emotion-and-affect.
65 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-330 | Damasio & Carvalho — The nature of feelings | An Opinion with no new data. Feelings are the felt side of interoceptive body maps, and they report homeostatic value. Feeling does not need the insula: the authors’ own patient with both insulae destroyed still feels. It needs the upper brainstem, where whole-body maps first assemble. The evolutionary story (felt maps beat unfelt ones because they support learning and anticipation) and the cellular one (unmyelinated, ligand- and ion-permeable interoceptive axons, with ephaptic coupling, as the root of sentience) are hypotheses, and are presented as such. | Read |
| NOTE-331 | Bechara, Damasio, Tranel & Damasio — Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy | Ten controls and six ventromedial prefrontal patients play the four-deck gambling task while anticipatory skin-conductance responses (SCRs) and verbal reports are tracked. Every control and no patient develops anticipatory SCRs; three patients who can state the right strategy still choose badly. Controls prefer the good decks significantly only from the hunch period, and the pre-hunch SCR effect is a group-by-period interaction, not a deck difference, so “before knowing” is better supported for articulated strategy than for any awareness at all. | Read |
| NOTE-332 | Damasio — The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex | The somatic marker hypothesis as its author stated it in 1996. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex stores links between classes of situation and the body states that accompanied them; on recurrence it re-enacts those states, via the body or an “as if” loop, and the re-enacted state marks imagined option-outcome pairs as good or bad, overtly as a feeling or covertly as a bias, pruning the space reasoning must search. The evidence is summarised from earlier lesion and skin-conductance studies, without numbers. The mechanism is argued, not shown, and the paper says it is not a theory of prefrontal cortex as a whole. | Read |
| NOTE-348 | The Emotion Machine | Read in the 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think: each emotional state is a selection of mental resources turned on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem, and ordinary thinking uses the same switching. On this design sit six levels of mental activity, panalogies that link descriptions across realms, and a Self that is a network of partial models. It is argued by example and analogy, with no experiment and few neural claims. Against Damasio, the body is a resource the brain exploits, not what an emotion is made of; on Elliot it proposes, without evidence, the reverse causal direction. | Read |
| NOTE-361 | Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious | Humour as the teaching and engaging of “censors”: learned, unconscious suppressors of thought-paths known to fail (paradox, circling, false analogy, prohibited wishes). Commonsense logic is too unreliable to repair, general methods can only be corrected subtractively, so minds accumulate negative meta-knowledge, and jokes, built on unexpected frame-substitution, are how it is learned. This explains why logical nonsense is funny in the same way as Freud’s forbidden subjects. An essay of conjectures, with no data. | Read |
| NOTE-387 | The Self and the Future | A body-exchange experiment told twice. Third-personally, with selfish choices before and reactions after, it supports “changing bodies”. First-personally, as torture preceded by amnesia, character change and implanted memories, fear remains rational at every step, and the step that completes the exchange alters only what happens to someone else. Conceptual undecidability and conventional decision leave the subject unable to expect anything. A “rather shaky” lean toward the bodily answer, as a risk. | Read |
| NOTE-396 | Graham et al. 2013, Moral Foundations Theory | MFT in four claims: a first draft of the moral mind organized in advance of experience, edited by culture, working through fast intuitions, with several foundations because there were several adaptive challenges. Five foundations, each with an evolutionary model (Care: kin selection; Fairness: reciprocal altruism; Loyalty: coalitions; Authority: rank; Sanctity: disease avoidance). MFQ findings: liberals rely on Care and Fairness, conservatives on all five, in every region sampled; Sanctity predicts culture-war attitudes best. Five criteria for foundationhood; Liberty, Efficiency, Ownership and Honesty named as candidates. | Read |
| NOTE-400 | Haidt & Joseph 2004, intuitive ethics | An essay, not a study. Humans are innately prepared to feel quick approval or disapproval at four patterns, suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity and purity, each a module with an evolved proper domain and a culturally widened actual domain; ingroup is the best fifth candidate (fn. 15). Three of the four were the concerns all five surveyed works shared; purity was added from the authors’ own research on disgust. Cultures vary in actual domains, in which modules they lean on, in what a virtue means, and in how virtues cluster. No data are reported. | Read |
| NOTE-402 | The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism | A verbal model: altruists who withhold help from non-reciprocators beat non-altruists when benefit exceeds cost, encounters are many, partners stable and exposure symmetric. Cleaner-fish hosts that do not eat their cleaners fit it; bird alarm calls are explained by a different, self-interested model. Human friendship, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, guilt, trust, suspicion and their sham forms are proposed as adaptations regulating exchange, supported by 1960s social psychology, not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-403 | Haidt 2001, the social intuitionist model | The social intuitionist model: moral judgments appear in consciousness as quick intuitions with an affective valence, and moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc search for supporting reasons, used to persuade others. Six links are drawn, four of them reasoning links, two of them private. The case rests on dual-process research, motivated reasoning, post-hoc confabulation and the weak tie between moral reasoning and moral action, mostly from outside morality. Harmless taboo violations are condemned regardless, and affect predicts the condemnation better than perceived harm. | Read |
| NOTE-428 | How effective psychological treatments work: mechanisms of change in cognitive behavioural therapy and beyond | A history-and-argument paper. It separates common factors from mechanisms of change, holds that a treatment’s success does not validate its theory, and proposes one mechanism for all effective therapy: the person, “stuck” in an exaggerated negative meaning (Theory A) maintained by their own reactions, builds and tests a less threatening alternative (Theory B), a meaning-making flexibility. The proposal is argued from clinical examples and cited trials. The paper itself says mechanism research has not yet met Kazdin’s standards. | Read |
| NOTE-429 | The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review | Gross’s founding review. Emotions are modulable response tendencies. Regulation, defined as influencing which emotions one has, when, and how they are experienced and expressed, is split from coping, mood regulation and defense, and sorted into five families by where it acts in emotion generation: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, response modulation. The paper’s own open problem is whether regulation can be told apart from generation at all. | Read |
| NOTE-431 | Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, Processes and Outcomes | The ACT model, read in an early manuscript. Psychopathology is psychological inflexibility: cognitive fusion (fed by literality, reason-giving and emotional control) supports experiential avoidance, and both displace present-moment contact and values. Six processes restore flexibility. The manuscript’s evidence: AAQ correlations with distress (21 studies), component studies of acceptance and defusion, mediation in seven trials, and weighted outcome effect sizes (d = .49 post and .69 follow-up against active treatments). | Read |
| NOTE-433 | Impulsive action: emotional impulses and their control | Frijda’s action-readiness theory applied to impulsive action. Automatic appraisal of concern pertinence elicits a state of action readiness, a motive to change a self–object relation, with control precedence. Emotions differ by mode of action readiness. Events draw several appraisals at once, and the resulting states of readiness interact, so impulse control and much emotion regulation are themselves emotional. Purposive impulsive action is grounded neurally in anticipating an action’s sensory effects (PPC, premotor, cerebellum), with frontostriatal circuits for stopping. | Read |
| NOTE-434 | The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization | Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion, stated through predictive coding. The brain runs an allostatic internal model. Its predictions are concepts, initiated in agranular limbic cortex and corrected by prediction error. Interoceptive consequences are felt as affect. An emotion is a categorization by an emotion concept. Degeneracy and population thinking deny emotion categories neural essences. Basic-emotion and causal appraisal theories are rejected; descriptive appraisals are kept as products of categorization. | Read |
| NOTE-436 | Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health | A narrative review that defines psychological flexibility by four dynamic abilities (adapting to situations, reconfiguring resources, shifting perspective, balancing domains). Flexible regulation beats any fixed strategy (Bonanno 2004; Cheng 2001). Inflexibility marks depression and anxiety, and cardiac vagal control may integrate its forms. Causal direction is open. It recommends experience sampling and multi-informant measures over global self-report. | Read |
| NOTE-443 | Précis of Breakdown of Will | Hyperbolic discounting makes preference reverse with delay alone, so a person is a population of interests that forestall one another. Will is the recursive bundling of choices by treating each as a precedent, which gives an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma and makes Kavka’s toxin rational to drink. The same recursion predicts legalism, “lapse districts”, motivated misperception and compulsive over-control, and premature satiation of appetite limits what will can do for emotional reward. | Read |
| NOTE-463 | Model-based and model-free Pavlovian reward learning: Revaluation, revision, and revelation | The paper argues that Pavlovian prediction has a model-based form. A cue that predicted disgusting salt was instantly “wanted” in a novel salt appetite, before retasting, with mesolimbic activation. That needs identity-specific prediction revalued by current state, which no model-free cache provides. It proposes “defocusing” of the predicted outcome as a model-based source of apparent habit. It argues dopamine can carry model-based evaluations. A kappa-transformation model fits the data but is described as phenomenological, and no algorithm is offered. | Read |
| NOTE-489 | Three types of phenomenal consciousness and their functional roles: unfolding the ALARM theory of consciousness | ALARM: basic arousal (level-1 experience, subcortical) alarms the agent when homeostasis fails, triggering survival behaviour, care for the body and generalised learning without choice; general alertness (level-2, cortical, attention-guided) enables flexible learning and decision; reflexive self-consciousness is general alertness plus metacognitive self-relational content, enabling long-term planning. IIT, HOT and GNWT are said to cover only general alertness. Argued, not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-507 | Damasio & Damasio — Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness | An Essay with no data. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as one’s own, provided by continuous homeostatic feelings that are conscious in themselves and “lend” consciousness to exteroceptive images. Feelings are hybrid because interoceptive pathways (unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic, barrier-free) let the body act on its own map. Evidence is cited clinical contrast: posterior brainstem lesions cause coma, extensive cortical lesions may not; anaesthetics act at membrane-level sensing below feeling. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-551 | The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and its Influence on Group Behavior | Study 1 (94 undergraduates, 29 groups, 2×2 confederate valence × energy): members’ mood followed the confederate’s valence (self-report change +.41 vs −.26, χ²(1) = 9.97; coders 2.75 vs 2.33, χ²(1) = 10.30). Pleasant contagion predicted self- and peer-rated cooperativeness, coder-rated group cooperativeness (r = .44) and lower conflict (r = −.42 to −.48). Valence asymmetry failed (χ² < 1) and energy effects were marginal and opposite in sign. Study 2 (113 MBA students, 26 groups, no confederate): mood ICC rose from .00 to .24; contagion correlated with cooperation (.49) and conflict (−.49). | Read |
| NOTE-552 | Towards a Theory of Collective Emotions | Collective emotion as synchronous convergence in affective responding towards one event or object. The minimal case needs only shared appraisal structures. Mutual awareness (contagion, mediated sharing) and group membership (identity, collective intentions, norms, collective memory, group-based sentiments) amplify it and change its quality, including a transition from “I-mode” to “We-mode” collective emotion. A conceptual synthesis with no data; the authors say the key linkages lack evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-553 | Huebner — Genuinely collective emotions | Collective emotion is defended by extending a homuncular, computational account of individual emotion to distributed systems. Fear needs four integrated capacities (p. 10). The USS Palau crew implements most of them but shows no fear, so it is reclassified as collective danger detection; a 2008 campaign is offered as a likelier case, without data. Unfelt collective emotion is defended by arguing that some individual fear is non-conscious (§5), and functional kinds are defended against homology (§6). Gilbert’s plural-subject account is rejected as reducible to individual commitments. | Read |
| NOTE-703 | Forssten et al. — One Giant Leap from Mouse to Man | A narrative review, by employees of a probiotics manufacturer, of the microbiota–gut–brain axis in mood. The routes in rodents are well documented. Faecal transplant from depressed humans partly transfers the phenotype to rodents. Human trials are mixed: some reductions in subjective stress in healthy volunteers, and several clean nulls for strains with strong preclinical records. It documents its own translational failures and ends more optimistically than they warrant. | Read |
| NOTE-761 | Theriault et al. — Allostasis at the core of brain function | A review arguing that the brain’s core function is allostasis, the predictive regulation of the body. Its evidence is an intrinsic allostatic system of visceromotor and interoceptive regions that matches tract-tracing and contains the default-mode and salience hubs; a limbic-to-sensory cytoarchitectural gradient read as a prediction hierarchy; and interoceptive effects on brain-wide signalling. It proposes that cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease may be an allostatic trade-off. The authors say they do not claim the hypothesis is correct. | Read |
| NOTE-785 | Brouillet and Friston — Relative fluency (unfelt vs felt) in active inference | A perspective essay with no model and no new data. Unfelt fluency is the subpersonal recognition of a change in precision, which orients attention; felt fluency is a hierarchically deeper inference about it, reached by mental action. Because its cause is internal, felt fluency is misattributed to the stimulus, which the discrepancy-attribution experiments it reviews are read to show. “Felt” here means attended and reportable; the paper does not separate felt from unfelt in any further sense. | Read |
| NOTE-852 | Chuai & Zhao — Anger makes fake news viral online | On Weibo 2011–2016, lexicon-scored fake news carries more anger and less joy than true news, and in regressions with content, author and topic controls a post’s share of anger words goes with more retweets and its share of joy words with fewer; the R² of the retweet models is 0.08–0.13. Two anger-dominated items in a 1,291-response survey drew slightly more anxiety-management and information-sharing motive than joy-dominated ones. The paper calls this causal; the design is observational. | Read |
| NOTE-950 | Ma & Kragel — map-like emotion knowledge in hippocampus and vmPFC | In fMRI of 29 people passively watching 14 emotional films, decoders trained on hippocampal patterns predicted an independent sample’s consensus ratings of 13 emotion categories better than positions in a two-dimensional affective space, and vmPFC showed the reverse; patterns could also be decoded into the activity of a Tolman–Eichenbaum Machine that had learned a grid built from rating correlations by random walk, hippocampus favouring its small-scale conjunctive layer and vmPFC its large-scale structural layer. Effects are small (prediction–outcome correlations of about 0.04–0.10), and no learning in the participants was measured. | Read |
| NOTE-994 | Borg, Harrison, Stazicker & Salomons — Is the folk concept of pain polyeidic? | Six objections to the experimental philosophers’ claim that the folk concept of pain is bodily, not mental: small and skewed samples, acute pain only, a loaded “in the mind” probe, means near neutral, a non-Cartesian mental reading of the same data, and an invalid step from “partly bodily” to “bodily”. Pilot vignettes in which damage never hurt drew mind-centred answers. The authors propose that the folk concept is “polyeidic”: several framing-sensitive dimensions, of which mental/bodily is one. | Read |
| NOTE-1000 | Seth — Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self | An opinion article that extends predictive coding to interoception. Felt emotion is the content of hierarchical top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals. Prediction errors are registered in the anterior insula, and are also cancelled by autonomic action under attenuated precision. The experience of body ownership is the same inference run over interoceptive and exteroceptive signals together. The evidence is indirect and cited: insula anticipation and error responses, false cardiac feedback, interoceptive sensitivity predicting rubber-hand susceptibility, and a heartbeat-synchronous virtual hand owned more. No direct test is claimed. | Read |
| NOTE-1061 | Bo et al. — Deconstructing the brain bases of emotion regulation | Two fMRI samples (n = 182 and 176) looked at, or reappraised, aversive pictures. Bayes factors for and against each of two contrasts sort voxels into four systems: regions engaged only by reappraisal (anterior prefrontal, temporo-parietal, cerebellar), regions engaged by both negative emotion and reappraisal (most of the reappraisal network), regions engaged by negative pictures and unchanged by reappraisal (all subcortical ones, amygdala and PAG included, with much of cortex), and posterior cortical regions reduced by it. Reported negative affect fell under reappraisal (d = 0.92). Activity is measured; experience is reported once per trial. | Read |
| NOTE-1067 | Barrett et al. — The theory of constructed emotion: more than a feeling | A reply by the theory’s architects to van Heijst et al., who gave basic emotion theory the emotion (a bioregulatory state) and constructed emotion the feeling (its representation). The reply says the split is a premise of basic emotion theory, not a division of labour: on constructed emotion the same allostatic signals that regulate the body make feeling, and an instance of emotion is one whole-brain event. It adds evidence lists for structured variation, an evolutionary frame from the extended synthesis, and the thesis that the two theories are incommensurable. No data. | Read |
| NOTE-1097 | Induction and Profiling of Strong Multi-Componential Emotions in Virtual Reality | Virtual reality induces intense emotions that engage several components, which passive paradigms do not, and the authors argue this is a precondition for testing synchronization. Seven games, 53 participants, one retrospective questionnaire per game. Fear and joy clusters span appraisal, motivation, physiology, feeling and regulation, and appraisal predicts their intensity best. Componentiality is a property of associations across observations. Nothing is measured within an episode. | Read |
| NOTE-1098 | Toward an integrative psychometric model of emotions | An integrative psychometric model of emotions must allow distinct emotions, variation between and within persons, and causal relations among components, one property from each broad class of emotion theory. Reflective and formative latent-variable models fail. A network model passes. In it, the network of causally interacting components constitutes the emotion, and a distinct emotion is a weakly emergent small-world community. Strong connectivity predicts self-sustaining activation and hysteresis, hence longer emotions. A programme paper: no data, and limits named candidly. | Read |
| NOTE-1100 | EMA: A process model of appraisal dynamics | A computational process model of appraisal after Smith and Lazarus. Appraisal is a single, fast, parallel mapping from the agent’s causal interpretation (its beliefs, desires, intentions, plans, probabilities and utilities) to per-proposition appraisal frames. Emotional dynamics come from the time course of the perception, inference and action that change the interpretation. Frames compete for the coping response, and the most recently accessed one with the highest mood-adjusted intensity wins. Coping alters the world or the agent’s mental state, which drives reappraisal. Illustrated by an actor’s 2.6-second reaction to a pigeon. | Read |
| NOTE-1101 | The current status of research on the structure of evaluative space | The evaluative space model restated by its authors. Positivity and negativity are separable systems whose combined output is a bipolar approach–avoid predisposition. They can be activated reciprocally, independently or together. Coactivation is ambivalence, which is rare, arousing and behaviourally indeterminate, and gives the same net output as neutrality. Negativity has the higher gain and positivity the higher intercept, and both recalibrate with context. Evaluation is heterarchical, with higher levels able to override lower. | Read |
| NOTE-1102 | Control Theory, Goal Attainment, and Psychopathology | A commentary. Control theory adds to goal talk the need to perceive the present state and compare it with the goal. Psychopathology arises where the loop’s input, reference value, comparison or output is extreme or biased. The five factors are sensitivities to classes of goals. Valence tracks the velocity of goal attainment against a reference value, so approach and avoidance can each produce either sign. Confidence, doubt and disengagement lie outside the loop, in expectancy-value theory. | Read |
| NOTE-1103 | An Appraisal-Driven Componential Approach to the Emotional Brain | A programme for taking the component process model into the brain: five functionally defined networks, appraisal driving changes and synchronization in the other four, synchronization proposed to be neuronal phase or cross-frequency coupling, and feeling emerging when the degree of synchronization passes a threshold. It states that some action tendencies take priority by control precedence. It gives no measure of synchronization, signed or unsigned, per episode or otherwise. | Read |
| NOTE-1104 | Interaction and threshold effects of appraisal on componential patterns of emotion: A study using cross-cultural semantic data | From the GRID data on the meaning of 24 emotion words in 27 countries, MARS models of 11 motivation, physiology and expression factors on 7 appraisal factors select interactions up to third order and some hinges. Goal compatibility is the main effect, agency and norm compatibility act only through it, and the structure is partly additive and partly hierarchical. The “threshold effects” are hinges in a continuous piecewise-linear fit. No synchronization measure, no time, and no choice data. | Read |
| NOTE-1105 | Kahneman, Wakker and Sarin — Back to Bentham? Explorations of experienced utility | Decision utility, an outcome’s weight in choice, and experienced utility, its hedonic quality, are distinct and can be measured separately. Experienced utility is instant (real-time report) or remembered (retrospective). Remembered utility follows a Peak-End rule with duration neglect, and choices follow remembered utility, so people choose dominated painful episodes. Total utility is axiomatized as a time integral of ordinal instant utility with a neutral zero. For the record, the dissociation is not a counterexample to potential read within the moment. It shows that potential read from deferred choices measures memory, and that a system’s model of its own past states is systematically biased. | Read |
| NOTE-1106 | The Emotion Process: Event Appraisal and Component Differentiation | The evidence for the emotion process, organised by appraisal criterion and by the component appraisal drives. Appraisal criteria predict action tendencies, physiology and expression better than emotion categories do. Intrinsic valence and goal congruence have partly different signatures and combine multiplicatively. Control amplifies goal-congruence effects. Coherence among components is proposed as the mark of an episode at one threshold and of awareness at a second. No negotiation among perspectives: appraisal is a profile of criteria that drives patterned responses. | Read |
| NOTE-1107 | Brain networks subserving functional core processes of emotions identified with componential modeling | fMRI during 40 films, with each of 119 short events rated on 32 CoreGRID features. PLSC gives six brain–behaviour processes: valuation, novelty, hedonic impact, goal monitoring, caring for others and approach/avoidance. Valence splits into a wanting-like valuation network carrying the action tendencies and a liking-like hedonic network carrying feeling and expression, and no arousal process appears. There is no synchronization measure, but every event gets a signed score on each process. | Read |
| NOTE-1108 | Levels of valence | A framework, not a study. Valence is located at two levels. Micro-valences are the outcomes of separate valenced appraisal checks, and they can conflict. Macro-valence is a one-dimensional integration of them and of other inputs, and it is what choice needs. The paper’s work is in the paths between the levels, and above all in the integration rules, from weighted sums to lexicographic and elimination strategies that need no trade-offs. Intrinsic pleasantness and goal conduciveness are separate checks, and the paper grounds the separation in Berridge. | Read |
| NOTE-1109 | Berridge and Robinson — Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction | An invited review of the incentive-sensitization theory by its authors. ‘Wanting’ and ‘liking’ have dissociable brain systems. Drugs can sensitize the ‘wanting’ system so that it is lastingly hyper-reactive to drug cues and contexts while ‘liking’ stays flat or falls. Sensitized ‘wanting’ can oppose cognitive desire, run without report, and grow in abstinence, and the theory is being extended, on weak evidence, to behavioural addictions. For the record it is a mechanism for proxy-keyed potential in persons. It also shows that the addict case CLAIM-433 settles holds only if the sign of valence is read along the proxy. | Read |
| NOTE-1110 | Berridge and Kringelbach — Pleasure systems in the brain | A review. Reward splits into ‘liking’, ‘wanting’ and learning. ‘Liking’ is measured without report by taste reactivity, homologous across species, and is generated by small opioid hotspots. Dopamine and most “pleasure electrodes” raise ‘wanting’ and leave ‘liking’ alone, and sensitized ‘wanting’ can grow while the drug becomes less pleasant. Objective ‘liking’ can occur without felt pleasure. For the record, this is the sharpest test so far of “valence is potential”. Read as written, the identity fails, and the dissociation calls for a hedonic marker measured apart from control. | Read |
| NOTE-1111 | Hesp et al. — Deeply felt affect: the emergence of valence in deep active inference | A computational proof of principle with no data. Valence is a state of self, inferred at a slower, deeper level from affective charge, the update to the expected precision γ that sets how far the preference- driven action model, rather than habit, governs policy selection. Positive charge is rising confidence in the action model and negative charge falling confidence. The valence level sends priors on γ back down. “Felt” means explicitly represented, which the authors take as necessary, not sufficient, for self-reportable valence. For the record, this is the closest existing model of that felt valence is the system modelling its own potential. But its sign and intensity run against the record’s potential account for negative valence, and it inherits the wanting/liking problem. | Read |
| NOTE-1113 | Emotions are emergent processes: they require a dynamic computational architecture | The component process model restated for computational modellers. Emotion is a bounded episode of synchronization among subsystems (appraisal, autonomic, motor, motivation, feeling), driven by appraisal checks in a fixed order and aimed at control precedence. Feeling monitors the process by representing the other components and their coherence. The degree of synchronization is hypothesised to generate consciousness. Emotions are attractor basins of coupled oscillators, with hysteresis and catastrophe jumps. No operational measure of synchronization is given. | Read |
| NOTE-1114 | Motivational trade-offs and modulation of nociception in bumblebees | A motivational trade-off in an insect. Bees given heated (55 °C) 40% sucrose feeders against unheated alternatives of 10–40% fed from the heated ones less as the alternatives got sweeter, and more steeply than without heat. Choice ran on learned colour cues, so the modulation is central. The authors take it as consistent with pain, not proof of it. One cost level, four resource levels in separate groups; graded at that cost, silent on a threshold in cost. | Read |
| NOTE-1115 | Conscious emotional experience emerges as a function of multilevel, appraisal-driven response synchronization | A theoretical paper with a short review of EEG and neural-synchrony evidence. Conscious emotional experience is recruited when lower, automatic levels of appraisal and regulation fail, which happens when component synchronization is strong and lasting. Conscious regulation needs explicit representations. The feeling is a central representation of the components and their coherence, built by local and distant neuronal synchronization. Proposed measures are EEG band activity in felt versus unfelt episodes, and phase coherence between regions. | Read |
| NOTE-1117 | The power of goal-directed processes in the causation of emotional and other actions | A reversal of the default in dual-process models of action and emotion. Goal-directed processes, which select the action option with the highest expected utility, can be fast and automatic, so they, not stimulus-driven habits or appraisal-to-action-tendency links, are the default cause of action. Most of the competition that decides behaviour is between goal-directed processes, and values and expectancies settle it. Emotional actions are those whose tendencies have control precedence because the goals at stake are highly valued, so emotional episodes are decision processes with higher stakes. | Read |
| NOTE-1118 | A Multi-Componential Approach to Emotion Recognition and the Effect of Personality | A crowdsourced film-rating study. Thirty-nine CoreGRID items rated after whole clips show emotion structure beyond valence and arousal (six dimensions) and predict discrete-emotion ratings better together than any component alone. Personality traits correlate with componential items. No synchronization, no within-episode measure, no physiology recorded. | Read |
| NOTE-1119 | Bridging emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems modeling | A dynamic-systems model of appraisal and emotion. Their constituents organize one another through feedback and circular causality into one emotional interpretation (EI): triggered by a perturbation, self-amplifying until it takes over the system, then self-stabilizing as competing cues are resolved. EIs are attractors, one at a time, with abrupt transitions between them. Vertical integration gives them momentum and selects among them. Stable EIs drive learning, so real-time and developmental order are interdependent. Predicts theta-band phase synchrony as an index of emotional relevance. | Read |
| NOTE-1120 | Brown, Price & Dombrovski — Anxiety as a disorder of uncertainty | A narrative review and theoretical proposal, with no new data and no simulation. Computational learning studies of anxiety (seven, not a systematic search) find altered adjustment of learning rate to kinds of uncertainty, mostly with aversive outcomes, rather than inflated threat learning or valuation. The authors propose that in aversive environments avoidance of uncertain states keeps their uncertainty high and so perpetuates itself, that anxiety amplifies this by misreading noise as change, and that exposure works by reducing the uncertainty, not the threat. It covers fear-based disorders and says it does not explain GAD. | Read |
| NOTE-1127 | Chou, Wilson & Smith — The influence of anxiety on exploration | A narrative review of computational modelling studies of anxiety and exploration, almost all in reward tasks and sub-clinical samples. In bandit tasks, directed exploration tends to rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and fall with state or somatic anxiety; random exploration shows no link; in foraging tasks, and in one task with a predator to check for, anxiety goes with less exploration. Results are inconsistent across tasks and measures and none has been replicated. | Read |
| NOTE-1133 | Ku & Finch — Routines die hard: ontological agency in securitisation | A conceptual paper with an illustration. Alongside the political agency securitisation theory grants its audience (accept, reject, contest), Ku and Finch propose ontological agency: keeping everyday routines going, which often means ignoring securitising moves. Observed by chance in Gangneung in 2022, people paid routine missile launches and beach-front military sites little attention; when a missile malfunctioned at night under a news embargo, tweets voiced fear of war and anger at the government. The authors argue such inaction lets securitisation reproduce itself and that accepting it delegates anxiety management to elites. | Read |
| NOTE-1285 | Group-level emotions | A review of intergroup emotions theory by its founders. Identifying with a group makes it “an aspect of the self through self-categorization”, so events are appraised for what they mean to the group, and emotions are felt on its behalf. Four facts: the emotion shifts with the salient membership; members converge on a group norm; no personal involvement is needed; and identification moderates the effect, the highly identified sometimes reappraising to avoid guilt. Group-based emotions predict collective action and treatment of out-groups and the in-group, and can be regulated. No new data. | Read |
| NOTE-1312 | The Concept and Psychological Consequences of Symbolic Immortality | A 1991–92 ANU master’s thesis testing Rank’s claim that people need to feel they transcend death, through children, an afterlife or creative work, and Lifton’s two added modes, nature and experiential transcendence (a mystical expansion of the self). 440 Australians aged 18 to 88 rated vignettes as consolation in imagined terminal illness. Having a mode, such as children, predicted accepting it, and so did religious affiliation; education lowered acceptance. The secular modes went with accepting death as final. The modes predicted death anxiety, neuroticism and personality only weakly; Rank’s sex-difference and neuroticism hypotheses failed. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1405 | Pettigrew and Tropp — Meta-analytic tests of three mediators of contact | Meta-analytic mediation tests over 54 studies of contact and prejudice that also measured knowledge of the outgroup (17 samples), intergroup anxiety (60) or empathy and perspective taking (14). All three mediate. Knowledge is much the weakest (Sobel Z = 3.87); anxiety reduction (26.6) and empathy (12.4) are strong, and in nine samples measuring both, anxiety and empathy together account for about half of the contact–prejudice covariance. | Read |
| NOTE-1423 v2 | Kuppens, Van Mechelen, Smits & De Boeck — The appraisal basis of anger | In two recall studies, anger was associated with other accountability and unfairness, and other accountability was specific to anger, but no appraisal (goal obstacle, other accountability, unfairness, control) and no antagonistic action tendency was singly necessary or sufficient for it. Every anger report in study 2 had at least one component. The authors conclude that appraisals and emotions are contingently associated, not linked by necessity, and make no causal claim. All measures are self-reports of recalled situations. | Read |
| NOTE-1429 v2 | Abuhamdeh — Investigating the flow experience | A conceptual review finding 24 operationalizations of flow in 42 studies, 17 without enjoyment. It argues flow should be measured as Csikszentmihalyi defined it, a discrete, highly enjoyable state distinct from its conditions, and that plain absorption is task involvement, not inherently enjoyable. It reports, and rejects by argument, the view that flow is emotionless or enjoyed only afterwards. It does not show by data that flow is positive during the episode. | Read |
| NOTE-1438 v2 | Thürmer, Scheier & Carver — Coasting and shifting | Two experiments in which false feedback put one of two competing task goals (speed, accuracy) ahead of or behind target. Running ahead on one goal lowered later performance on it and raised performance on the other, so the overshot goal lost its hold to its rival; an if-then plan to ignore one’s feelings removed both effects. It is the closest the record has to a test of Carver’s thesis that positive affect lowers a goal’s priority, with small effects, one-tailed contrasts, and no check that the plan changed affect. | Read |
| NOTE-1442 | Fulford, Johnson, Llabre & Carver — Pushing and coasting | A 21-day experience-sampling study of 24 people (12 with bipolar I disorder in remission) found that progress ahead of expectation on a self-chosen goal was followed by less effort on it (b = −0.34) and progress behind expectation by more (b = −0.25 on the undershoot vector), and that the bipolar group coasted less. It restates Carver 2003’s thesis that positive affect lets a goal take lower priority, but measured neither affect nor any shift of effort to other goals, so it bears on that thesis only through the behaviour it predicts. | Read |
| NOTE-1450 | Orehek, Bessarabova, Chen & Kruglanski — Positive affect as feedback | Positive affect, induced by pictures after students promised to do something for someone close, lowered the goal’s activation and the stated intention to pursue it when competing goals were salient, and raised both when they were not. So positive affect lowers a goal’s priority only under competition; alone, it strengthens the goal. The affect was incidental, not generated by progress, and Experiment 1’s measure is one reaction time per person. | Read |
| NOTE-1486 | Massumi — The Principle of Unrest | Interviews and an essay in activist philosophy. Movement is qualitative relational transformation, and capitalism an ontopower feeding on “bare activity”. Micropolitics aims at “a maximally inclusive co-patterning of contrasting tendencies” (p. 64), an aesthetic ideal that affirms discord rather than resolving it. The parent paper’s quotation is exact; it turns the ideal into a description of organizational becoming. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1488 | Massumi and McKim — Of Microperception and Micropolitics | An interview, not an argument with evidence. Affect is the felt transition of a body’s power to affect and be affected toward a diminished or augmented capacitation, offered as a proposition to be regenerated in each use, not a definition to apply. Microshocks prime bodies differentially; affect is reactivated in each event, not transmitted between them; micropolitics modulates collectively felt, unacted-out potential toward a “symbiosis” of contrasting tendencies. | Read |