Somatic theory is a theory of human social behavior based on the somatic marker hypothesis of António Damásio. The theory proposes a mechanism by which emotional processes can guide (or bias) behavior: in particular, decision-making, the attachment theory of John Bowlby, and the self-psychology of Heinz Kohut (especially as consolidated by Allan Schore).

It draws on various philosophical models: On the Genealogy of Morals of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger on das Man, Maurice Merleau-Ponty practiced on the lived body as a center of experience, Ludwig Wittgenstein on social practices, Michel Foucault on discipline, as well as theories of performativity emerging out of the speech act theory by J. L. Austin, in point of fact was developed by Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman. Some somatic theorists have also put into somatic theory to performance in the schools of acting, the training was developed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Bertolt Brecht.

Barbara Sellers-Young applies Damasio’s somatic-marker hypothesis to critical thinking as an embodied performance and provides a review of the theoretical literature in performance studies that supports something like Damasio’s approach:

Edward Slingerland applies Damasio's somatic-marker hypothesis to the cognitive linguistics by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, as well as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In particular, Slingerland combines Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual blending and Lakoff and Johnson's embodied mind theory of metaphor in his hypothesis. His goal to apply somatic theory into cognitive linguistics is to show that:

Douglas Robinson first began developing a somatic theory of language for a keynote presentation at the 9th American Imagery Conference in Los Angeles, in October 1985. It was based on Ahkter Ahsen's theory of somatic response to images as the basis for therapeutic transformations. In contradistinction to Ahsan's model, which rejected Freud's "talking cure" on the grounds that words do not awaken somatic responses, Robinson argued that there is a very powerful somatics of language. He later incorporated this notion into The Translator's Turn (1991), drawing on the (passing) somatic theories of William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Kenneth Burke in order to argue that somatic response may be "idiosomatic" (somatically idiosyncratic), but is typically "ideosomatic" (somatically ideological, or shaped and guided by society). Furthermore, the ideosomatics of language explain how language remains stable enough for communication to be possible. This work preceded the Damasio group's first scientific publication on the somatic-marker hypothesis in 1991, and Robinson did not begin to incorporate Damasio's somatic-marker hypothesis into his somatic theory until later in the 1990s.

In Translation and Taboo (1996), Robinson drew on the proto-somatic theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Gregory Bateson to explore the ways in which the ideosomatics of taboo structure (and partly sanction and conceal) the translation of sacred texts. His first book to draw on Damasio's somatic-marker hypothesis is Performative Linguistics (2003); there he draws on J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, Jacques Derrida's theory of iterability, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, to argue that performativity as an activity of the speaking body is grounded in somatic theory. He also draws on Daniel Simeoni's application of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus in order to argue that his somatics of translation as developed in The Translator's Turn actually explains translation norms more fully than Gideon Toury's account in Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond (1995).

In 2005, Robinson began writing a series of books exploring somatic theory in different communicative contexts: modernist/formalist theories of estrangement (Robinson 2008), translation as ideological pressure (Robinson 2011), first-year writing (Robinson 2012), and the refugee experience, (de)colonization, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma (Robinson 2013).

In Robinson's articulation, the somatic theory has four main planks: