APPRAISALS

Emotional appraisals serve as a mechanism for enacting priorities via goal directives, initiating the process of valuation. These appraisals function as a bridge, merging incoming information (motivations, registrations) with anticipated content and comparing this amalgam against the already active generated content.
At the heart of these appraisals lie evaluation tendencies, which are essentially predictive patterns that prime our value containing content generation (affects and beliefs). These tendencies are responsible for generating the (pre)conscious experiences we recognize as somatic markers, heuristics, moods, and attitudes, acting as a form of pseudo-content for state consciousness.

The appraisal process can be conceptualized through the lens of the free energy principle (FEP). In this framework, the brain generates predictions about future content based on its internal models that goals direct. These predictions are then combined with newly registered information, resulting in new content as presentations. These presentations themselves are predictive errors, representing the discrepancy between expected and actual information. When the predictive error embodied in these presentations is low, it affirms the current emotional state and associated goal directives. Conversely, a high predictive error may trigger a transformation of the emotional content, leading to shifts in current emotion and behavior. This dynamic interplay between predictions, registered information, and existing emotional content allows for a continuous refinement of our emotional responses.

Reappraisal emerges as a crucial extension of the initial appraisal process, serving as a mechanism for integrating new information and refining emotional responses. As the brain processes presentations (predictive errors) generated from the interaction of predictions and incoming data, it continually reassesses the significance of situations in light of updated information and evolving goal directives. This ongoing reappraisal allows for dynamic adjustment of emotional responses, enabling more nuanced, context-appropriate reactions. As such, reappraisal can serve as an integral part of emotional regulation.

MOTIVATIONS

Emotional motivations play a crucial role in enacting motives via goals directive. They initiate the process of taking purposeful action towards achieving certain objectives. These motivations function as a mechanism for merging other analyzed information (appraisals, registrations) with anticipated outcomes; and then comparing this amalgam against the already active motivational content.
At the core of these motivations lie action tendencies, which are essentially predictive patterns that prime our purpose containing content generation (impulse and will). These tendencies are responsible for generating the (pre)conscious experiences we recognize as habits, routines, moods, and attitudes, acting as a form of pseudo-content for state consciousness.
The motivation process can be understood through the lens of the free energy principle (FEP), but with a distinct focus on purposeful action. In this context, the brain generates action predictions based on its internal models that goals direct. These predictions interact with incoming information to form action-oriented presentations. These presentations represent potential courses of action and their anticipated outcomes, embodying the predictive errors between expected and actual states of affairs. When the predictive error in these action presentations is low, it reinforces current action tendencies and associated goal pursuits. However, a high predictive error may instigate a recalibration of emotional content and behavioral strategies, leading to shifts in how we approach our goals and express our emotions.
Emotional regulation emerges as a natural extension of this motivational process. As the brain works to minimize predictive errors in action presentations, it simultaneously engages in emotional regulation. This involves modulating the intensity, duration, and expression of emotional responses to align with goal directives and environmental demands. The constant recalibration of action tendencies in response to predictive errors serves as a built-in regulatory mechanism, allowing for flexible adjustment of emotional states. This process enables individuals to maintain emotional equilibrium while pursuing their goals, adapting their emotional responses to best serve their purposes in varying contexts.

GOAL DIRECTIVES

Goal directives function as the driving force behind emotional activation, serving as instructions or intentions that set emotions into motion. These directives operate across three primary categories, each playing a crucial role in shaping our emotional responses and behaviors. Affordances identify which goals are relevant within a given environment, providing meaning to our emotional experiences. Priorities establish a hierarchical structure among these goals, determining their relative importance and assigning value to different emotional responses. Motives supply the underlying reasons for pursuing specific goals, offering purpose to our emotional pursuits.
Goal directives become enacted through the process of emoting, serving as the catalysts that transform passive goals in active ones. In the realm of emotional experiences, these directives are primarily centered around value and purpose, providing the essential framework for how we interpret and respond to our environment. The strength of a goal directive, determined by its priority level and motives, directly influences the likelihood of generating new, (ir)relevant mental content. When a goal directive is particularly potent, it increases the probability that current episodes of content will lead to the creation of new, related content, building upon the previous one. Conversely, weak goal directives may cause current content episodes to fade, allowing unrelated content to potentially come to the forefront of our consciousness.

Goal directives are intricately linked to both predispositions and propensities, forming a complex network that shapes the potential for our emotional responses. The connection between propensities and goal directives explains the variation in emotional responses among individuals who might share similar predispositions. While two people might be predisposed to consider the same set of goal directives, their unique propensities will guide how they interpret the affordances, prioritize the goals, and act on the motives present in a given situation.

Predispositions, as the foundational probabilities for processing certain content, influence which goal directives are likely to be considered in any given situation. They act as the initial filter, determining which affordances, priorities, and motives are most likely to come into play based on our innate tendencies and learned patterns. This relationship explains why certain individuals are more inclined to notice specific emotional cues or consider particular goals in their environment.
Propensities, on the other hand, determine how these goal directives are interpreted and acted upon once they’ve been highlighted by our predispositions. They govern the specific ways in which we process the value and purpose embedded in these directives, influencing how we prioritize and pursue them.

PASSIONS

Passions, or basic emotions, represent the most fundamental emotional responses that have evolved to transcend simple impression-instinct behaviors (stimulus-response experience). Passions facilitate adaptive navigation of the natural environment in which a species evolved. By introducing schemas that merge valuations with motivations, passions create a process for accumulating knowledge about the world, moving beyond direct stimulus-response patterns and shape a repertoire of adaptive valence schemas. These adaptive valence schemas act as intermediaries between environmental cues and behavioral outputs, enabling more nuanced and context-appropriate reactions. This evolutionary advancement allows organisms to develop a richer understanding of their surroundings, where each emotional experience contributes to a growing repository of adaptive knowledge. This evolutionary advancement allows organisms to move beyond rigid, reflexive responses, instead providing a flexible framework for interpreting and responding to environmental challenges. As a result, passions serve as a crucial bridge between primitive impressions and instincts, enhancing an organism’s ability to thrive in complex and dynamic environments.

These primal emotional experiences are composed of two key elements: affect and impulse. Affect arises from primitive appraisals, providing a natural, reflexive valuation of situations in the environment. Impulse, on the other hand, stems from primitive motivations, offering a natural, reflexive motive for action due to certain situations. This intricate interplay between affect and impulse creates the experience of value and purpose through emotion. These experiences equip organisms with the potential to thrive in both challenging and abundant environments by producing a direct reflexive knowledge about the value and purpose of meaningful objects in their surroundings. While passions acquire information about meaning through environmental registration, it’s crucial to understand that in the context of emotion, environmental affordances serve primarily as triggers rather than active shapers of the emotional response. The true sculpting of emotion unfolds through internal processes of value assignment and purposeful reactions.

This distinction highlights the organism’s active role in emotional experiences, emphasizing that while the environment provides the stimuli, the emotional response is fundamentally an internal process guided by evolved value systems and purposeful tendencies. Through these experiences, emotions may produce shifts in goal priorities as the value of objects and situations, as well as the purposeful actions they trigger, are re-interpreted based on outcomes. If the initial emotional intuition about something proves incorrect or maladaptive, as it increases the stress level, the organism must adapt its emotional response for future encounters, recalibrating its internal value and purpose assignments. Conversely, if the emotional response leads to successful outcomes, it is reinforced, strengthening that particular emotional pathway. This dynamic process of emotional adaptation and reinforcement allows organisms to fine-tune their responses to environmental challenges over time, enhancing their ability to navigate complex and changing environments effectively; But may in some cases produce rigid and less adaptive behavior.

GENERAL EMOTIONS

General emotions emerge as socially constructed and linguistically mediated experiences, built upon the foundation of basic passions. These emotions arise from specific situations that trigger combinations of different passions, which are then labeled and categorized as particular phenomenal experiences dependent on context. This process of labeling and categorization allows for a wide range of communicable understanding of oneself and others, incorporating contextual nuances.
The versatility of general emotions lies in their ability to emphasize different aspects of an emotional experience or even transcend simple emotional states. For instance, the concept of love can encompass various emotional dimensions: it might represent a disposition of sympathy towards an object, point to an appraisal of allure, or motivate an action of embrace. In more complex scenarios, love can extend beyond these simple emotions to represent deeper states like adoration or even suggest contextual elements such as trust and commitment.

While general emotions are socially constructed, they inevitably include certain underlying passions. This grounding in basic emotional experiences ensures a degree of universality – we cannot, for example, associate love with repulsion, as these are fundamentally opposed. However, cultural variations can lead to minor discrepancies in how certain passions are interpreted and generalized into specific general emotions. This explains why studies generally find similarities in the meaning of emotional words across cultures, particularly for simpler emotions.

It’s important to note that as emotions become more complex, the universality of their meaning and expression diminishes. The graphical representations of emotions typically focus on simpler, more universal emotional states, excluding the more nuanced and culturally variable complex emotions. The exceptions are complex emotions that combine similar dispositions, appraisals, motivations, passions, and sentiments – such as adoration, caritas, and ithar – which are shown as neighboring parts of emotional intuition.

COMPLEX EMOTIONS

Complex emotions, while still categorized under general emotions, are distinguished by their intricate composition, involving more than two neighboring passions – as a fundamental rule. This multifaceted nature allows for a more nuanced and profound understanding of emotional situations, often resulting in heightened arousal and intensity of the emotional experience.

The formation of complex emotions occurs as different passions merge, creating a more profound understanding that captures the subtleties of complex situations. This merging process not only deepens the emotional experience but also broadens its scope, allowing for a more comprehensive emotional response to intricate social and personal contexts.

To illustrate this concept, we can examine emotions like adoration, caritas, and ithar. Adoration and caritas both share the foundational passions of attraction and affection, creating a base of positive emotional engagement. However, their complexity emerges from the additional passions they incorporate. Caritas, often associated with sentiments of compassion and pity, includes the passion of appeasement, adding a dimension of soothing and conflict resolution to the love associated emotional experience. Adoration, on the other hand, incorporates intrigue, infusing the emotion of love with sentiments of wonder and admiration.

Ithar, an Arabic emotion most closely resembling what Western cultures might term devotion, exemplifies an even higher level of complexity. This emotion encompasses both adoration and caritas, effectively combining all the passions mentioned – attraction, affection, appeasement, and intrigue. This rich emotional tapestry results in a profound feeling of selfless love, loyalty and dedication.
The increased arousal associated with complex emotions stems from this multifaceted nature. As more passions are involved, the emotional experience becomes more intense and potentially more consuming. This heightened arousal reflects the depth and significance of the situations that typically evoke complex emotions, often relating to profound personal relationships or pivotal life experiences, either positive or negative.

SENTIMENTS

Sentiments represent a more sophisticated tier of emotional experiences, often intertwined with cognitive judgments. This fusion allows individuals to develop a deeper, more nuanced awareness of their emotional situations. Unlike basic passions, sentiments may not always be experienced as immediate feelings, particularly when they lack a connection to affect and impulse components typical of simpler emotions.

However, sentiments typically do incorporate affect and impulse, albeit in a more subdued form. This subtle inclusion of passions bridges sentiments with more basic emotional experiences. The key distinction lies in their foundations: while passions are primarily rooted in affect and impulse, sentiments draw more heavily on belief and will. However, passions and sentiments work together, with passions rooted in immediate feelings and while sentiments come with an increase in fantasy that adds depth in understanding complex situations.

Importantly, sentiments are more closely related to character and attitudes. Reflecting learned emotional responses shaped by complex social experiences with additional conceptual processing. In contrast, passions are more intimately connected to temperament, representing innate, reflexive emotional reactions.
As individuals, including certain animals, develop the capacity to experience more complex sentiments, they advance along the spectrum of personhood, exhibiting greater emotional depth and self-awareness. Simple passions represent our most basic emotional responses, but as we cultivate more nuanced sentiments, we gain a richer understanding of ourselves and an ability to navigate complex social situations.

The ability to experience complex sentiments indicates a sophisticated interplay between feelings, fantasy, and logic. It suggests an individual can hold multiple, sometimes conflicting, emotional perspectives simultaneously, reflecting a more mature and multifaceted personality. This complexity allows for more nuanced social interactions and a more profound engagement with moral and ethical considerations.

MOODS

Moods can be understood as embodied manifestations of accumulated experiences and anticipatory states. They are intimately connected to both physical and mental homeostasis, with imbalances in either domain potentially leading to shifts in mood. For instance, hunger-induced irritability stems from a deviation from physical wellbeing, regulated by hormones like ghrelin and leptin. Similarly, mental states can be affected by a kind of “psychological homeostasis,” where imbalances can lead to mood alterations, such as mental exhaustion or general stress.

Repeating emotional experiences contribute significantly to the formation and maintenance of moods through a self-reinforcing cycle. As specific emotions occur frequently, they shape the underlying emotional tone, strengthen neural pathways, and prime cognitive processes for similar future responses. This repetition leads to sustained hormonal and physiological changes, establishes behavioral patterns, and influences environmental interactions. Additionally, it affects memory consolidation and sets expectations for future events. The cumulative effect of these processes is the development of a persistent mood state that becomes increasingly entrenched over time, creating a framework that influences perception, decision-making, and emotional responses to new stimuli.
The intensity of a mood can significantly impact emotional experiences. Stronger moods require more potent appraisals to activate contrasting emotions. For example, severe depression might completely inhibit humorous responses, while milder depression still allows for some amusement. When emotions induce strong, congruent moods, these moods become more resilient to contradictory emotional signals. This phenomenon creates a sort of emotional inertia, where an anxious mood, for instance, resists joyful interruptions. Interestingly, intense emotions can also temporarily override moods, suggesting a dynamic interplay between immediate emotional responses and underlying mood states.

Crucially, moods are intrinsically linked to evaluation and action tendencies. They serve as a predictive mechanism that primes emotions, influencing how individuals assess their environment and their readiness for certain actions. In essence, a mood indicates how favorable the current environment is for particular behaviors or strategies increasing the chances for an adjacent/similar emotional content to become more prominent.

It’s important to note that moods may operate below the threshold of consciousness, particularly if suppressed by defense mechanisms or when an individual is not actively monitoring their emotional state. However, their influence on perception, decision-making, and behavior persists, subtly shaping how individuals interact with their environment and allocate their resources.

ATTITUDES

Attitudes and moods are both persistent mental states that affect behavior, but they differ in their complexity and cognitive involvement. Moods are simpler, more general emotional states that primarily influence our immediate feelings. Attitudes, on the other hand, are more sophisticated states that contains knowledge about specific objects or situations without needing feelings to be involved. Attitudes develop from the understanding personal experiences and become what we experience as a particular conscious state. Like filters, they selectively emphasize certain aspects of our environment while downplaying others. This selective attention process influences how we perceive and respond to the world around us, similar to how moods can color our general outlook, but in a more targeted and often backed up by conceptual knowledge.

Attitudes are fundamentally originating from beliefs and will. They are being goal directed combining elements of evaluation and action tendencies which are often aligned with one’s self-image. This alignment stems from attitudes representing how individuals want or shouldn’t behave, effectively manifesting their desired or expected self. Attitudes guide feelings with the help of though which helps produce behavior in congruence with one’s self-concept, reflecting and reinforcing personal values and purpose. However, it’s important to note that there can be a discrepancy between how individuals perceive themselves and how others interpret their behavior. When individuals act in accordance with their attitudes, they affirm and strengthen their self-image, potentially perpetuating both positive and negative traits. Attitudes conflicting with one’s self-image may lead to cognitive dissonance, but the difficulty in changing deeply ingrained attitudes can result in persistent behaviors that contradict one’s desired self-presentation. This misalignment may occur because attitudes, once formed, can be remarkably resistant to change, even when one becomes aware of their own negative attributes.

In practice, attitudes and moods often work in tandem and are indistinguishable. They become distinguishable mainly when they conflict, such as when a person with a positive attitude towards exercise finds themselves in a lethargic mood. The cultivation of nuanced and flexible attitudes is often associated with greater emotional maturity. This ability to hold and navigate multiple, sometimes conflicting attitudes reflects a sophisticated level of cognitive and emotional processing. Such flexibility allows individuals to adapt their responses to varying contexts, resulting in more appropriate behaviors.

As such, attitudes can often be used to protect the self from bothersome moods. For example, when lonely men become aloof or even callous as a defence against the discomfort caused by loneliness stemming from feelings of rejection. While the background loneliness might not go away as easily, it surely prevents it passing into associated attitudes such as being shy or clingy, or at least there is an attempt.

CHARACTER

Character, unlike the relatively fixed temperament, is a malleable aspect of personality that evolves throughout life dependent on the breadth and depth of life experiences. It serves as a modulating force on temperament, influencing the intensity and expression of innate predispositions. Through character development, individuals can amplify or diminish the power of their temperamental tendencies at a fundamental level. This modulation occurs covertly, altering the underlying strength of temperamental predispositions themselves. Simultaneously, character shapes propensities – the overt manifestations of these predispositions – potentially transforming them into behaviors that may seem at odds with one’s innate temperament. These character induced propensities act as a filter between temperamental impulses and outward behavior, allowing for more nuanced and context-appropriate responses. With healthy character development, individuals refine their propensities, enabling them to navigate complex social and emotional landscapes with greater flexibility and effectiveness, even when their innate temperamental inclinations might suggest otherwise. However, in certain cases, character development may lead to a rigid personality focused on one aspect of emotional and social life. This rigidity can create complex defense mechanisms designed to keep certain emotional experiences at bay, potentially limiting the individual’s ability to fully engage with a diverse range of emotional states and social situations. In some instances, such a personality structure, which may be classified as a personality disorder, can prove highly effective in specific situations or environments. Nevertheless, it often fails to produce good outcomes in most other aspects of life, leading to a pattern of success in narrow domains but struggles in broader social and emotional contexts.

This dual influence of character allows for both subtle recalibration of temperamental intensities and more dramatic shifts in outward behavioral tendencies, providing a complex mechanism for personality adaptation and growth.

PERSONALITY

Parts of personality emerges through correlations between FFM dimensions and emotional dispositions: Conscientiousness relating to dispositions of adversity, vulnerability, jeopardy, antipathy, and autonomy; Extraversion with autonomy, superiority, prosperity, curiosity, and appealability; Openness with prosperity, curiosity, appealability, sympathy, and affinity; and Agreeableness with sympathy, affinity, inferiority, adversity, and vulnerability. Neuroticism, in contrast, correlates with negative manifestations of moods and emotional reactivity across these dispositional patterns.