Leslie Greenberg writes that we inherit emotional responses like fear of the dark, but on top of this, we learn to associate particular emotions with experiences which become emotional memories. These memories are organisations of lived emotional experiences that are formed into emotion schemes. These neural programmes react automatically to cues that were learned to be dangerous or safe from the past. These emotional schemes are rapid and automatic and form the foundation of the adult emotional response system.
Schemes are internal emotion memory structures that synthesise affective, motivational, cognitive and behavioural elements into unified organisations. Important life experiences become coded in emotion schematic memory. The emotion scheme represents the original situation and its emotional effect on the person, made up often of a wordless or imagistic script that forms a narrative. Being cuddled as an infant or being abused are encoded in procedural memory of what happened and how this felt. Emotion schematic learning means that emotions can either be adaptive processing systems or maladaptive.