That we can reinterpret our emotions by will I agree is fairly silly, and seems like more like the thing one would believe if one wants to sell self-help books.

That we can reinterpret our emotions by will I agree is fairly silly, and seems like more like the thing one would believe if one wants to sell self-help books. But this doesn't rule out that emotional responses are early, learned scaffolding on raw internal cues that we couldn't reliably distinguish without context. That all babies seem to learn e.g. fear and laughter in a similar way doesn't contradict that. We could just all be pushed by our circumstance to learn in a similar same way. And more darkly, we may not quite all learn basic emotional resposes in the same way. Reading about people growing up in abusive relationships, and e.g. returning to an abusive spouse I've often wondered, does the person here described literally confuse fear and affection?