A Model of Emotion

i plan to write a follow-up post on this, in terms of physics.

one of the ideas that heavily influenced me was this one:

http://www.insidescience.org/content/physicist-proposes-new-...

What I don't get is how you reduce a variety of different emotions (hunger, anger, hope, etc) into a dichotomous "positive/negative outcome" spectrum. You don't really address that.

the "positive/negative" spectrum is meant to apply to possible outcomes reflected by the emotions - not the emotions themselves. An emotion like anger typically arises when lots of new negative (unwanted, undesired) possibilities appear newy likely, or lots of desired or 'good' possibilities disappear.

For example, suppose you were going home and upon pulling onto your street, you see the house is on fire. This is probably something you "don't want" - and the SoP model suggests that the negative emotion you experience corresponds to your internal estimate of 'likely events' being updated.

I realize that for most people, the explanation of "well if your house burns down, you'll be angry" seems kind of fatuous. The point of the model is to try to find an underlying thread or consistency to emotional experiences. Yes, it's "obvious" that seeing your house burn down will make a person angry.

What's the relationship between seeing your house burn down, having your best friend cheat on you with your partner, and then finding out that lawsuit was filed against you - aside from "they will all make you mad?"

Anyone can say "its obvious that those will make you angry", but the things we found "obvious" in mathematics for thousands of years turned out to be covering up a very complex situation.

The underlying thread that I see in all of those above situations, aside from them inducing anger - is that they all will cause the person experience them to reduce the probably of positive outcomes they predicted for living in the house, their relationships with their friends and partners, and their finances and time.

For each one of those situations, if you go through the 'set of possible outcomes eliminated' and then try to eliminate them _before_ the 'anger inducing event' occurs, suddenly the event doen't make you angry any more. Playing with the 'set of expected outcomes' seems to directly impact the anticipated emotional response.

If you had already planned to move out of your house, and packed everything up - none of your stuff was damaged, you suffer no financial loss, and insurance recoups everythign you need. Any lingering unpleasantness you feel can be attributed to a reduce sense of 'saftey' or an increased estimate that the house will burn down - but by removing the chance that you planned on staying in that house for years, or that you had a bunch of stuff in there that was destroyed - the emotional sting goes down.

Your friend cheating on you with your partner - that one is much harder to 'prepare' as having zero expectations for the future' - could a friend really be your friend if you didn't plan to be with them? So try the opposite, them - it stings much harder if it's your best friend you've had for 40 years, and your spouse of 30, than if it's a someone you just met and enjoyed spending time with, and a partner you just started dating. Again - this is "OBVIOUS" to most neurotypicals - and so they wouldn't bother explaining to themselves "ok here is why this is." As someone with a very intense emotional history, i wanted to understand the patterns underlying these phenomena.

Sure, I guess I wasn't looking so much for an in depth text as a high level summary of different models and how they differ. Just to get an idea of what's out there.

A former professor of mine wrote his PhD thesis on categorizing human emotion (I believe it was out of an AI department). Not sure how much help it will be, but it might have some ideas you can pull from.

http://condor.depaul.edu/elliott/ar/papers/dis/elliott-phd.h...