Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Emotion and affect — emotions, feelings and affect — what they are, their bodily and neural basis (including the homeostatic and interoceptive states feelings are said to report), their role in decision, memory and behaviour, and whether they ground consciousness (group: philosophy; ADR-014).
12 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-044 v2 | When an organization is said to be angry or afraid, is the emotion fixed by a mode of action readiness the organization has, or by the attributor’s emotion concept grouping variable states? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-039 and QUESTION-053. THEORY-057 and THEORY-055 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. Deferred with its line on filing; Open since the owner reopened the line on 2026-10-23. | Open |
| QUESTION-045 v4 | Is a mental disorder that outlasts its trigger a protective lock-in at the individual scale, a regime kept stable by behaviour that blocks its own disconfirmation while the capacity to leave it degrades, and does cutting the maintaining link, with the regime’s content held fixed, produce lasting change? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-079, CLAIM-025, CLAIM-099 and CLAIM-018. THEORY-058, THEORY-050, THEORY-052 and THEORY-053 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-053 | Does organizational affect need a group subject, a state of the group not reducible to its members’ states, or only the synchronized convergence of members’ affect? | An unmarked tension between two THEORYs the record holds, raised by the synthesis review of 2026-10-11. THEORY-125 (Huebner) allows a group to be in an emotional state that is not its members’ states in aggregation. THEORY-126 (von Scheve and Ismer) makes collective emotion synchronous convergence with no group subject. The organizational-affect line (CLAIM-039, Deferred) needs to know which it is claiming. | Open |
| QUESTION-059 v2 | Does a state that meets a functional characterization of affect thereby have to be felt, or does feeling need a mechanism, such as a body acting on the neurons that map it, that an organization lacks? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-039 and QUESTION-053. THEORY-101, THEORY-045, THEORY-090, THEORY-093 and THEORY-095 bear on it; none answers it as posed, and the body gives each one’s limit. Deferred with its line. | Deferred |
| QUESTION-122 | Can a deep network during training have meaningful affect-like states, such as frustration of its demands, and to which unit, the network, the network–optimizer pair or the training process, would they belong? | The owner’s, U30 of the exchange of 2026-10-17: “the possibility of meaningful affective states attributable to a deep neural network specifically during training”. A30: the framework supports “a meaningful, qualified notion of training-time affective organization” and not “the conclusion that a neural network feels distress”. U31 added the bearer half, and CLAIM-367 answers it for conventional training, in part. U33 moved the primitive from distress to frustration (CLAIM-368). An answer says what training-time condition, if any, is affect-like, and whose. Organizational-affect is the natural line, set aside; whether it reopens is the owner’s decision, not made here. | Open |
| QUESTION-266 | Can felt valence be operationalized, for systems that report and systems that cannot, by three layers measured independently, an ordering serving as the negotiation’s potential in the system’s conflicts, a hedonic marker that does not depend on choice, and the system’s own model of its potential, and do the layers dissociate where the potential account and its rivals say they should? | Filed at the owner’s direction, 2026-10-23, after a survey of work near the record’s account of valence as ordering-potential (CLAIM-440) for ways to operationalize felt states. Three layers, each with existing measures: potential (a conflict record, estimated arbitration weights); a hedonic marker independent of choice (taste reactivity, judgement bias, reports of experienced utility); and the system’s model of its own potential (confidence and metacognition paradigms). The claims are tested where the layers come apart. | Open |
| QUESTION-267 | When the ordering that prevails a system’s negotiation ranks its states by a proxy for its maintenance rather than by its maintenance, as a firm’s potential metric may, is that valence, and is it the form that metric fixation in organizations and addiction in persons share? | TERM-076 restricts valence to an ordering serving as the negotiation’s potential of the system’s own states by their bearing on its maintenance. A potential ordering can instead rank them by a proxy that has come apart from maintenance. Wells Fargo’s cross-sell metric (CASE-151) is a candidate: treated as the firm’s standing, it was not its viability. The question is whether such potential is valence, and whether it is a common form of organizational metric fixation and of addiction. | Open |
| QUESTION-268 | What record of an organization’s or an animal’s conduct shows that one ordering prevails in the negotiation among its perspectives, which conflicts it wins, for how long, and whether it returns after interruption, and does potential measured on conflicts actually won give the same verdicts as potential read as a disposition? | TERM-076 defines potential by Frijda’s three marks of control precedence: priority in conflicts, persistence and resumption after interruption. CLAIM-440 rests its consequences on potential, and each of its defeaters needs potential measured. This asks how, and whether the measured (actual) and the dispositional readings agree, which bears on the counterfactual eraser (THEORY-252). | Open |
| QUESTION-269 | Does the potential account of valence need the will-organization’s other relations, accessibility, jurisdiction, suspension and transformation, beside the priority, persistence and resumption it reads off which side wins, and does a system’s valence change when one of them changes and the record of wins does not? | From the comparison of the record’s will and affect lines of 2026-10-23, filed at the owner’s direction. Will-organization (TERM-023) has six relations, and CLAIM-057 shows three of them vary independently. The potential account (TERM-076, TERM-078) reads valence from wins alone, through Frijda’s three marks. That is the reduction to “who won” that CLAIM-027 resists for will. The question is whether the other relations make a difference to valence that the record of wins cannot see. | Open |
| QUESTION-270 v4 | When can an organization hold an evaluation that is accurate, a consummatory process registering that an outcome no longer pleases or a process whose belief keeps predicting well, and still deny it the authority to revise pursuit or the collective judgement, and how is that told apart from the evaluation’s not being recognized at all? | From the exchange of 2026-10-24 (workbench entry of 2026-10-24, U23–U25). The owner asked “where does hedonic drive fit into our model?” and then “we have an operational characterization of feeling, wanting, liking… how about belief?” Both answers ended on the same question: an evaluation that is right, registered, and not consequential. It joins CLAIM-437’s wanting and liking, CLAIM-403’s ladder from access to uptake, and CASE-124’s legibility. | Open |
| QUESTION-292 v2 | What evidence would show that a maintaining link, and not a regime’s content, keeps a disorder in place: does the efficacy of a treatment that targets the link count, or only change in the link that is specific and comes before the outcome? | The evidential part of QUESTION-045, split off by the status review of 2026-10-27 under ADR-049, because THEORY-053 (Active) settles it. A treatment’s efficacy is not evidence for its theory of change. Only change in the theorised process that is specific and comes before the outcome bears on it, and moving the process without moving the outcome counts against the theory. | Answered |
| QUESTION-330 | How does anxiety change exploration across tasks and facets: does it reduce foraging exploration once stress and effort cost are controlled, does somatic anxiety reduce checking for threat through aversion to detecting it rather than a lower value placed on the information, and, in the same participants across more than one bandit task, does directed exploration rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and fall with state or somatic anxiety? | The promotion conditions formerly on THEORY-907 and THEORY-917, moved here together when the thirteenth status review narrowed both to Chou, Wilson and Smith’s review and promoted them, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Both ask whether the review’s patterns hold with facets, tasks and confounds separated. | Open |