Co-constructed Emotion: A Collective Predictive Coding Theory of Interoception and Social Symbol Sharing

Emotion is both a psychological phenomenon rooted in physiological fluctuations and a socially constructed phenomenon shaped by language and culture. However, traditional psychological constructivism has remained confined to individual brain processes, while social constructivism has lacked a bottom-up computational mechanism explaining how language and culture emerge from bodily emotional substrates and dynamically evolve. To bridge this theoretical gap, this paper proposes the Theory of Co-constructed Emotion (TCoE) via Collective Predictive Coding (CPC), a framework coupling physiological r