The Human Affectome

Abstract

Over the last decades, theoretical perspectives in the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences have proliferated rather than converged due to differing assumptions about what human affective phenomena are and how they work. These metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions, shaped by academic context and values, have dictated affective constructs and operationalizations. However, an assumption about the purpose of affective phenomena can guide us to a common set of metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions. In this capstone paper, we home in on a nested teleological principle for human affective phenomena in order to synthesize metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions. Under this framework, human affective phenomena can collectively be considered algorithms that either adjust based on the human comfort zone (affective concerns) or monitor those adaptive processes (affective features). This teleologically-grounded framework offers a principled agenda and launchpad for both organizing existing perspectives and generating new ones. Ultimately, we hope the Human Affectome brings us a step closer to not only an integrated understanding of human affective phenomena, but an integrated field for affective research.

Keywords: Affect; Allostasis; Arousal; Emotion; Enactivism; Feeling; Framework; Mood; Motivation; Self; Sensation; Stress; Valence; Wellbeing.

Fig. 1.. The Human Affectome.

This framework is guided by the teleological principle that the collection of human affective phenomena in their entirety can only be accounted for by the nested and intertwined purposes: to ensure viability, to execute operations, to enact relevance, and to entertain abstraction. The bidirectional arrows are used to indicate that the human is enacting—in both being affected by relevant aspects of their actionable world, and affecting that world in order to make it relevant. We characterize affective phenomena as algorithms that address the relevance of the environment and monitor that adaptation. We distinguish between processes that reflect affective concerns and those that reflect affective features. The algorithms that address affective concerns indicate the relevance of a physical or mental object by suggesting actions regarding that object. We can organize one set of these processes in a hierarchy according to the distance from metabolic impact that the actions demanded by the concerns would have. The most immediate concerns (dark blue) are also the most concrete, yet least complex in actionability (i.e., physiological concerns, such as consuming food to alleviate hunger). On the other end of the continuum, more distal concerns (light blue) are increasingly abstract and complicated in terms of actionability, wherein more causal steps are required to achieve homeostatic impact (i.e., operational concerns, such as running away from a dog to alleviate fear, flickering lights for right-of-way on the road to express irritation, or researching more on a topic to address interest). In addition, the set of algorithms addressing affective concerns that do not fall along this continuum of distance from metabolic impact instead summarize across affective concerns. These global concerns include trajectory (green), the direction that the environment is heading toward across time; optimization (yellow), the best match between the environment and organism’s adaptive capacities across a given duration of time—the self-evaluations of aspects of the organism’s own adaptive capacity that are persistent across time. Finally, algorithms expressing affective features provide momentary information on the status of the adaptive process in relation to the comfort zone. These include valence and arousal. Created using Biorender.com.