Emotional Being

Our moods stem from our habitual physical experiences of affect (valence and arousal) and we can make them more meaningful through refined language-based distinctions. By more effectively  reconstructing our moods in language, we can better understand our habitual predispositions and seek to generate habits that serve us better in life and create our preferred emotional […]

As they result from our habitual stances to the world and the resultant predictions and simulations, moods are constant through our lives and form the emotional feedback loops and interpretations from which we create our more immediate emotional experiences; defined as our emotions. As with moods, emotions are our interpretation of affect generated by the

Our moods are feedback loops of habitual ways of making predictions and simulations based on our habitual ways of observing. Those simulations impact our body resources leading to certain interoceptive sensations showing up as habitual patterns of affect. We call these patterns our moods, some of which are so common, we refer to them as

If moods relate to our general sense of affect, emotions are related to specific situations in which we find ourselves. As with moods, emotions are related to predictions, interoception, affect and our concerns. The key difference lies in the immediacy of the situation. The immediacy of a situation often creates breakdowns and the need to

Human beings generally take two stances to life – a constructive stance and a defensive stance. A constructive stance involves an approach that tends to accept reality, seek possibility, and focus on the best way forward. A defensive stance sees threat in situations and uses various strategies to repel or avoid that threat. Starting at

We all experience affect, our sense of pleasantness and arousal. However, affect stems from interoception involving all internal sensations, so when is that sensation an emotion and when is it not? Indeed when we believe it is an emotion, how do we know which emotion?  It has long been theorised that all human beings experience

Interoception produces a bi-product known as ‘affect’, which is the sense of feeling that we experience throughout each day. Feelings that we have to make meaningful. Affect falls into two very broad categories – ‘Valence’ and ‘Arousal’.   Valence relates to how pleasant or unpleasant we feel whilst arousal relates to how energised we feel

One of the most popular theories about the human brain is known as the ‘triune brain theory’. Attributed to Paul MacLean and popularised by writers such as Carl Sagan and Daniel Goleman, the triune brain model purports that evolution has developed the vertebrate animal’s brain in three distinct stages, but that only human beings have

Human beings are emotional beings. It would be hard to imagine life without happiness, sadness, anger and the other emotions that are part of the rich tapestry of the human experience.  Yet defining our emotions has been a significant area of disagreement largely because those exploring this field have used a different basic interpretation of