Affect is the Evaluative Context for the Brain’s Shifting Goals

Abstract

Affect is a valenced (i.e., positive-to-negative) experience in consciousness that changes each moment and guides what people do, and despite its importance to human decision-making, it currently has no consensus understanding. The recent neuroscience theories of Predictive Processing and Active Inference offer some promising directions in characterizing affect but related accounts of affective valence emphasize either allostasis or the prediction/error dynamics in the brain. In this paper, I argue that these accounts of affect have excluded one affective phenomenon or another and present an alternative perspective on affect, called the Affect Management Framework (AMF). The brain has evolved to compute contextualized goals and capitalize on affordances in the environment, and affect reflects an evaluative common currency in consciousness that helps the brain switch between and track progress toward these contextualized goals. There are different categories of affective influences, including: (1) the goal itself, (2) interoceptive senses (evaluated via interoception, taste, and smell), (3) semantic processes of the brain (evaluated via meaningfulness, certainty, and agency), (4) exteroceptive processing (evaluated via familiarity, processing speed, and capacity), and (5) proprioceptive signals from the body that enable action (evaluated via controllability of the body and spatial orientation). Affect management is anticipatory, multifaceted, and contextual, involving an interplay between the various sources of affect throughout the brain and requiring a balance between attunement to the outside world and acting to change it.