The Rollercoaster and the Flashback Feel Nothing Alike, and Your Body Cannot Tell Them Apart

Racing heart, tight chest, shallow breath, hands damp. That description fits a person cresting the first drop of a rollercoaster and a person sitting in a therapist's office recalling something they have spent years avoiding. One of them is laughing. Nappe (2026) uses close to this pairing to make a point that sounds obvious until you sit with it, which is that a matched autonomic profile can be thrill in one situation and dread in another, and the biology alone will not tell you which.

This is the puzzle at the center of a body of work spanning predictive neuroscience, emotion theory, developmental psychology, and clinical practice. The signals arriving from inside the body are real and measurable. What they mean, and therefore what they feel like, appears to be settled somewhere other than in the signal itself.

One explanation comes from interoceptive inference. Seth (2013) proposed that subjective feeling states arise from the brain's inferred model of what is causing its interoceptive signals, meaning the sensory information originating inside the body. Under that account, arousal is raw material awaiting an explanation, and the explanation is supplied by expectations built from context and prior learning. The same elevated heart rate gets categorized differently depending on what the model already predicts is happening.

Barrett (2022) makes a related argument from a constructionist angle, and the wording matters. Her claim is that the psychological meaning of any individual signal is relational: it depends on the other signals present in the ensemble and on the situation in which the whole thing occurs. A single physical cue such as a facial movement does not carry one emotion inside it, waiting to be read off. This is not the softer claim that context influences an already-complete signal; it is the stronger claim that context helps constitute what the signal is.

The clinical stakes here are not small. Nappe (2026) argues for what he calls a content-sensitive psychiatry, meaning an approach that treats the personal content and meaning of experience as clinically real rather than as decoration over the underlying mechanism. Similar nociceptive input, meaning the neural signaling of tissue damage or threat, can register as relief in one frame and as suffering in another. A patient who tells you the pain means something different now is describing a change in the phenomenon, not just a change in attitude toward it.

Cognitive reappraisal, the emotion regulation strategy of changing how you interpret a situation in order to change your emotional response to it, fits this picture with an important complication. Wang and Yin (2023) proposed extending reappraisal through schema theory, arguing that changing the meaning of an event can change the emotion, but that transfer across settings depends on contextual cues and feedback that actually update the underlying schema. Rehearsing a better sentence about a situation is not the same as revising the model that generates the response. That gap probably explains some of the frustration people feel when a reframe works in session and evaporates in the parking lot.

People are not equally shaped by all of this, which is where the sensitivity literature earns its place. Differential susceptibility models argue that certain physiological and genetic profiles confer greater openness to the environment in both directions, so the same child who does worse in harsh conditions may do better than peers in supportive ones (Ellis & Boyce, 2011). Pluess (2017) developed the positive half of this under the term vantage sensitivity, describing heightened responsiveness to supportive experiences as a function of genetic differences. The framing shifts sensitivity from a liability to a bidirectional trait, though these remain theoretical models with mixed and still developing evidence.

Sensitivity also moves. Armstrong-Carter and Telzer (2022) found that adolescents were more affected by their socioeconomic context on days when their diurnal cortisol slope was flatter, meaning the normal decline in cortisol from morning to evening was less steep than usual. Biological sensitivity to context fluctuated within the same person from one day to the next. Reading it as a fixed personal characteristic flattens what the data show, and the finding is correlational, so which way the influence runs is not established here.

Enactive and embodied approaches push the argument further out. On these accounts cognition is sense-making, meaning the organism actively brings forth significance in its world according to its needs and goals rather than passively decoding incoming information (McCaffrey, 2024). De Jaegher (2013) applies this to autism, describing how people coordinate embodied meaning-making with each other, so that difficulties in social understanding may be located between people rather than inside one head. Setting matters materially too: sensory richness, movement, and place anchor connection and memory in ways that reduced or mediated environments may not reproduce (Truong & Clayton, 2020; Lin & Xu, 2022).

There is a methodological consequence that researchers have been slower to absorb. Shamay-Tsoory and Mendelsohn (2019) argue for ecological approaches to brain and behavior research on the grounds that real settings are vivid, dynamic, and multisensory, while conventional laboratory stimuli are deliberately stripped of exactly the contextual information that determines meaning. If context helps constitute the experience, removing context does not isolate the phenomenon; it may partly dissolve it. Even Drosophila show behavior in which situational context can be a decisive determinant of outcome, which suggests context-dependence is not a late human elaboration (Mathejczyk et al., 2026).

None of this makes the signal irrelevant. The racing heart is doing something, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of distortion. What the corpus suggests is that lived experience belongs to the organism-in-situation rather than to the physiology alone, which is why life transitions and disruptions can make familiar inputs suddenly salient (Ardoin & Heimlich, 2021). The practical residue is a better question. Instead of asking only what a body is doing, it becomes reasonable to ask what the body is doing here, with these people, in this life, given what this person has learned to expect.

References

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Armstrong-Carter, E., & Telzer, E. (2022). Biological sensitivity to environmental context fluctuates dynamically within individuals from day to day. Scientific Reports, 12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14481-7

Barrett, L. F. (2022). Context reconsidered: Complex signal ensembles, relational meaning and population thinking in psychological science. American Psychologist, 77, 894-920. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001054

De Jaegher, H. (2013). Embodiment and sense-making in autism. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 7, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2013.00015

Ellis, B., & Boyce, W. (2011). Differential susceptibility to the environment: Toward an understanding of sensitivity to developmental experiences and context. Development and Psychopathology, 23, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1017/s095457941000060x

Lin, M.-T., & Xu, H. (2022). Subjective bodily experiences of island cyclists in different contexts: The case of Hainan Island, China. Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141610176

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McCaffrey, G. (2024). Enactivism: Embodied cognition, sense-making, and nursing. Nursing Inquiry, e12672. https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12672

Nappe, L. F. (2026). From mechanisms to meanings: Toward a content-sensitive psychiatry. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1742330

Pluess, M. (2017). Vantage sensitivity: Environmental sensitivity to positive experiences as a function of genetic differences. Journal of Personality, 85(1), 38-50. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12218

Seth, A. (2013). Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(11), 565-573. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.09.007

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Wang, Y.-X., & Yin, B. (2023). A new understanding of the cognitive reappraisal technique: An extension based on the schema theory. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1174585