This white paper undertakes a comparative analysis between the Theory of Constructed Emotion (TCE), developed by Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues, and the TATi developmental grammar embedded within a regenerative coherence metaphysics. TCE reconceives emotions as emergent constructions of the predictive brain engaged in allostatic regulation, rejecting essentialist and typological models in favor of contextual, population-based patterns. Similarly, the TATi grammar frames emotion as a coherence phase within a teleodynamic unfolding of life — where bodily regulation, symbolic enactment, and semantic integration co-arise. Both frameworks emphasize holism, interoceptive sense-making, and energy regulation as the foundation for emotional life, yet differ in ontological scope, with TCE grounded in empirical minimalism and TATi operating within an expansive symbolic and metaphysical model of becoming. This paper proposes a synthesis whereby emotion is re-understood as a felt, folded coherence event that bridges biophysics and meaning, physiology and value, allostasis and transformation.
