What is the end goal?
Interactive Site
When the site is finished you will be able to click on each word on an interactive graphic and a short description will appear.
Personal Emotional AI Assistance
Hopefully, a personal AI psychotherapist will be available in the future. This isn’t just a cheap way to find help – it’ll be accessible whenever and wherever you have an internet connection on your device. This makes it both practical and affordable.
What this theory is about
This theory attempts to create a unified framework for understanding emotions by mapping out how different emotional components interconnect and contribute to personality formation, with each concept meticulously positioned in logically precise relationships to others. It aims to bridge the gap between emotional concepts and psychological systems & processes by illustrating the precise relationships between emotional experiences, personality structures, and the underlying processes that create and maintain them.
Each term and concept is deliberately placed within the framework, with their relationships to other elements carefully mapped according to spatial logical relation, creating a rigorously structured model. Words and concepts in this framework are arranged spatially based on their relationships—the closer two terms appear to each other, the more closely they are related. This creates a structured model where proximity reflects the strength of conceptual connections.
By providing a clear visual representation of these complex relationships, the theory strives to serve both as an accessible entry point for those new to understanding human psychology and as a rigorous conceptual foundation that researchers can use to advance their studies of behavior and consciousness. Essentially, it’s trying to create a logically coherent “map” of how emotions work within the larger system of human personality and the mind.
A Quick Introduction to the Basics
The following categories are interconnected, with some having stronger relationships than others, but none can exist in isolation. Some concepts are more concrete and observable, while others are more practical and abstract. Each concept helps us understand both the complete system and its individual components.
Temperament: The biological foundation for how we process emotions.
Dispositions: Generalizations of probabilities for experience and understanding stemming from temperament and character.
Appraisals & Motivations: Value and purpose processing working together to shape emotions.
Goal Directives: Instructions that turn passive goals into active ones by directing appraisals and motivations.
Passions: Basic, primitive emotions formed from appraisals and motivation that produce what we understand as the feeling part of emotion.
General Emotions: Combined patterns of passions and sentiments shaped by social understanding.
Complex Emotions: Combinations of 2 or 3 general emotions creating deeper patterns that are a consequence of deeper sentiments bound to strong passions.
Intricate Emotions: Part of complex emotions as they are a combinations of 3 general emotions.
Sentiments: Advanced emotions formed from appraisals and motivations that blend thinking and feeling via fantasy.
Moods (Negative and Positive): Mental feeling states reflecting accumulated experiences that influence behavior and prime emotions.
Attitudes (Negative & Positive) : Mental fantasy based states, dependent and correlated with the associated mood, that dictate thoughts and behavior.
Character (Atypical & Virtuous) is the changeable part of personality, that correlates strongest to attitudes and sentiments, capable of regulating temperament .
The BIG 4/5 (FFM) of personality appears as the final integration, representing how these emotional patterns contribute to broader personality traits. It differs a bit from the standard five factor models that modern psychology studies.
INTERNAL DYNAMICS
TEMPERAMENT forms the innate, biological foundation of personality, remaining largely immutable throughout life except for subtle hormonal influences. Provides the basic emotional reactivity patterns as baseline predispositions that shape how we construct mental content and engage with the world.
The graphic here tries to illustrate temperament as the foundation of what give color to these processess, spreading all the way to character.
There are four types: Sanguinic, phlegmatic, melancholic, choleric.
DISPOSITIONS operate through two distinct yet interrelated aspects: predispositions that serve as the underlying framework determining the likelihood of specific content being constructed in particular ways, and propensities that dictate how this emotional content is interpreted and acted upon, explaining why people with similar dispositions can lead to markedly different emotional behaviors and reactions.
The graphics aim to illustrate the close connection with temperament, as they are shaped by it, while also reflecting the influence of character, which feeds back into temperament through the tubes that connect them.
Sympathy, affinity, inferiority, adversity, vulnerability, jeopardy, antipathy, autonomy, superiority, prosperity, curiosity, appealability.
APPRAISALS serve as the mechanism for enacting our priorities through goal directives, merging appraisal processes with evaluation tendencies. This creates our value-containing experiences such as affects and beliefs.
When it comes to emoting, it seems like appraisal comes before motivation, so this is what the graphic shows.
Allure, favor, esteem, defeat, loss, danger, threat, offense, blame, honor, benefit, interest.
MOTIVATIONS function as the mechanism for enacting motives through goal directives, initiating purposeful action. Operates through action tendencies that generate predictive patterns and combines them with the processesing of current information and produces content categorised as either impulses or will.
Motivations usually come after the appraisal process, as the graph shows, it is why they are a consequence of one or two appraisals.
Accept, defer, submit, resign, retreat, avoid, resist, aggress, dominate, engage, explore, approach.
GOAL DIRECTIVES act as the driving force behind emotional activation, operating through affordances (identifying relevant goals), priorities (establishing hierarchical importance), and motives (providing reasons for pursuit). Determines how emotions transform passive goals into active ones.
The graphic attempts to show that these goal directives are connected to both motivation and appraisal processes.
Affiliation, cohesion, approval, security, safety, protection, opposition, control, power, success, thrill, hedonism.
CHARACTER represents the adaptive, dynamic aspect of personality that evolves through experiences, choices, and social pressures. Malleable, shaped by interactions with the environment, personal reflection, and intentional development. It reflects how we interpret, integrate, and express predispositions (temperament) in response to the demands of life.
Graphic shows which dispositions, appraisals, and motives are most correlated with a particular virtuous character.
Positive: Flexible, friendly, caring, prudent, insightful, cautious, steadfast, toughminded, forthright, courageous, charismatic, spontaneous.
TYPES OF EMOTION
Passions (basic emotions) are the most primitive of emotions as much as they can be separated from other emotions, in theory. They are constructed from above mentioned processes – mainly as a spectrum of different motivations and appraisals.
The graphic attempts to illustrate how these passions constantly form with each second newly content possibly emerging (look at spirals between the center and passions).
Attraction, affection, appeasement, dejection, distress, fright, repulsion, annoyance, frustration, exaltation, exhilaration, intrigue.
General Emotions emerge as larger patterns integrating multiple passions, representing socially constructed emotional understanding.
The graphic shows which two passions contribute to the formation of a specific general emotion.
Love, guilt, shame, sadness, fear, disgust, hate, anger, pride, joy, marvel, desire.
Complex Emotions form from the combination of neighboring general emotions, creating more intricate emotional patterns. They range from those who combine two general emotions, and those that combine three.
The graphic shows which general emotions contribute to these complex emotions.
Less complex: Adoration, caritas, contrition, pena, despair, abhorrence, contempt, rage, disdain, fiero, amazement, infatuation.
More complex (intricate emotions): Ithar, karuna, remorse, anguish, dread, ghrina, scorn, spite, fervor, satori, rapture, eros.
Sentiments are advanced emotional experiences that combine thinking with feeling to create deeper understanding of complex situations. They are the opposite to passions – in terms of emotion – but work in conjunction most of the time.
The graphics aim to illustrate how sentiments surround and enhance all the emotions, especially the ones closest to them.
Fascination, admiration, trust, commend, compassion, pity, regret, diffidence, despondency, futility, concern, worry, appall, reproach, suspicion, scold, indignation, resentment, triumph, determination, enthusiasm, inspiration, amusement, wonder.
FROM STATES TO PERSONALITY
Moods are embodied manifestations of accumulated experiences that function as a predictive mechanism that primes emotions through evaluation and action tendencies which indicate how favorable the current environment is for particular behaviors or strategies. They emerge as a consequence of particular emotional experience, and in turn, also prime similar emotions.
Negative: Bored, Lonely, depressed, anxious, irritable, manic.
Positive: Serene, tranquil, untroubled, resolute, condifent, excited.
Attitudes are sophisticated mental states containing knowledge about specific objects or situations without needing feelings to be involved, originating from beliefs and will that combine evaluation and action tendencies to guide behavior in congruence with one’s self-concept.
Extreme or negative attitudes: Naive, needy, clingy, shy, insecure, timid, cowardly, rigid, distrustful, cynical, hostile, arrogant, callous, deceitful, brash, pushy, flaky, gullible.
Positive: Flamboyant, sincere, reserved, principled, bold, exuberant.
Character is the malleable aspect of personality that evolves through life experiences and learning, acting as a modulating force that can either regulate or enhance temperamental dispositions by covertly altering their underlying strength while simultaneously shaping propensities into behaviors that may appear at odds with innate temperament.
Negative: Histrionic, dependant, avoidant, paranoid, egocentric, turbulent.
Positive: Flexible, friendly, caring, prudent, insightful, cautious, steadfast, toughminded, forthright, courageous, charismatic, spontaneous.
Personality emerges as a generalization of behavioral patterns shaped by emotional experiences, where temperament provides the innate foundation of emotional reactivity and character represents its learned modification through experience. This interaction between fixed temperamental dispositions and malleable character development creates consistent yet adaptable patterns of behavior, forming our well established influences on the FFM.
– Openess – flexible, emphatic, modest – Agreableness – polite, conforming, cautious – Conscientiousness – industrious, ambitious, assertive – Extraversion – gregarious, adventurous, inquisitive – Openess
About my research and what I do
My research into personality theory led me down an unexpected but fascinating path. I discovered that understanding personality first required a deeper exploration of human emotions. This exploration, in turn, demanded an investigation into the fundamental workings of the mind, which expanded into a need to complete a comprehensive theory of emotions. While this work primarily focuses on emotions, it also presents key insights into cognitive processes and personality development, revealing the intricate connections between these three domains.
Jan Meznarič Jakopič
Conceptual Architect
Organizing, refining, and structuring abstract ideas and theoretical frameworks to make them more coherent, precise, and useful. I analyze complex concepts, identify logical relationships between different ideas, and reconstruct them into clearer, more systematic frameworks. This work involves identifying gaps or inconsistencies in existing theoretical frameworks, establishing clear connections between related concepts, and building comprehensive systems of knowledge that can be understood and applied effectively. I focused my time on psychology and philosophy, where I attempt to transform abstract or scattered ideas into well-organized theoretical frameworks through beautiful graphical designs that can serve both academic understanding and practical application for layman.
Would you like to be part of the project?
I know some parts of this project need to be explained better. Even I find some of the ideas challenging, which is why getting feedback from others is so important. Working together will help improve the quality of my research.
My email: emotionalintuition@gmail.com
