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).
35 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-045 v3 | Felt affect is the experience of the body’s regulatory state, valenced by what that state means for staying alive and present throughout waking experience, not only in emotion; whether what is felt is a prediction of that state or a map of it is unsettled | Barrett (2017), LIT-542, and Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, are two independent accounts that agree on a base layer. What is felt as affect (valence and arousal for Barrett, feeling for Damasio) is the body’s regulatory state. Its valence is that state’s value for the organism, and it is present in hunger, pain and well-being as much as in emotion. They disagree about what the experience is of. For Barrett it is the brain’s allostatic prediction of the body, issued from agranular limbic cortex. For Damasio it is a topographic map of the body’s state, built in the upper brainstem, and their paper makes no use of prediction. Seth (LIT-135) builds on the same base but makes his claim about consciousness, not about affect. Friston (LIT-526) supports neither. Proposed: both sources are theoretical syntheses, and neither tests the claim. | Proposed |
| THEORY-050 | Psychological inflexibility, in which verbal relations give private events aversive functions and make experiential avoidance a general strategy, is a transdiagnostic process in psychopathology | Hayes et al. (LIT-555) model psychopathology as inflexibility: cognitive fusion supports experiential avoidance, which narrows behaviour. Barnes-Holmes et al. (LIT-541) give the mechanism: once a word stands in derived relation to an event it can carry that event’s aversive functions, so private events become worth avoiding. Kashdan and Rottenberg (LIT-553) find inflexibility across depression and anxiety in cognitive, behavioural and physiological systems, and say its causal role is unknown. The evidence is correlational, small, mostly self-report and mostly from the model’s authors, and the meta-analysis that would test it (LIT-543) is unread, so Proposed. It is compatible with the loop account of disorder, not a rival to it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-055 | An appraisal of an event’s pertinence to the agent’s concerns elicits the emotion, as a state of action readiness, and emotions differ by their mode of action readiness | Frijda, Ridderinkhof & Rietveld (2014), LIT-540, Frijda’s own late statement of the theory of The Emotions (LIT-546, unread). An automatic appraisal of how an event bears on one’s concerns elicits a state of action readiness: a motive to change one’s relation to the object, with control precedence. Emotions differ by mode (hostility for anger, avoidance for fear), and “in the absence of concern pertinence … no emotion”. It is the record’s only read statement of an appraisal theory, because Lazarus (LIT-550) is unread. Both the elicitation claim and the claim that emotions differ by mode are argued, and neither is tested. The second is partly definitional within the theory. Rivals THEORY-057: both accounts let instances vary and group them by function, but the appraisal account puts the unity in the agent’s readiness and the constructionist account puts it in the perceiver’s concept. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-056 v3 | Emotion regulation is not a process separate from emotion generation: most of it is one motive state checking another, with no distinct regulating system above them | Frijda, Ridderinkhof & Rietveld (2014), LIT-540, deny “the exclusivity of emotion regulation processes”. Appraising the consequences of an impulse raises a competing readiness, as when fear of retaliation holds back anger, so control is the interaction of motive states and not reason governing emotion. Barrett (2017), LIT-542, reaches the second half from the opposite side of the emotion debate: automaticity and control are “different brain modes … not two battling brain systems”, and she offers as a hypothesis that reappraisal works by the same predictions that construct emotion. Two rival theories of what an emotion is agree on this. Gross (1998), LIT-554, poses the question and keeps the distinction. Proposed: argued from examples and from architecture, untested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-057 | Emotion categories are populations of variable instances grouped by the perceiver’s concepts, not natural kinds with a shared neural or appraisal mechanism | Barrett (2017), LIT-542: degeneracy, population thinking, and a table of findings in which no region, network, pattern or neuron is consistent for an emotion category. From these she concludes that categories such as fear are populations of variable instances, grouped by a goal and constructed by categorization with a concept. She rejects basic-emotion and causal appraisal theories as positing a “Lockean essence”. This is the record’s only read statement of the view. The record’s philosophy holdings sharpen it. Pernu (LIT-147) shows that many-to-one realisation at a fine grain does not rule out one variable at a coarser grain, so degeneracy alone does not carry the conclusion, and Table 1 has to. Searle (LIT-482) shows that Barrett’s comparison with money is to observer-relative function, not to institutions. Rivals the appraisal account, THEORY-055. Proposed: one theoretical paper, no independent test, and the reply unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-090 v2 | A basic, affective form of consciousness is realised subcortically, in the upper brainstem and thalamus, before and without cortex, and its first function is alarm: survival behaviour, care for the body and generalised one-shot learning, with no choice between options | Newen & Montemayor’s ALARM theory (2025), LIT-626: basic arousal, a sensitivity to pain, pleasure and other basic affect without focused attention, can be realised without cortex, by the upper brainstem and thalamus, and its function is to alarm the bodily agent when a homeostatic variable leaves its range, giving the signal “100% weight” through “rather rigid behavioural programmes without choices”. Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, supply the subcortical clause independently: feeling is generated in the upper brainstem and the insula is not needed. Both papers argue from cited evidence and offer no new data, and neither has a marker that tells a felt alarm from an unfelt one. The function clause rests on ALARM alone, and Veit’s account rivals it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-093 v2 | A content of mind is conscious when a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings identifies it as the organism’s own; the feelings are conscious in themselves and hybrid, partly made of the body state they map, because interoceptive pathways let the body act directly on the neurons that map it | Damasio & Damasio (2022), LIT-628, an essay with no data, read only through a summarising fetch tool, so its wording is paraphrased here. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as belonging to one’s own organism, and a continuous stream of homeostatic feelings, from hunger and pain to a faint feeling of existing, supplies it; the feelings are conscious in themselves and confer consciousness on exteroceptive images. They are hybrid because interoceptive axons are unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic and outside a systematic blood–brain barrier, so viscera and circulating molecules act on the neurons that map them. Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, read in full, supply the upper-brainstem site of feeling and the unmyelinated-fibre proposal. Proposed: the identification is a definition, the mechanism an interpretation of anatomy, and the clinical evidence does not separate this account from its rivals. | Proposed |
| THEORY-101 v2 | Consciousness began as hedonic valence, which evolved as a common currency for trading off competing options in action selection among animals with many degrees of freedom | Veit’s pathological complexity thesis, as he restates and defends it in his reply to commentators (2025), LIT-105: consciousness originated as hedonic valence, “a common currency of sharing evaluative information across multiple control systems”, which animals with many degrees of freedom need to solve the combinatorial trade-offs of action selection. Felt valence is identical with that currency, “not Cartesian but cybernetic”. Motivational trade-offs are his criterion for consciousness. The source is a reply piece; the thesis is argued in a book the record has not read, and the mechanism is a sketch. ALARM (THEORY-090) rivals it on what the first consciousness did. | Proposed |
| THEORY-123 v2 | In ad hoc groups of students negotiating a bonus, a confederate’s randomly assigned pleasant or unpleasant mood spread to the other members, by their self-reports and by blind coders, and the more pleasant mood a group caught, the more cooperative and the less conflicted coders rated it, a correlation with measured contagion rather than a manipulated effect; members’ moods also converged without a confederate, and members did not credit their mood for how effective they judged themselves; the numbers are from the 2001 manuscript | Barsade (2002), LIT-706, read from the August 2001 manuscript, so every number is the manuscript’s. Study 1 (94 undergraduates, 29 groups): a confederate randomly assigned to show pleasant or unpleasant mood moved members’ self-reported mood by +.41 or −.26 (χ²(1) = 9.97), and blind video-coders rated members’ mood 2.75 against 2.33 (χ²(1) = 10.30). Members who caught more pleasant mood were rated more cooperative, and at group level coder-rated contagion correlated with cooperativeness (r = .44) and against conflict (r = −.42). Study 2 (113 MBA students, 26 groups, no confederate): the ICC of members’ mood rose from .00 to .24, and contagion correlated with members’ ratings of cooperation (.49) and conflict (−.49). Members related how pleasantly they behaved to others’ conduct but showed “absolutely no awareness” of mood bearing on their judged effectiveness. Valence and energy hypotheses failed or were marginal. Limits: one experiment, one actor, retrospective mood, correlational process effects. Promoted 2026-10-20 on what the manuscript measured (ADR-047 v3); the wider claim is THEORY-826. | Active |
| THEORY-125 | A group can itself be in an emotional state that is not its members’ states in aggregation, when its distributed routines integrate the capacities an emotion requires into one action-oriented representation; because emotions are functional kinds such a state need not be felt, and no actual case has yet been shown | Huebner (2010), LIT-702: a genuinely collective emotion is a state of a group that “could not be exhaustively characterized in terms of intentional states of individuals in aggregation”. Fear requires danger detection, redeployment of attention, system-wide preparatory change and their coordination into one state with indicative content and imperative force; a distributed system can integrate routines that way. Some individual emotions are non-conscious, so a group’s need not be felt, and emotion kinds are functional (“like vodka”), so lacking homologous mechanisms does not exclude groups. The paper establishes a possibility, not an instance: its worked case, the USS Palau crew, turns out to be “collective detection of danger in the absence of a fear response”, and the replacement, the 2008 McCain–Palin campaign, is offered as “intuitively plausible” pending anthropological data. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-126 v2 | A collective emotion is the synchronous convergence of individuals’ affective responses to one event or object, produced bottom-up by shared appraisal, contagion and group membership, and it needs no group subject; it takes a We-mode form when the appraisals rest on collectively intentional states | von Scheve & Ismer (2013), LIT-696, a conceptual synthesis with no data: collective emotion is “synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals towards a specific event or object”. Its minimal case is shared appraisal with no mutual awareness (drivers in one traffic jam). Mutual awareness and membership in a collective amplify it, and appraisals grounded in collective intentions give “We-mode” collective emotion, which they expect to differ in quality. Barsade (2002), LIT-706, supplies the one measured instance: in 26 groups with no confederate, the intraclass correlation of members’ mood rose from .00 to .24. The account posits no group subject and does not deny one. Proposed: the definition is stipulated, the routes beyond contagion are untested, and the We-mode clause is a hypothesis its authors say lacks evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-291 | The brain’s visceromotor and interoceptive regions form one intrinsic system that reproduces their tract-traced anatomy and contains the hubs of the default-mode and salience networks | Theriault et al. (2025), LIT-996, read in full in NOTE-761, reporting the group’s own 3 T (N = 550) and 7 T (N = 90) studies; Barrett (2017), LIT-542, read in NOTE-434, for the 3 T system. The anatomy and overlap are reported second-hand. The reading the paper adds, that the named networks’ psychological labels are “destined to fail” and that the brain’s primary function is allostasis, is not part of this account; the authors themselves do not claim allostasis-first is correct. | Proposed |
| THEORY-329 v2 | In 32,479 Weibo posts of 2011–2016 scored with an emotion lexicon, posts tagged fake by the platform’s fact-checkers carry more anger and less joy than true posts from verified accounts, and a post’s share of anger words goes with more retweets after controls; whether the gap is due to falsity, and whether anger causes the spread, is not shown | Chuai & Zhao (2020), LIT-379, read in NOTE-852. In 32,479 Weibo posts from 2011–2016, lexicon-scored anger share is higher and joy share lower in fake than in true news, and in highly than in lowly retweeted news, under three scoring methods. With content, author and topic controls, anger share predicts more retweets within 48 hours and joy share fewer (R² 0.08–0.13). The paper calls this causal; the design is observational, and the fake set is selected for having spread. Active as a report of the association (ADR-065); the paper’s causal thesis is THEORY-1221, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-500 | Ventromedial prefrontal cortex stores links between kinds of situation and the body states they produced, and re-enacting those states when an option is imagined marks it good or bad, overtly as a feeling or covertly as a bias, pruning the options before reasoning weighs them; without the marks, choice under uncertainty fails despite intact knowledge and intellect | Damasio (1996), LIT-384, read in NOTE-332, the somatic marker hypothesis stated by its author; Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Damasio (1997), LIT-383, read in NOTE-331, the experiment it is usually cited for. The robust result is a group difference: in the gambling task all 10 controls and none of 6 ventromedial patients developed anticipatory skin conductance responses. That controls chose well before they knew, and that the marker causes the choice, is not carried by the statistics. The mechanism is argued, not observed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-560 | In rodents, gut microbes can drive stress and affect-related behaviour through vagal, immune, endocrine and metabolite routes, and faecal transplant from depressed people partly transfers the phenotype; in people, probiotics have so far shown at most small reductions in subjective stress in healthy volunteers, and strains with strong preclinical records have failed in controlled trials | Forssten et al. (2022), LIT-915, read in NOTE-703. A narrative review with no search method, by employees of a probiotics manufacturer, which documents its own translational failures: L. rhamnosus JB-1 had no effect on any outcome against placebo after “comprehensive preclinical evidence”. The rodent half is well documented; the human half rests on one meta-analysis of healthy volunteers and trials with nulls. Proposed because the source is a narrative industry review; the gap it describes runs against its authors’ interest. | Proposed |
| THEORY-570 | An emotional state is a large-scale selection of mental resources, switched on and off by Selectors that Critics trigger on recognising a type of problem, and so of the same kind as an intellectual way to think; feelings are the mind’s descriptions of these cascades, and the body is one more resource the brain uses, not the substance of emotion | Minsky (2006), The Emotion Machine, LIT-432, read in NOTE-348 from the author’s 2005 draft. A design argued from examples, thought experiments and the author’s own AI programs, with no experiment; Minsky marks several parts as his untested conjecture. It disagrees directly with the body-state views of emotion and of feeling. On Elliot it proposes the reverse causal order to Damasio’s, with no evidence offered. | Proposed |
| THEORY-603 | In the Iowa gambling task, every one of ten controls and none of six patients with bilateral ventromedial prefrontal damage developed anticipatory skin-conductance responses, and three patients who could state the right strategy still did not switch to the good decks; the controls’ preference for the good decks became significant only once they reported a hunch, so the study does not show advantageous choice or deck-specific bodily signals before any awareness | Bechara, Damasio, Tranel & Damasio (1997), LIT-383, read in NOTE-331. The robust results are the group difference in anticipatory SCRs (Fisher’s exact, one-sided P < 0.001) and the insufficiency of stated knowledge in three patients. The abstract’s “before they realized which strategy worked best” and “before they knew” outrun notes 8 and 9: the pre-hunch choice preference was not significant, and the pre-hunch SCR effect reported is group × period, with no bad-versus-good deck test. Nothing here shows that the SCR, or what it indexes, causes the choice. | Active |
| THEORY-662 | The feeling of fluency is an inference about the precision of one’s own processing, triggered by a change in precision against expectation; because its cause is internal and not given to introspection, a felt discrepancy is attributed to the most salient external source, as familiarity, liking or a sense of error | Brouillet and Friston (2023), LIT-957, read in NOTE-785. A perspective essay with no model and no new data. It joins Whittlesea’s discrepancy-attribution hypothesis to precision-weighting. The part with moderate support is the reviewed finding that fluency judgements follow discrepancy from expected fluency (the hension effect and its extensions), reported secondhand. The precision reading and the felt/unfelt levels are proposals. “Felt” here means attended and reportable, not phenomenal, and fluency is not offered as affect. | Proposed |
| THEORY-663 | Altruism between non-relatives can be selected when each act costs the giver less than it benefits the recipient, the same partners meet often and symmetrically, and help is withheld from those who do not return it; in humans, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy and guilt are adaptations that regulate such exchange, and selection then favours sham versions of each and the ability to detect them | Trivers (1971), LIT-510, read in full in NOTE-402. A verbal model, with a Prisoner’s Dilemma sketch Hamilton communicated, followed by a functional account of the human emotions that would regulate reciprocity. The model is plausible and was later formalized. The psychology is fitted to 1960s social-psychology findings, mostly on American students, and the heritability of the dispositions is assumed. Trivers knows “of no psychological studies on the detection of sham moralistic aggression and sham guilt” (p. 51). His “unfairness” is inequity in exchange, not the division of a disputed resource. | Proposed |
| THEORY-680 | Emotion regulation is a set of processes distinct from emotion generation, by which people influence which emotions they have, when, and how they are experienced and expressed; regulatory acts can be sorted by the point in the generative sequence where they act, and acting before response tendencies form (reappraisal) has different consequences from acting after (suppression) | Gross (1998), LIT-554, read in NOTE-429, the founding review. It reports no data. The five families (situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, response modulation) are “working distinctions”. The antecedent and response contrast rests on a handful of film studies it cites: reappraisal lowered negative experience, suppression did not reliably do so and raised sympathetic activation. The paper’s own first open problem is whether regulation can be told apart from generation at all. | Proposed |
| THEORY-826 | In work groups, a member’s displayed mood spreads to the others, and pleasant emotional contagion improves the group’s cooperation and reduces its conflict | Barsade (2002), LIT-706, read in NOTE-551, presents emotional contagion as a general phenomenon of work groups and states its effect on group process causally: “this contagion improved cooperation, decreased conflict”. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-123, only what her two studies measured: ad hoc student groups, one actor as the source, and a process link that is a correlation with measured contagion. This is her wider claim, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-871 v3 | In two midlife community samples (n = 182 and 176), instructed reappraisal of aversive pictures, mostly by reinterpretation, lowered reported negative affect, while the BOLD responses of the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, hypothalamus and the other subcortical regions that responded to the pictures showed evidence of no change (Bayes factors below 1/10); the emotion-responsive regions it reduced were all cortical, mainly higher visual and parietal | Bo et al. (preprint 2023, published 2024), LIT-1359, read in full from the bioRxiv v2 preprint in NOTE-1061. Reported negative affect fell under reappraisal (d = 0.92, n = 358). Every subcortical region engaged by negative pictures, amygdala subregions and PAG included, showed 10:1 evidence of no change under reappraisal, as did most cortical emotion-responsive regions; the eight regions reduced were all cortical. BOLD and one rating per trial; it does not show that the unchanged response is part of what is felt, though the authors write as if it were. | Active |
| THEORY-878 | Instructed reappraisal of aversive pictures engages anterior prefrontal, temporo-parietal and cerebellar regions that show evidence of no response to negative emotion generation, beside a larger set of regions engaged both by generation and by reappraisal: in this task part of regulation runs in regions apart from generation, and most of it in regions shared with it | Bo et al. (preprint 2023, published 2024), LIT-1359, read in full from the bioRxiv v2 preprint in NOTE-1061. Two fMRI samples (n = 182 and 176), voxelwise Bayes factors, every effect replicated in both. Sixteen regions are engaged by reappraisal and show 10:1 evidence of no response to negative against neutral pictures without it; fourteen, the larger set, are engaged by both. The selective set best predicts how much reported negative affect falls. One instructed strategy, one stimulus type, BOLD only; nothing shows the selective regions do the regulating. | Proposed |
| THEORY-893 v3 | Reward has separable components: ‘liking’, its hedonic impact, measurable without report by orofacial taste reactivity in humans, apes, monkeys and rodents, and ‘wanting’, its incentive salience; brain stimulation and sensitization can raise ‘wanting’ without raising ‘liking’, so motivation can grow while pleasure stays flat or falls, and ‘liking’ reactions can occur without any subjective feeling of pleasure | Berridge and Kringelbach (2015), read in NOTE-1110. Reward splits into ‘liking’, ‘wanting’ and learning. ‘Liking’ has objective, cross-species orofacial markers. Lateral-hypothalamic stimulation and incentive sensitization raise ‘wanting’, which can grow “even if the drug became less pleasant”. Objective ‘liking’ reactions can occur “without any subjective pleasure feeling at all”. Filed because it bears directly on the record’s reading of valence as ordering-potential (CLAIM-440). | Proposed |
| THEORY-898 v2 | In Gangneung, South Korea, in 2022, people the authors observed by chance in beach-front cafés outwardly ignored routine retaliatory missile launches and military sites on the beach, while a missile malfunction at night under a news embargo was followed by tweets voicing fear of war with North Korea and blaming the government and military | Ku & Finch (2024), LIT-1478, read in full from the CC BY version of record in NOTE-1133. Chance observation of one afternoon and a keyword-filtered tweet sample of one night, offered as an illustration of “ontological agency”, not a test. The authors read the inaction as coping that lets securitisation reproduce itself, not as resistance to it. | Active |
| THEORY-907 v2 | As Chou, Wilson and Smith review them, in about six foraging studies, mostly sub-clinical, higher stress or anxiety went with less exploration, and in one task with a predator to check for (Trier et al. 2023), people higher in trait somatic anxiety checked less and did worse, a reduction the study’s further analyses associated with greater aversion to detecting the predator | Chou, Wilson & Smith (preprint June 2024; NBR 2024), LIT-1483, read in full in NOTE-1127. Foraging: Lenow et al. 2017, Bustamante et al. 2023, Lloyd et al. 2022a and 2022b, with human open-field and plus-maze studies agreeing. Checking: Trier et al. 2023, a single study. Mostly sub-clinical; stress and anxiety are treated together; the mechanisms are the authors’ readings. | Active |
| THEORY-917 v2 | Chou, Wilson and Smith read about eight computational studies of exploration in reward-based bandit tasks, mostly in sub-clinical samples, with mixed results and none replicated, as suggesting that directed exploration rises with trait or cognitive anxiety and falls with state or somatic anxiety; none they review links random exploration to anxiety | Chou, Wilson & Smith (preprint June 2024; NBR 2024), LIT-1483, read in full from the PsyArXiv preprint in NOTE-1127. A narrative review; the pattern is the authors’ reading of about eight studies with different tasks, models and anxiety measures, with one failed replication and one null. The authors hedge it with “may” and “many results could be seen to suggest”. | Active |
| THEORY-1180 | In foraging tasks, higher stress or anxiety goes consistently with less exploration, and in one task with a predator to check for, people higher in somatic anxiety checked less and did worse, a reduction associated with greater aversion to detecting the predator | The wide form THEORY-907 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-907, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1186 | Across computational studies of exploration in reward-based bandit tasks, mostly in sub-clinical samples and not yet replicated, directed exploration tends to rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and to fall with state or somatic anxiety | The wide form THEORY-917 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-917, Active, is its evidence. The old title’s last clause, that random exploration shows no relation to anxiety, is not kept: the review reports only that no study links them, and THEORY-917’s note of 2026-10-30 says why. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1202 | A securitised public keeps its routines by not attending to routine security practices, which keeps an anxiety about the threat latent rather than absent; when the security apparatus itself disrupts those routines the anxiety surfaces, and with it blame of the apparatus | Ku and Finch’s ontological agency (LIT-1478, read in NOTE-1133), filed beside THEORY-898 when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed and promoted that entry under ADR-065 (ADR-047 kind 1). The Gangneung observations illustrate it; inner states were not measured, and habituation and low perceived risk were not tested against it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1221 | Anger makes fake news viral online: on Weibo fake news carries more anger and less joy than true news, and the anger in a post causes it to be shared more | Chuai and Zhao’s (2020) thesis, LIT-379, kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed THEORY-329 to the association their corpus measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047 kind 1). The design is observational, and the fake set is selected for having spread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1237 | Instructed reappraisal lowers reported negative affect to aversive pictures while the responses of the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, hypothalamus and other subcortical regions to the same pictures show evidence of no change; the regions it reduces are cortical, mainly higher visual and parietal | The wider thesis Bo et al. assert (“subcortical affective processes are less modifiable by reappraisal than previously thought”, p. 20), filed beside THEORY-871 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-871, Active, holds what their two midlife samples measured under one instructed strategy. Whether the result holds for reappraisal at large is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-871’s old condition, without the version-of-record clause. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1282 | Affect, in Massumi’s sense, 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 rather than a definition to apply | Massumi (2009), LIT-1905, read in NOTE-1488, p. 1; reprinted in Politics of Affect (2015, pp. 47–48), LIT-1907. The definition is Spinoza’s as Deleuze took it up, and it runs both ways, diminished or augmented. Massumi says it is “not a general definition that you can apply”. Bencherki et al. (LIT-1902) quote it exactly and then apply only its augmenting half, as a definition of agency. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1283 | Micropolitics is the modulation of a relational field toward a maximally inclusive co-patterning of contrasting tendencies, in which each realizes itself without curtailing the others; the co-patterning is aesthetic, an affirmation of discord rather than its resolution | Massumi (2017), LIT-1910, p. 64, read in NOTE-1486; anticipated in the 2009 interview (LIT-1905, p. 12) as “a symbiosis: a cross-fertilization of capacitations”. It is an aim, which Massumi grants “sounds utopic” and calls “always-as-yet unknowable”. Bencherki et al. (LIT-1902, p. 1358) quote it exactly and use it to say what organizational becoming is constituted by. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1286 | Affect is not transmitted from one body or event to another; it is reactivated anew in each event, and bodies cued by the same event are attuned to it differentially rather than made alike | Massumi (2009), LIT-1905, read in NOTE-1488, pp. 6 and 9: affect “is not a content that can be transported from one event to another … an event logic, not a logic of transmission or communication”, and there is “affective difference in the same event”. This sits uneasily with the “excess action” that Bencherki et al. (LIT-1902) have passing between individuation processes. | Proposed |