Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Katherine T. Peil
EFS International
12626 NE 114th Place
Kirkland, WA 98033
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Abstract
information-rich sensory stimulus that concerns optimal interactions between humans and their
physical and sociocultural environment. The model suggests that the hedonic categories and their
good/bad subjective appraisals emerge from fundamental positive and negative feedback processes
which relate to dual self-regulatory behavioral regimes and right states of homeostatic balance—
calling into question the traditional good/evil moral dichotomy. Distinctions are made between
encoded within basic and complex feeling tones, and the implications for moral reasoning are
discussed.
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The wisdom of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) has oft been quoted: “Man has been placed
under the governance of two sovereign masters: pleasure and pain.” Despite this insight,
pleasure and pain. Indeed, it has been difficult to tease emotion apart from physiological
responses (James, 1890), from reflexes, and biological drives, motivational appetites and defenses
(Cannon, 1927), from cognitive appraisals (Schachter & Singer 1962), from moral intuitions
(Haidt, 2001a); to reconcile divergent functional theories (i.e., levels of analysis, specificity vs.
generality, manner of organization, and range of focus (Keltner & Gross 1999), or to make sense
of the many cultural similarities and differences evidenced (Mesquita & Frijda, 1992), so
difficult, that definitive theorizing about emotion has all but gone out of fashion. Hence,
Kleinginna & Kleinginna (1981) identified over ninety definitions of emotion and, as recently as
1997, the philosopher Paul Griffiths (1997, p. 14) wrote: “My central conclusion is that the
My purpose is to suggest that emotion has not remained categorically and functionally
mysterious due to generality, but because the traditional approach has been overly specific,
anthropomorphic, narrow, and “preemptive” (Zajonc, 2003). I will argue that the regulatory
patterns of emotional pain and pleasure hearken much further back in our evolutionary history
than yet supposed, and play a much more important functional role. I will also argue that the
empirical study of emotion has been stymied by a fundamental violation of the rule of parsimony.
Wouldn’t the simplest assumption be: What feels good is “right” and what feels bad is “wrong”…
by biological dictate? Doesn’t it make sense that the universal pursuit of pleasure and avoidance
of pain might relate to naturally optimum or deficit states of some sort? Instead, the cultural,
legal, and moral ramifications of the notion that human hedonism might be “good” are enough to
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send any sensible scientist scurrying down safer empirical avenues. As such, we remain saddled
with the premature conclusion that emotions themselves are outdated “responses” that are “suited
poorly to modern exigencies” (Gross, 1998), and nearly universal cultural consensus that
emotions should be suppressively regulated, to the degree one prominent etiquette advisor
“maintains a list of emotions that should never be experienced let alone expressed” (Martin, 1984,
pp 115).
Certainly there is merit to the intuition that something is “bad” about negative emotion. The
fight and flight responses typically accompanying such painful feelings as anger, disgust, fear,
rage, and hate can indeed be disrupters of moral, even willful, thought and action. Plus, there is
plenty of evidence linking excessive negative emotion with immune dysfunction, cardiovascular
disease (McClelland, 1982); endocrine dysfunction (Buck, Miller & Caul, 1974); and cancer
(Hagnell, 1986), not to mention a host of mental disorders. But by virtue of their formidable
persistence and disruptive power, shouldn’t bad feelings be worthy of our respect? Might we be
blaming the messenger and missing a crucial message? Perhaps our bad feelings are trying to tell
us that something is wrong—so wrong, that if we miss the biological message we hurry our own
demise? Furthermore, recent pioneering work in the field of positive emotion (Csikszentmihalyi,
1990; Seligman, 1991; Deiner & Larson, 1993; Lipton, 1998, Fredrickson, 1998; Isen, 2000;
Haidt, 2001b) suggests that what feels good (flow, optimism, joy, interest, love, contentment,
elevation) assists us in optimal adaptation. Good feelings tell us that something is right—so right
that we gain positive effects in our intellectual and social development, our thought processes, our
moral reasoning, and our physical and mental well being. Perhaps we are missing messages about
biologically right states, states that we can willfully reinforce, reproduce, and creatively amplify?
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So if emotions might contain messages of right and wrong states, this immediately begs two
questions: 1. Where are the messages coming from? and 2. What do they mean? I will address
these questions while introducing a new homeodynamic feedback model that recasts emotion as a
primal sensory system so ancient that it predates neural organization, yet so evolutionarily
complex and elegant that its modern perceptual messages provide a universally efficient yet
personally tailored moral compass. The cybernetic feedback context provides a holistic tree-top
vantage which elucidates the intricate connective paths within the disorienting emotional forest,
unveiling a self-organizing evolutionary function that gives rise to its “self-regulatory” (e.g.
Mischel & Mischel, 1976) character. From this vantage, it becomes apparent that while we are
busy regulating our emotions, our emotions are actually trying to regulate us—and from a much
more ancient, wiser, and biophysically valid, moral authority. Indeed, in times of terror, epidemic
depression and pain-numbing addiction, when faith in human nature seems to have ebbed, this
Emotions are commonly referred to as “perceptions” (i.e. “what is emotion the perception
of?” (Damasio, 1999, p314); “the amygdala…a crucial structure in emotional perception” (Dolan,
2002, p1194), yet the implications of this terminology have gone unnoticed. In introductory
sensation is defined as “the conversion of energy from the environment into a pattern of response”
(Kalat, 1999). So the simple answer is that emotional messages come from the environment, as
sensory perceptions of energy stimuli from both external and internal worlds. Like sounds, smells,
or colors, feelings deliver packages of information via the body to the mind—information that is
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multi-tiered, encoded within emotion’s unique blend of cognitive and behavioral perceptual
responses. I will argue that emotional sensory information comes courtesy of ancient yet
intricately complex regulatory feedback networks that yield global behavioral control via local
electrodynamic signaling (Presman, 1970, Pohl, 1983) and electrochemical “signal transduction
cascades” (Goodenough, 1998, p 42). Hence, the complex answer begins with the threefold
suggestion that: 1) The function of emotion concerns the integration, coherence, and regulation of
one’s physical identity within the immediate environment; 2) its “self-relevant” sensory stimulus
is ultimately rooted in electrical activity and optimal energy balances; and 3) its behavioral
This follows from reconceptualizing “the self” as a physical rather than psychological
construct, wherein “identity” is defined as the body’s ongoing chemical activity. Psychologists
can bypass dualistic paradoxes and explore relatively uncharted reductionistic frontiers in both
identity and behavior, by revisiting several facts from chemistry: First, all biological organisms
temporarily harnessing, converting, and transferring energy (until their eventual entropic demise)
via chemical reactions. Second, all chemical reactions rely on the simple behavior of electrons—
their wave/particle manifestations, their ordered filling of energy shells within atoms of any
unique element, their comings and goings from one atom to another, and the molecular bond-
making and bond-breaking that results. Third, the behavior and number of electrons is the
defining characteristic that distinguishes the unique identity of the various elements (witness the
nomenclature of the periodic table), and as large organized bags of chemicals contained by our
skin, the same is true for each human identity. Fourth, the self-organizing transformations from
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one chemical identity to another are determined by stimulus-response behaviors that flow from
electrons respond by attraction to others with opposite charge and repulsion from those with like
stability by restoration of right states of energy balance (maintaining the right number of
electrons at each energy level, including eight in the outermost valence shell—the octet rule),
despite the never-ending inner electronic perturbations and outer molecular transformations.
There are several crucial psychological insights to be gained by defining the self
chemically. The first is the primary link of self-relevance between emotion and electricity—both
mysterious yet ubiquitous processes that have long remained conceptually isolated, at least in
terms of theory. Yet in practice, changes in electromagnetic states are routinely used to measure
emotional responses (i.e. EEG, EMG, EKG, EDM, PET, MRI); various emotions can be elicited
by direct electrical stimulation of the brain (i.e. merriment/mirth – the supplementary motor area
(SMA) and anterior cingulated cortex; fear and sadness – the periaqueductal gray (PAG)
Damasio, 2003, pp 74-76); and psychiatrists have historically used electricity to treat depression
(ECT). A second insight is that the complex human identity is a fractal (self-similar at various
and cognitive “mini-self” identity components, each self-organizing within their own relative
time/space environment (rather like a set of Russian nesting dolls), yet connected via electro-
signal transduction cascades (rather like dominoes all falling one after the other)—those that I will
argue underlie the bottom-up informational and behavioral components of emotional perception.
In this context, human identity is a highly dynamic state rather than a fixed set of personality
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characteristics wherein a potentially self-relevant alteration can occur even as the body changes
its immediate location in space; inhales or ingests anything from the environment; fires off
neurons in mindful recollection or volitional thought; or absorbs even a single electron. A third
insight is that right states of balance are defined and determined by our chemistry, and mediated
Indeed, our cellular behaviors ensure that the right proteins with the right conformations arrange
themselves in the right places at the right times, but their assembly of the right molecular mixtures
in the right amounts depends upon the right behavior of elemental atoms, and ultimately upon the
right behaviors of electrons. These self-organizing optimums were in place long before the
evolutionary emergence of cognitive or even neural identity constructs and even before genetic
identity blueprints with their “selfish gene” (Dawkins, 1989) regulatory machinery, and survival
imperatives. This brings the question of morality—the optimal regulation of behavior—into the
realm of hard science, where reconceiving emotion as a sensory system offers some intriguing
suggestions about the right/wrong evaluative criteria within natural selection. For in the fractal
human identity set when subatomic, atomic, genetic, neural, and cognitive Russian dolls
communicate about self-relevant changes and the dominoes fall, they are already falling in one
specific direction—the right direction, whether any consciousness of the process exists or not.
In this context emotion is not a newly evolved sense, but perhaps the very first sensory
which still underlies the more complex and specialized senses. Indeed, all sensory stimulus
receptors also respond to direct electrical stimulation and exhibit homeostatic thresholds wherein
extreme stimulation (i.e. sunlight too bright, music too loud, limburger too pungent) may also be
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perceived as noxious if not painful (Starr & Taggart, 1998; p 590), and particular sorts of
“unconditioned” stimuli (i.e. sunsets, harmonic music, the scent of food or one’s mate) are
inherently pleasing and attractive. Likewise, the bizarre condition of synesthesia, the
commingling of the senses, finds its expression dependant upon the limbic system (Cytowic,
1993), the brain structures long touted as the seat of emotion. But rather than nominating one
particular structure as “the” emotional sensory organ (e.g. the amygdala or even the limbic
system), I prefer to address human emotional perceptions as emergent properties of the entire
electrochemical identity network. This includes both the central nervous system’s neuron-axon-
dendrite-neurotransmitter pathways (with its inhibitive and excitative lateral connections), as well
as the more far flung neuropeptide ligand-receptor chemical network deemed the “molecules of
emotion” (Pert, 1997), which together provide integrated body-brain communication across all
fractal levels. Perhaps even more fundamental sensory pathways involve the “liquid crystalline”
nature of living organisms that facilitate “quantum coherence” recently discovered by biochemists
(Ho, 1998).
However intriguing the physiological questions, my purpose is first and foremost to suggest
that emotion does indeed function as a sense, one that only comes to light when it is broadly
expanded (well beyond the term “affect”) redefined, and reframed within the lens of the physical
sciences. From this alternate perspective, I will offer a unique theoretical paradigm wherein the
interactions within and between all material “self-units”, feedback processes that are inherent in
the energy exchange process itself. I will argue that the behavioral manifestations of emotion
emerge from simple stimulus-response behavioral mechanics that negotiate, preserve, expand, and
redefine the relative boundaries within, across, and between all self-organizing life forms, and give
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rise to what humans experience as emotional feelings. I will suggest that nature’s primordial
right/wrong evaluative—and moral code—is not rooted in a good/evil dichotomy as our traditional
moral authorities suggest, but in feedback signaling and coupled self-correcting responses that
maintain optimal states of electrochemical balance between any relative chemical unit and its local
environment. In this context the hedonic valence encodes dual adaptive value criteria within
(survival) and self-development (adaptation). I will suggest that although the majority of the
regulatory functions are performed subconsciously by the “body-self”, the emotional perceptions
that erupt into awareness offer the “mind-self” richly detailed information about its crucial role in
the process—sensory information without which our species remains morally challenged.
system that serves the biological function of evaluative, self-regulatory, behavioral adaptation by
positive or negative “hedonic” valence; 2) an approach or avoid action tendency to move toward
or move away (linked to the hedonic valence); and 3) a subjective feeling tone (i.e., joy, fear,
I base my argument for its primary self-regulatory function upon the phenomenon of
feedback. Indeed, the electrochemical information super-highways, byways and transit stations
within a human body are born of a web-work of interconnected feedback loops and feedback
networks. Although feedback is central to all electronic circuitry (Waldhauer, 1982; Friauf, 1998;
Diorio & Rao, 2000; Hahnloser, Sarpeshkar, Mahowald, Douglas, & Seung, 2000; Palumbo &
Pennisi, 2002); a key component in nonlinear mathematics (e.g. Thieffry & Kaufman, 1995) and
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fractal geometry (Mandlebrot, 1977); has a ubiquitous presence in the regulation of genetic
expression (e.g. Niswander, Jeffrey, Martin & Tickle, 1994; Mendoza, Thieffry, & Alvarez-
Buylla, 1999; Freeman & Gurdon, 2002); as well as neural information processing circuits (Rapp,
Albano, & Mees 1988) and sensory perception (Freeman, 1991); it has been largely absent from
theoretical approaches to human emotion (notable exceptions include James, 1890; Tomkins,
1962; Laird, 1974; Zajonc, 1985; Carver & Scheier, 1990; Frijda, 2000; Heilman, 2000; LeDoux
& Phelps, 2000; Clore, Wyer, Dienes, Gasper, Gohm, & Isbell, 2001). Of course, feedback has
only recently taken center stage due to the new nonlinear dynamic sciences collectively known as
chaos (e.g. Gleick, 1988), and as British scientist Steve Grand put it: “Feedback is what has been
missing in science since Newton” (Malone, 2002). Nonetheless, understanding feedback is crucial
to our moral discussion since the pleasure/pain evaluative stimulus categories within emotional
perceptions are rooted directly in positive and negative feedback processes inherent within our
electrical circuitry. As such, the simple feedback rules provide the biologically evaluative bedrock
—the natural values—from whence all higher-level cognitive judgments concerning good and
bad, or right and wrong, ultimately emerge. In short, they offer the core evaluative meaning that
allows us to decipher the many levels of information encoded within the emotional sensory
message.
What is feedback?
environments” (see Starr & Taggart, 1998, p 554-555 for a general biological discussion). More
specifically, the word feedback means any circular situation in which information on a system’s
behavior is fed back into that system and used to modify its future behavior, wherein “recursion
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involves self-correction” (see Becvar & Becvar, 1996, p 66-70; and de Rosnay, 1997; for
cybernetic discussions). Feedback also underlies the long-term behavioral patterns that emerge
despite seemingly random interim behavior (see Briggs & Peat, 1989, for an excellent nonlinear
system discussion). In short, feedback is the cyclic regulatory control process that transfers
information from the environment across a system and affects self-correcting changes that
influence the system’s future interaction with the environment. But both the “control” and
“information” emerge as functions of the system within its immediate environment, with
regulation neither completely determined by the system nor by the environment, but by their
reciprocally combined effect upon one another. (I suspect feedback is inherent in the reciprocal
causality between electricity and magnetism and the wave/particle manifestations of electrons—
and indeed all matter, with information patterns relating to wave interference). Regardless of how
they emerge however, clearly these information exchanges allow “sensitivity to initial conditions”
and to environmental changes, and they push and pull the system toward identity “attractors” that
Feedback sensitivity also underlies the phenomenon of “positional information” (Wolpert, 1969)
interpreting a positional information field” (Levin, 1994) in order to determine their optimal
morphogenic developmental state (also see Thelan & Smith, 1994, p 45-69 for an excellent
organization, crossing each local time/space dimension, yielding network node connections, and
providing global identity information about self, not self, and even not-yet self such that adaptive
self-corrections occur at the right times and in the right places. And of course, I am suggesting
that this core feedback sensitivity is inherent within the electrical circuitry and energy balancing
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mechanics of living systems, serves as a core form of physical perception, and ultimately gives
This argument begins to take shape when we examine the two types of feedback loops:
positive and negative: Positive feedback is associated with chaotic runaway change, instability,
complexity. Positive feedback loops accelerate a transformative event in the same direction with
inhibitive, out-of-phase, “noisy” interference or blocking affect. In other words, positive feedback
loops are self-reinforcing, wherein you get more and more (or less and less) of whatever sort of
change you started with. By amplifying perturbations, positive feedback pushes the system away
from its existing control parameters, often resulting in bifurcations that bump the system from one
stability, equilibrium, and convergent behavior. It maintains optimal stimulus thresholds and
equilibrium conditions, often reversing the conditions that caused the change in order to return the
system to its preferred state. In other words, unlike positive feedback, negative feedback has a
purposive goal serving as it’s main attractor, the point where it will ultimately return following
perturbation—its equilibrium or its preferred “right” state. Negative feedback kicks in when high
or low thresholds are breached and either reduces or increases the stimulus to restore the optimal
balance. (A home heating thermostat is a common example, wherein the actual temperature is
monitored and compared against the desired preset temperature, and mismatches trigger the heat
to click on or off.)
However, “when positive and negative feedback loops couple together, they can create a
new dynamic balance—a bifurcation point where chaotic activity suddenly branches off into
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order” (Briggs & Peat, 1999, p 16). Indeed, although the initial feedback loop is local and self-
referential, living feedback systems attain global cohesion via complex networked
interconnections wherein either second, third, or fourth order positive or negative feedback loops
tip the system toward instability or stability anywhere along the line. In terms of electrical
circuitry, both types of loops interact to serve as linear and nonlinear resisters, capacitors,
oscillators, and inductors, yielding small and large signals with analog and digital informational
features (e.g. Diorio & Rao, 2000; Hahnloser et al, 2000; Cinquin & Derongeot, 2002). The
complexities of feedback circuitry within multi-cellular organisms are as staggering as they are
intriguing and biophysicists have yet to hammer out all the details. But fortunately, the ubiquity of
feedback speaks for itself and we need not become experts on physics or electrical engineering for
this discussion. For by examining the functional components of the feedback process and its
behavioral outcomes, we can readily identify a meaning-rich self-regulatory pattern which is “at
work at all levels of biological activity, from biochemical interactions within single cells to
ecological interactions in the biosphere” Starr & Taggart, 1987, p 310). This is where the chaos
associated with positive feedback and the stability of negative feedback couple together into the
territory. This is where the functional concepts of “positive and negative” within feedback
intersect with “positive and negative” mathematical values, iterations, and balanced equations and
those of “positive and negative” electrical charges, stimulus thresholds, environmental state space
“attractors” and optimal “attract or repel” global behavioral responses—and where we find the
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These patterns come to light when we return to the fractal nature of self-organization, but
shift from the relative notion of identity to the subjective perspective and objective behavior of
any specific self-unit in a given location in time and space (e.g. the self in question could be either
an atom, a molecule, a cell, or a multi-cellular organism). In this context each self serves as a
local closed-loop feedback system (with its identity defined by chemical structure and/or any
information concerning the quality and intensity of electrochemical stimulus from both internal
and external realms. From this perspective each individual self-unit operates as a negative
arrangement. Each has its own chemically defined energy thresholds, preferred attractor states,
and behavioral regimes that reverse perturbations and regulate optimal electrochemical identity
balance (just like the home heating thermostat regulates the heat).
This common thermostatic system yields self-regulation via three common functional
operations unfolding as sequential steps in an ongoing cycle: comparison, signal, and self-
correction. First, they systematically integrate and compare actual electrochemical stimulus states
against the preexisting (right state) biological optimums; second, they signal when threshold
breaching imbalances occur; and third, the signal triggers corrections (effectors, behavioral
responses) that restore equilibrium by either reducing or increasing the stimulus accordingly. The
corrective response not only rights the local self, but in doing so may also perpetuate the change
across other levels of the global network—yielding the signal transduction function of a positive
feedback circuit. This occurs with stimulus adjusting corrections that facilitate synchronization
with nearest–neighbor signaling and yield the “slaving” (e.g. Thelan & Smith, 2002; p55) of
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formerly unrelated modes into a collective behavior. In our Russian doll analogy for example,
self-regulation can involve only one doll, or can work like a bucket brigade, wherein each doll’s
self-correcting behaviors serve as feedback signals to nearest neighbors until the perturbation is
distributed and global equilibrium is restored. (Or in our domino analogy, the signal can send the
dominoes falling at any point in the system, but the corrective response can speed them up, slow,
stop and/or reverse them depending upon whether it increases or decreases the initial stimulus.)
This elegant sequential coupling of positive feedback signals with negative feedback
corrections provides the mechanism for self-organizing phase transitions between attractor
regimes of varying stability and complexity that allow adaptive responses to environmental
changes. In this context a feedback cycle occurs during each “not-self” moment of identity
self system. This fluctuation serves as the positive feedback signal wherein in-phase constructive
interference informs the system of a chemical change in the negentropic direction, while out-of-
phase destructive interference speaks of an entropic energy loss from the system. The signal then
triggers its coupled negative feedback correction that prevents or facilitates the change by
This is where the concepts of positive and negative take an important turn: When out-of-
phase positive feedback is occurring, the self-regulatory signal is negative, and the correction is
inhibitive, reducing the stimulus, reversing the course of change via a repellor regime to preserve
the previous state of self-system. Likewise, when in-phase positive feedback is occurring the
signal is positive and the correction increases the stimulus—perhaps bumping it into a more
complex behavioral regime. In this way positive and negative feedback work together within the
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self system such that the signal-correction functions yield the traditional stimulus-response
behavioral pattern—responses that “drive the system closer to an ideal behavior” (Cinquin &
Demongeot, 2002. (Refer to figure 1.) (Note that the meanings of positive and negative shift from
signal to correction as positive feedback signals triggers negative feedback corrections in the
coupled system—just one example of the many switchbacks within complex feedback circuits I
encountered in tracing the hedonic valence to its core.) From this point forward the terms
“positive and negative” will refer to this thermostatic negative feedback self-regulatory pattern,
Working together in this manner, the two types of feedback yield “bistable” (Ferrell, 2002)
switch-like responses that dictate digital (either/or) decisions between behavioral regimes. They
cycle attractors that together honor the long-term goal of electrochemical—hence identity—
homeostasis. This common feedback pattern serves as a digital language or sorts, roughly
analogous to a computer chip with its digital 0/1 logic, offering simple rules that can beget self-
complexity from the attraction (+) and repulsion (-) behavior of atoms (as electrons come and go);
the agonizing (+) and antagonizing (-) chemical behavior of cell receptor proteins (as molecules
come and go); the excitatory (+) and inhibitory (-) behavior of cellular membranes and neural
networks (as electrical signals comes and go); to the approach (+) and avoid (-) instinctive and
conditioned behaviors of animals (as sensory stimuli come and go); and all the way to the good
(+) and bad (-) evaluative appraisals of the human mind (as cognitive experiences come and go).
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This simple digital behavioral pattern is that which yields the right number of electrons, elements,
substances, proteins, hormones, in the right places at the right times such that organisms enjoy a
coherent chemical identity, a consistent form and flexible structure, can move about in space,
adapting to ever wider environmental niches and surviving for ever longer periods of time.
Herein lies the core self-regulatory logic within natural selection and the fundamental
underpinning for the evaluative positive/negative dichotomy within the emotional sensory system.
Positive emotions (“good” feelings) signal an ongoing change that is good for self-development—
a negentropic not-yet-self adaptive opportunity already being exploited by the body. The positive
emotional category speaks of positive feedback excitative signaling and corrective stimulus
increases that facilitate “morphogenesis” (e.g. Becvar & Becvar, 1996), which creates identity
change and innovation toward dynamic equipotentiality (the most complex strange attractor
regimes covering the broadest territory of cognitive state space). The negative emotional category
concerns negative feedback blocking and stimulus reductions that deliver corrective morphostasis,
in order to preserve system stability. “Bad” feelings carry the message that the body is preventing a
change that could compromise global self-preservation, by invoking a more localized attractor
regime with fewer degrees of collective freedom. In short, the hedonic valence encodes a universal
valence is simply a complex extension of the negentropic biological vacillation between stability
and change, born of the never-ending mechanical dance between construction and destruction of
material form.
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At this point I want to reemphasize that the self-regulatory process is fully automatic—with
that emerge. The not-yet-self states signaled by positive emotion and the pre-cognitive priming
effects occur simply because any global perception of the signal occurs much later down the line
in the self-regulatory network—after much of the work is already complete in local, relative, and
“earlier” zones of time/space. The key point for our moral discussion however, is that the pattern
of thermostatic feedback correction is directing each local self-system into its optimal goal state—
restoring right states of homeostatic balance in response to any relevant chemical changes
anywhere in the system. Hence moral behavior is inherent within our chemistry, it obeys simple
digital laws, and is fully mechanical. For thus far the self-regulatory process described requires
neither consciousness nor volitional participation whether or not there exists any subjective
sensation of emotional pleasure or pain. Indeed, the fully human sensory process involves the
cognitive level of identity wherein the subjective feeling, part three of the emotional perception
consciousness (subjective self-awareness) exists in some potential form in all matter. The
feedback model suggests this is due to the ubiquity of stimulus-response feedback, the chemical
basis of identity, and because the self-regulatory process sets the evolutionary stage for awareness
of self as distinct from one’s not-self environment. Although I would be loathe to speculate about
the subjective experiences of less complex self-units, clearly some form of self-awareness exists
even within single cells. (Witness the routine self/not-self distinctions made by human blood cells
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and the protective actions taken by the immune cells, as well as the emergence of not-yet-self
genetic potentials by a stem cell as it specializes into a given tissue environment.) The crudest life
forms may even experience some hedonic sensitivity given that “appetitive” behavior toward food
and away from danger is observable even in the single celled ameba (Medicus, 1987). Clearly at
some evolutionary juncture, however, the feedback signal became perceivable as an actual feeling
—a feeling coinciding with the body’s mechanical self-correcting behavior. Perhaps akin to a
simple reflexive bodily startle, this first flash of cognitive awareness may be an ancient
predecessor to the modern bivalent emotion of surprise. Indeed, it has been suggested that
emotion gives rise to a core “proto-self” consciousness by informing us of the “feeling of what is
happening” (Damasio, 1999), to which I would add: “the feeling of a self-relevant identity change
that is happening…. to me”, (and that an updated Cartesian cogito might be: “I feel therefore I
am”). It also seems likely that the equilibrium requirement would also influence the subjective
experience, bringing awareness of the feedback signal’s digital dimension with a feeling
ancient precursor to both kinesthetic and vestibular proprioception). This perception carries the
ancient moral message: “When I am in balance, this is right” (a corrective prescription which
emotional dissonance.) It also sets the stage for emotional resonance as pleasurable with the
Perhaps coincidently with the evolution of somatic and other sensory modalities, the
feedback signal evolved its fully hedonic dimension allowing experiences to be divided neatly
conditioned learning and long-term knowledge about right/wrong states of balance. (Indeed, I
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suspect that the coupling of parts one and two of the emotional perception have long been the
response pair.) I align this highly adaptive evolutionary milestone with the neural level of
identity complexity (aka the “synaptic self” (LeDoux, 2002), whether through simple nerve nets
or complex brains the add-on feature of neural plasticity ushered feed-forward enhancements that
allow the organism to act before the fact, dramatically increasing the global degrees of freedom
within the system. This expanded the role of the hedonic feedback signal to serve as a reminder of
(Damasio, 2003, p 36) in the environment—with very little sensory or neural complexity
required. (Witness the roles of feedback in neural habituation and sensitization in conditioned
withdrawal behavior of simple sea slugs (e.g. Aplysia; Kalat, 1992; pp 512; Dale, Schacher, &
Kandel, 1988). In humans, the neural relationship between the amygdala, hippocampus, and
orbitofrontal cortex illustrates the role of emotion in conditioning and encoding novel information
into new memories. Given its ancient self-regulatory function, this is particularly true of
“behavioral rules for moving directionally through space” (Muller & Kubie, 1989) and when said
This neural identity enhancement also ushered the earliest evaluative appraisals of distress
(“stress”) and eustress (Selye, 1956) perhaps the first fully egoistic—good for me/bad for me—
component of emotional feelings. (As do I, Selye equated stress with change, although the word
has since become synonymous with negative distress). This final cognitive link brought full
operant behavioral conditioning and cementing the regulatory role of volition in the self-
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organizing process. Or, put another way, the hedonic cues brought awareness of the self as an
active player in one’s life and the adaptive ability to distinguish between a cooperative “win-win”
environmental climate and a competitive “win-lose game” (Seligman, 2002, p 30-31). The moral
message then became: Distress is bad for my self-preservation and I must correct-to-protect by
avoiding pain eliciting objects or locales. Likewise, eustress is good for my adaptive self-
The emergence of neural networks gave rise to the cognitive level of identity—the mind,
which opens all new realms of self-development with its capacity to learn through iterative cycles
of trial and error feedback. (In fact, the affect attunement and emotional sensory exchanges
between caregiver and infant play a central role the ego individuation process itself (Mahler, Pine,
& Bergman, 1975). However, in humans (and perhaps other primates), as cognitive development
proceeds the emotional sensory signal takes on an added level of specific information about both
the person and their environment. Indeed, the final evolution of the feedback signal takes place
within one’s individual ontogenic development—becoming more complex as one “grows up”.
For example, the newborn exhibits a bivalent startle reflex to both eustress and distress, then in a
process likened to learned “flavor appreciation” (Izard, 1984), the simple positive and negative
feeling signals become experience dependent (Greenough, 1986) and entangled within semantic
associations (Bower, 1981). This process results in the emergence of egoistic and/or social
cognitive identity constructs as well as specific feeling tones similar to the sensory tones of color
or sound—part three of the human emotional perception. These are the basic and universal
feelings of joy, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust (Ekman, 1973; Plutchick, 1984; Tomkins 1984;
Bertocci, 1988), which are evident in the distinct facial expressions of infants by six months of
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age (Izard, 1971). These feeling tones offer a second evaluative dimension in addition to the
ancient hedonic valence, one relating to the egotistic identity constructs and providing what is
known as the cognitive appraisal (i.e., Arnold, 1945; Zajonc, 1980, 1984; Lazarus, 1982, 1991,
Scherer, Schorr, & Johnstone, 2001). These tones inform the mind about what the body is doing
and why. This basic group of feeling tones has also been referred to as drive discharge affects
(Engel, 1963); outcome dependent emotions (Graham & Weiner, 1986); and general purpose
emotions (Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988). As sensory bearers of newly pertinent information,
Then these basic feeling tones become intermixed like the primary colors on an artist’s
palate as schematic “assimilation and accommodation” processes occur (Piaget, 1952) in response
to each dissonant (or resonant) experience. They evolve into secondary cognitive blends and
shades offering a third layer of self-regulatory information relating to the socio-cultural identity,
while still retaining all other encoded layers as well. Complex feelings include such recognizable
emotional experiences as: contentment, trust, mistrust, confidence, doubt, shame, guilt, pride,
respect, appreciation, remorse, gratitude, resentment, shame, envy, hope, love, and hate. They
have also been called: complex emotions (Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988), attribution
dependent emotions (Graham & Weiner, 1986), and signal scanning affects (Engel, 1963.) Given
their personalized nature, they are subject to many levels of analysis in space and time (see
Rosenberg, 1998), and they have specific appraisal themes (i.e., certainty, controllability,
accessibility, self-esteem, modifiability, manageability, and time reference, Frijda, 1987). They
exhibit many differences in antecedent events, event coding, cognitive appraisals, patterns of
expression, etc. (Mesquita, & Frijda 1992); they are socially constructed, and culturally diverse,
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lending credence to the notion that emotion is “unnatural” (Lutz, 1988). In sum, the cognitive
appraisal offers an intrapersonal sensory bridge of circumstantial regulatory evidence that links
mind-self via the body-self to the world and all its physical and socio-cultural environmental
conditions. But specifically, the basic feelings relate to body-self (toward preserving the atomic,
genetic, and neural identity constructs), while complex feelings relate to mind-self (toward
developing the purely cognitive egoistic and socio-cultural identity constructs). Plus, in its latest
negative facial expressions, nonverbal postures, vocal tones, and approach/avoid actions) create a
secondary social layer of external environmental stimulus cues (i.e. emotional “contagion” and
“comparison”, Bartel & Saavedra, 2000; Barsade, 2003), further extending the self-regulatory
behavioral feedback cycle has expanded into a five-step cycle in humans that integrates each level
of self-organization within the body, the body with world, the mind with body, and minds with
other minds. As such, contemporary emotional sensory messages bear meaning at each step in
the following iterative feedback cycle: Complex feelings guide the mind’s conditioned 1) motives,
which beget, 2) actions (volitional behaviors) which beget 3) outcome events (humanly
influenced environmental changes), which beget a new round of the body’s 4) basic emotional
evaluations (the original feedback signal), and 5) either autopilot or mindful behavioral
Summary
So finally, we can answer our first question: Where do emotional messages come from? The
complete answer is that they come from here, there, and everywhere, cycling within and between
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adaptation. They are complex integrated sensory perceptions of ancient self-organizing dynamics
and stimulus-response mechanics that underlie both the subconscious and volitional patterns of
human motivation. (Indeed, identifying the ongoing mind-body interactions as sequential steps
within the feedback cycle, unites the biological (Tinbergen, 1989), the cognitive (Zimmerman &
Schunk, 1989), the social (Geen, Beatty & Arkin, 1984) and emotional (Petri, 1986) factors of
motivation under the umbrella of sensory behavioral regulation.) Subjective human emotional
messages unite the body and mind in coherent, adaptive harmony with the physical world.
Objective emotional behavioral expressions add yet another link in the self-organizing chain,
emotional messages mean? What information does part three, the feeling tone, of the emotional
message bear? The feedback model allows us to address this question by looking at what kind of
internal and external environmental conditions make humans uniformly feel good or bad. And the
answers must make sense of the common appraisal themes within both primary and complex
feeling categories as well as the core digital feedback language encoded within the hedonic
valence. Although the traditional concept of “appraisal” entangles the physiological and cognitive
processes, this fractal approach separates the body/mind identity structures and functions,
shedding light upon three distinct dimensions of meaning encoded within each feeling perception.
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The first, which relates to the body’s innate atomic, genetic, and neural identity constructs
and to the fundamental chemical environmental changes, I call evaluative utility. The second
offers judgmental utility, delivering information concerning the conscious mind’s learned egoistic
and socio-cultural identity constructs. Third, is the moral utility, concerning the optimal
integration of the first two, which allows access to the trove of universal moral wisdom available
within the emotional sense. (As we proceed, keep in mind the preliminary nature of this
discussion, the meager level of our emotional literacy, and its linguistic consequences. I will be
redefining what constitutes a feeling tone pursuant to the feedback roles, but also utilizing the
encourage readers to draw upon personal experiences as well. Indeed, morality theorists have
referred to “implicit perception” (Bruner, 1960), “embodied cognition” (Lakoff, 1987), the
“momentary intuitive response” (Galotti, 1989), “the automatic moral intuitions” (Haidt, 2001a);
and in a survey of the most important sources of moral authority a whopping 74% chose
“personal experience” over God’s word at 21%; and religious leaders or modern science at 2%
The first meaning dimension, the evaluative utility, captures the fundamental biological
meaning to be found within emotional messages, offering the only mechanically constrained
(hence, most universally valid) value guidance. Evaluative information is available when feelings
are used as a sense, relevant to the person perceiving them, valid the moment they are experienced
(step 4 of the Figure 2 cycle) and pertinent only to the immediate environmental circumstances—
just like sensory colors, sounds, and smells. Evaluative utility is universal, concerning
right/balanced states of nature, the body’s multi-tiered chemical identity, its regulatory dynamics,
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needs and purposes, and the self-relevant conditions for meeting them in the local environment.
Evaluative utility is delivered through the hedonic valence and its coupled digital behavior (parts
one and two of the perception). Pleasure, attraction, and approach concern adaptive self-
development, while pain, repulsion, and avoidance concern self-preservation—the two right and
The most meaning-rich evaluative utility, however, is to be found in the appraisal themes of
the five basic feelings: joy, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust—which offer the specifics about
optimal and deficit self-organizing states. These feeling tones bear information about the body’s
biologically preset parameters (like the thermostatic settings) against which the feedback
constructs, best described as needs. (In Pavlovian language innate needs are the unconditioned
stimulus that yield the hardwired behavioral responses and conditioned motivational urges.) The
core needs concern maintaining physiological homeostasis (the biological requirements for
oxygen, water, food, warmth, sleep, movement, behavioral adaptation, and procreation) and the
deficit or opportune environmental conditions in which they are met. They are largely mediated
through the hedonic drives to increase pleasure and decrease pain, such that a comfortable state of
balance is maintained. But at the outer-doll level of mind and its cognitive feedback loop to the
motivational needs that are encoded within the feeling tones themselves. Although a consensual
taxonomy is yet to emerge, there is convergent data supporting two broad primary and secondary
need classes (Darwin, 1871; Murray, 1938; Klinger, 1977; Wright, 1984; Insko, 1985; De Waal,
1989; Heaven, 1990), which the feedback model suggests relate to the dual self-organizing
imperatives. In this context, the appraisal information within the five basic emotions evidences a
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two-tiered hierarchical arrangement of six universal psychosocial needs similar to Maslow (1970)
—all of which must be met on an ongoing basis for optimal self-regulation. However, the
dynamics of protective distress suggest that nature has afforded the self-preservationary needs top
priority. Indeed, four out of the five basic emotions are negatively valenced, for nature is much
more specific about the external conditions that are universally “wrong”—those that disrupt the
The first tier consists of two primary self-preservationary needs, which are protectively
regulated by the four basic emotional pains. The need for freedom (the ability to move about, to
access environmental stimulus and physical need-meeting resources), and the need for power (the
ability to respond, to behave flexibly, adaptively, autonomously, and effectively; to have agency
or personal control.) These two fundamental needs safeguard the body’s self-regulatory
imperative (for indeed the individual self-unit is always the proximate unit of evolution). They
interact conceptually in the term “liberty” and underlie notions of human rights, social justice, and
public trust. They also equate with Maslow’s need for safety/security, as the non-negotiable
conditions necessary for the individual’s psychological survival within any self-organized group.
Hence, emotional pain will deliver its correct-to-protect distress message if either need is
environmental repellors that thwart the need-meeting effort, the destructive interference patterns
Basic distress signals specifically ask us to protect ourselves from: 1. Losses (sadness) of
bodily harm, or to rightful control or safe security; and 3. Unwholesome, naturally offensive
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(disgust) comestibles, commodities, or conditions, all three of which invoke the repellent “flight”
action tendency, a “moving away” (Horney, 1945) in protective avoidance of that which is not
right for us. And lastly, to protect ourselves against: 4. Unjust obstructions, violations, and
inequities (anger) via its antagonistic “fight” defensive reaction, a “moving against” any
perceived obstacle to one’s rightful agency, liberty, and need-meeting efforts. (Anger, perhaps the
newest of the basic emotions, emerges coincidentally with social cooperation on the evolutionary
stage evidenced at the primate level, perhaps born of a blend of play and mating instincts in
mammals. Anger is perhaps also akin to disgust, wherein innate unwholesomeness extends to the
social sphere. Since social networks cannot be escaped, anger offers a special blend of both
approach/avoid motions, wherein passionately aggressive battles for individual freedom or power
yield consensually just social rules, structures, and roles. Anger also begins to merge both poles
any kind feels good.) In sum, the evaluative motivational theme within the primary need tier is
one of emotional pain relief and negative feedback corrections, which protect the body (one’s
atomic, genetic, and neural identity structures) until the mind (one’s egoistic and social identity
The pursuit of emotional pleasure as it own reward occurs largely in the secondary tier,
which concerns the dynamics of cognitive self-development, as well as the cultural evolution of
the species. This secondary tier holds four higher needs for: connection (viz., belonging, group
membership, to love and be loved); esteem (to be accountable, worthy, productive, valuable, and
lovable); creativity (to actively express one’s unique talents, novel imagination, and skills, to
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discover, engineer or reproduce life-enhancing resources); and meaning (to extract long-term
Although something feels wanting when these secondary needs are unmet, they are
regulated largely by eustress and positive feedback corrections. They underlie the “moving
toward” and “moving with” motivational themes within the basic feeling of joy—the hedonic
grandmother of all complex positive feelings—bearing her correct-to-grow message. Joy is the
seductress that pulls the mind from the subconscious pain-reducing activities of the lower tier,
amplifying awareness of optimums that the mind can then recreate of its own volition. Joy
expands our cognitive state space and offers bifurcations from simple repetitive attractor regimes
into the strange attractors that afford us a much broader range of identity and behavioral freedom.
Joy constitutes a general, multipurpose theme of free flow that is both reinforcing and intriguing,
reflecting the positive feedback correction of increasing the stimulus conditions, to “broaden and
build” (Fredrickson, 1998) the conscious mind and the social sphere. Unlike distress, which is
more universally constrained, eustress is personally negotiable and culturally flexible, linked with
one’s genetic propensities and the virtually unlimited cultural conditions under which they can
emerge and flourish. Joy’s broad appraisal theme speaks of not-yet-self moments of negentropic
relationships, and magnetically retaining them in the mind as “good”. Joy urges us to explore, to
play, to find comfort, to bond and nurture; to wonder over nature’s mystery and patterned
symmetry, and to take delight in novel cognitive connections and new experiences. Momentary
joy will linger with optimal self-development, taking up permanent resonance in the emerging
mindscape through her complex shades and blends. As such, joy serves all four higher needs by
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developing the mind, broadening the cognitive identity boundaries and expanding the empathic
However, joy—and mindful volition—are perhaps most intimately associated with the need
for connection. Joy validates the internal and external connections that reflect the cooperative
slaving or long-term constructive interference between self and other, the ever-expanding network
connections that yield evermore complex identity gestalts. The threshold into the higher needs tier
(and successful social cohesion) rests upon sufficient emotional connection and coherence
between body and mind—which is contingent upon the person’s ability to resolve basic distress
signals to some minimal degree. (Indeed, in group dynamics optimal social “connectivity”
depends on an optimal ratio of positive and negative emotion or the interactions will quickly fall
into an ineffective limiting attractor, Losada, 1999.) For due to the survival priority, eustress
always takes the back seat to protective distress. Anger and other pains will sweep in like a wet
blanket, jolting the mind from its comforting habits, tabling all higher needs, temporarily severing
social bonds, and momentarily silencing all positive feelings, should the body’s non-negotiable
Indeed, there are elegant physiological safeguards within the emotional system that ensure
that the emerging mind will not be allocated any more volitional control than it can handle
adaptively. Whenever the mind misses its protective feedback cue, the encoded message will
simply be conditioned into the memory increasing both the frequency and the intensity of the
painful signal in similar future events—shouting the ever-louder message that one has “exceeded
one’s adaptive resources” (Lazarus, 1977). Just like the thermostat that shuts off the heat, when a
critical intensity level of pain is breeched the body will override the mind’s volition marshaling its
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reflexive approach and avoid auto-corrections—simply removing the mind from the self-
regulatory loop. This remarkable safeguard is evident in the dual “low road and high road”
(LeDoux & Phelps, 2000) emotional information processing routes through the ancient amygdala
pathway and straight to reflexive behaviors, or the more circuitous, cognitively involved, route
through the prefrontal cortex. At present, this bypass is considered to be a bad thing (e.g the
“amygdala hijack”, Goleman, 1995), for it limits the human to the simple approach/avoid
behavioral repertoire of the lesser neurally endowed. However, from the sensory perspective, such
a conservative bypass is a very good thing. The body must retain its protective authority, for the
mind is a newfangled evolutionary add-on, a liberal maverick that can learn the wrong stuff—and
garbage in produces garbage out. (The mind’s relatively unbridled abilities to harbor maladaptive
information, attitudes, strategies, and/or compulsions are well documented. The mind can filter,
skew, and distort perception and judgment (e.g., Tversky & Kanhenman (1974), offer perilous
intuitional knowledge (Myers, 2002), and even reinvent memory (Loftus, 1993). At the social
level, cloistered groupthink can occur, and even too much unwarranted positive emotion can lead
to “Pollyannaish” ineffectiveness (Losada & Heaphy, 2003). Indeed, without the body’s vital
evaluative tether the mind can foul the self-regulatory works curtailing self-development,
contained within the hedonic valence, the action tendencies, and the appraisal themes of the five
basic emotions: joy, fear, anger, sadness and disgust. Evaluative utility is available upon
subjective introspection and objective observation and offers common empathic meaning across
humanity. Evaluative utility elucidates how the basic sensory signals provide a cognitive link
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two-tiered set of six universal human needs that mediate the dual self-organizing imperatives.
Evaluative utility is nature’s collective self-regulatory wisdom encoded within the body, an ever-
present global synthesis of local self-correcting activity across neural, genetic, and atomic levels.
It offers the core self-regulatory “whys” within the feeling of what is happening in the “here and
now” moment. But the evaluative utility will also carry forth within all secondary shades and
blends of complex feeling tones—wherein we find the next meaning dimension, relating to the
The second meaning dimension offers judgmental utility, which concerns all the learned
mental constructs related to the mind (i.e., the egoistic and socio-cultural identity constructs; all
knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and volitional need-meeting strategies.) Unlike its universal
arbitrary, and less accessible by direct social observation. (In Pavlovian language the judgmental
meaning dimension relates to the conditioned stimulus cues within emotional perceptions. In the
language of dynamics, the judgmental meaning dimension relates to the cognitive attractor
patterns that constrain neural network behavior.) Hence, judgmental utility addresses the mind’s
long-term good or bad value judgments—which can become arbitrarily conditioned to people,
places, and things, and often passed between generations as cultural memes (Dawkins, 1989) if
not “viruses of the mind” (Brody, 1996). As evaluative utility is to universality and nature,
Fortunately, judgmental utility is easy to find and decode. It resides within the complex
feelings (i.e. trust, mistrust, envy, admiration, love, hate, etc.), and can be found at every other
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step of the feedback cycle except the in-the-moment evaluation (as noted in Figure 2). As subtle
shades and blends of their primary parents, complex feelings still carry the basic evaluative
appraisals (relating to all six needs), but their added specificity addresses the quality and quantity
of the mind’s developmental status: its awareness of the body’s regulatory needs and processes,
the relevance of environmental conditions, as well as the empathic parameters of its self-concept
and the adaptive quality of its habitual need-meeting strategies. Judgmental utility speaks of the
mind’s specific holdings, offering the who, what, where, details to the whys of the evaluative
dimension, but from a broadened time perspective of “there and then” both past and future. As
such, complex feelings add distinguishing cognitive characteristics such as relational complexity
(who and what the situation involves, and where and when it occurs); the accountability
attribution, also called responsibility, agency, or culpability (who or what is assigned as the main
stimulus or cause of the event); a broadened empathic range in connected social space (who or
what is taken within the socio-cultural identity constructs, wherein “your interests are factored
into my feeling signals”), and the specificity of the implied action tendency (who or what is
Given the role of conditioning, complex feelings also carry a hydraulic-like quality, wherein
they can build in memory until vented or released. They carry a weak to strong range of emotional
“charge” or motivational power in local space that directly relates to a short term/long term
temporal range in time (i.e., fleeting, after-the-fact joy gives rise to present moment trust which
builds a durable future hope, and ultimately can yield an unshakably timeless faith; or a flash of
unresolved anger could breed lingering resentment, hostile contempt, and eventually a volatile
rage.) Complex feelings also offer social referencing information about one’s adjudicated value in
the context of the hierarchical social structure (i.e., people look up to others in admiration or
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gratitude, or down upon others in contempt or pity.) Pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, regret,
and remorse reflect dissonance between one’s social persona and egoistic identity and signal a
vertical shift pursuant to a gain or loss in self-esteem. Finally, complex feelings offer information
developmentally cooperative (win-win) (i.e., mistrust versus trust, envy versus admiration,
resentment versus gratitude, contempt versus compassion.) Judgmental utility can be found in all
valenced mental holdings, all long-term attitudes, and any feelings that the mind can conjure
To summarize, all emotional sensory messages are right, good, and meaning-rich. The more
basic the feeling, the more momentarily salient, biological, and universally valid its informational
message. The more complex, the more experientially tailored, cognitive, and cultural information
it contains, and the more it concerns the mind’s long-term judgmental and behavioral strategies.
As basic emotions deliver evaluative meaning about the adaptive status of the body, about nature,
and the adaptive quality of the physical and sociocultural landscape, the judgmental utility within
lingering complex feelings relates to nurture and culture, and evaluates the adaptive quality of the
mindscape.
Moral Utility
The third meaning dimension encoded within each feeling, which I call moral utility, is
central to our discussion. This is where we mine the optimal “how to” guidance about right or
wrong uses of free will (the implicit goal of all cultural ethics—to foster right behavioral choices.)
The moral meaning springs from the interactive symbiosis of both the evaluative and judgmental
dimensions. It is a simple assessment of how well the mind’s “good/bad” ideologies are tailored
to the body’s “right/wrong” homeodynamic regulatory physics—a good fit is right and offers
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optimal choices, a bad fit is wrong and exposes lingering self-regulatory dysfunction and misuses
of volition.
The emotional sense offers a three-fold moral prescription which hinges upon the
fundamental difference between basic and complex feelings and the core corrective feedback
functions of reducing negative and increasing positive stimulus conditions. First, the positive and
negative valence delivers a universal moral code akin to the negative version of the “golden rule”,
concerning the reduction of all conditions that elicit basic pain and the increase of any that foster
complex emotional pleasure. Second, basic feelings are asking for behavioral changes that
threats, losses, and obstacles) that “should not” exist, and maximizing positive opportunities,
resources and connections that “should” exist—by biological decree. And third, complex feelings
are asking for corrections to the mindscape and the should/should not messages are quite black
and white: Judgments and motivations with a positive valence and an approach direction are
good, the more complexly positive the emotional tone, the more right the belief, thought, or action
—and cultural meme, structure, or tradition—that is associated with it. Conversely, pre-judgments
and motivations that carry a negative valence are bad, and the more complexly negative the
emotional tone, the more wrong and in need of corrective revision the associated schemata. In
short, humans are optimally self-organizing—rightly moral—when thinking and acting using
positive judgments and actively choosing right responses that replace the fight and flight auto-
corrections. This involves correctively righting oneself in answer to each complex feeling—by
cultivating and enhancing the optimal cognitive schemata and finding, purging, and replacing the
deficits that elicit the complex pains. It involves righting the world in answer to the five basic
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cooperative networks, need-meeting opportunities and resources, and actively eliminating the
The moral utility offered within the emotional sense is nothing new. This natural code of
ethics is evident within the emotional milestones of Erickson’s (1968) stage model of
psychosocial development, within Kohlberg’s highest stage of moral reasoning (Kohlberg, 1967)
and within an optimal level of “emotional intelligence” (Salovey & Mayer, 1990; Goleman,
1995). Our innate ethics also echoes the universal virtues and values recently identified by the
Institute for Global Ethics (Loges & Kidder, 1996), the positive psychology Values-In-Action
taxonomy of human strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), and it resonates from within the
cutting edge well-being advice across the mental and physical health sciences. It is also reflected
in the common sense empathic intuitions that we think of as the moral conscience. For example,
notice the intuitive difference in implied approach/avoid behavior between feelings of admiration
and envy, compassion and contempt, confidence and shame, gratitude and resentment, love and
hate, honor and guilt, hope and despair, and how they strengthen or weaken esteem or social
connection, and offer ethical if not “spiritual” meaning. Indeed, when laundered of all
supernatural assumptions and cultural trappings, spirituality reduces empirically to the objective
(animating) and subjective (evaluative and guiding) manifestations of the emotional sense. And
once the sensory messages within pain and pleasure are disentangled from the good/evil
dichotomy, nature’s right/wrong ethics echoes the common moral wisdom across the great
philosophical and spiritual traditions—all of which flow from the complex positive emotions (e.g.
The Divine Virtues of Western religious tradition: Love, Faith, Kindness, Humility, Generosity,
Zeal, Temperant self-control; each either a positive emotion or the empathic understandings and
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The worst of our traditional moral advice springs from the idea that emotion itself is
evidence of “original sin” (e.g. five of “Seven Deadly Sins” are emotions: pride, wrath, envy,
greed, lust), and the companion assumption that divinity and moral virtue harkens only from
supernatural realms. With this assumption morality—and all forms of behavioral control—
becomes vested in external regulatory authorities, which negates personal empowerment, limits
freedom, and confounds the biological self-regulatory mechanisms. Our standard moral fare
suggests that social conformity, obedience and “selflessness” are virtuous, while the “selfishness”
of human hedonism becomes something to loathe and suppress in oneself and in others. However,
self-regulatory distress that invite even more negative emotional signals. Indeed, our standard
moral approaches are based upon profound misunderstandings and abuses of the protective pains,
to which I will devote the remainder of the discussion. For now, I offer the following summary
reference chart of the three interactive meaning dimensions encoded within the feeling tones (see
Figure 3), which demonstrates how the emotional sense offers a simple, straightforward, and
Unfortunately, humanity has largely missed the boat on our ancient sensory guidance. Given
the aversive power of negative emotions even scientists who acknowledge some sensory function
still suggest that emotion is bad stuff (witness the cover headlines of Discover magazine:
“Primitive brain senses emotion….Neuroscientists explore ways to keep emotions from hijacking
the mind”, Johnson, 2003). We have made the fundamental attribution error of blaming the
messenger and missed the crucial self-regulatory message. We have chosen to deny and
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conditions they are asking us to change. Suppression reflects an inaccurate top-down (mind-to-
body-to-world) information processing and behavioral control model, when all evolutionary,
regulatory, and sensory systems are organized from the bottom up (world-to-body-to-mind).
Although the mind can deceive itself and pretend that an emotion is not occurring, it can never
outsmart the body’s predominant self-regulatory dynamics, for its defensive safeguards will
simply over-ride volition, narrow the breadth of consciousness, and intensify its distress signals
until the mind “gets it” and aligns with them. In fact, with the strategy of suppression (and such
platitudes as “suffering is good for the soul”) we have accomplished just the opposite of the
Indeed, the most shocking revelation from the feedback model is that complex negative
feelings need never have emerged, had we correctively utilized the sensory information within the
basic distress signals early on—in our species evolutionary history as well as in individual
psychosocial development. (As in a six-month-old, the full range of basic emotions is evidenced
at least as far back as the primate level, along with a “tit-for-tat” cooperative moral ethic mediated
by anger and complex trust (Trivers, 1985). Instead, we have inadvertently sullied our
sociocultural environment with a spurious man-made layer of complex pain by embracing the
inevitability if not “normalcy” of such feelings as mistrust, shame, contempt, envy, guilt, rage,
and hate.
Perhaps worse yet, we have pressed all the excess man-made pain into moral service.
Instead of using emotional perceptions to regulate our own behavior in alignment with nature’s
simple rules, we routinely use them to manipulate the emotional behavior of others in an odd
third-party form of morality. We express our negative emotions at those who “cause” our pain in
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order to manipulate them into conforming to our particular ethical rules. For example, social
expressions of contempt, anger, and disgust have been linked with conformity to ethical codes of
community (local social mores and laws), autonomy (human rights), and divinity (religious
doctrine), respectively (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, (1999). But the feedback model predicts
that punitive emotional expressions are far more likely to backfire, given the safeguarding
functions and dynamics of negative emotion. For the sensory paradigm suggests that these third-
party expressions only succeed to the degree that they instill first-party feelings in the recipient
such as shame, guilt, humiliation, embarrassment, sadness, or fear and gain submissive
compliance by harnessing their coupled withdrawal “flight” behaviors. However, given the self-
preservationary priority, these same expressions are perhaps even more likely to elicit anger or
disgust (and/or complex resentment, contempt, rage, and hate) in the recipient instead, along with
the fight response, aggressive non-compliance, and retaliative vengeance leveled back upon the
sender. Thus, third party morality sets in motion a self-perpetuating downward spiral of cyclic
threat, disconnection, pain, self-defense, and reciprocal infighting—a socially self-destructive, yet
historically evident, pattern of human behavior that has compromised the developmental
imperative and created the illusion of evil within our nature. This pattern is the exact opposite of
the “upward spiral” of growth and thriving that results from reciprocal cycles of positive emotion
(Fredrickson, 2003), the evolving cooperative complexity that nature preferentially selects.
Indeed, many of our common parenting practices may even promote deficit psychosocial
outcomes (i.e. milestones marked by mistrust, shame, and guilt; Erickson, 1968) by utilizing
punitive approaches that scuttle innate efforts toward autonomous self-empowerment and
impeach—if not pervert—the emotional guidance system. In fact, an early pattern of violent
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subjugation and the accompanying self-effacing feelings of shame and humiliation mark the first
The evolutionary result of emotional suppression is that the species remains limited to
struggles for basic power and freedom that thwart the emergence of public trust, weaken social
bonds, squander positive intrinsic motivations, frustrate higher needs, and stifle self-organizing
development at every turn. We have wrongly carried forward a mixture of outdated primate social
territoriality, and deception), and we remain largely limited to Kohlberg’s three lowest stages of
moral reasoning. Indeed, we now suffer an overly narrow range of social self-identity (civil war or
empathic range (racism, sexism, classism, and anthropomorphism versus humanitarian equality
and respect for the interconnected self-organizing web of life); a lack of moral maturity (third party
morality, negative motivations, and situational ethics; versus universal self-regulated, positive
motivations, and empathic virtue); and conflicting motives, ethics, and values (religious “holy
complex negative emotion subject our bodies to far more chronic regulatory distress than they
have evolved to handle. Something is indeed very wrong—we have handicapped ourselves by
Conclusion
psychological territory, when viewed from a feedback perspective it can be recognized as a primal
sensory system, serving the biological function of evaluative self-regulatory behavioral adaptation.
Although the positive and negative hedonic valence remains entangled within the good-evil
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dynamics, which mediate an ongoing balance between two right and good self-organizing
offers a natural, universal, and yet-to-be harnessed behavioral guidance system—an innate,
The sequence of events that began September 11th, 2001, underscores the urgent need for
humanity to identify global ethical principles—to discover, embrace, and exploit nature’s
universal moral and spiritual guidance. As scripture suggests, humans have bitten of the fruit from
“the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17), severing our connection with nature’s
evaluative wisdom and are suffering the hellish consequences. But as natural bearers of ancient
sensory messages, our hedonic masters of pleasure and pain are hardly the source of our suffering
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Equilibrium
* Goal
(Equilibrium)
Out-of-phase Blocking/Inhibition
(- - - - - -) Stimulus increase/Attractor regime
* (+ + + + + +)
Time Time
Figure 1.
The two types of feedback that couple together in self-regulatory feedback systems and
remain encoded within parts one and two of the emotional perception.
(Adapted from de Rosnay, 1997)
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References
Basic Feelings Complex - Shades Complex - Blends
Distress (-/Avoid):
(“Reduce the stimulus”) Greed
Fear Anxiety, Paranoia Boredom; Ennui
(Threat) Worry, Doubt, Mistrust, Inferiority Hopelessness; Depression
Sadness Loneliness, Sympathy, Regret Envy
(Loss) Grief, Despair Embarrassment
Anger Frustration, Resentment, Rage Shame; Contempt Hate
(Injustice, inequity) Annoyance, Arrogance (Superiority) Jealousy
Disgust Guilt; Remorse
(Unwholesomeness)
MORAL UTILITY:
Deficit external states: MORAL UTILITY: Deficit internal states: Eliminate eliciting conditions
Eliminate from landscape from the mindscape (Deficit, cognitive and behavioral “should nots”)
(Environmental “should nots”)
Eustress (+/Approach):
“Increase the stimulus” Contentment, Trust, Hope, Faith
Interest, Curiosity, Wonder Awe
Integrity
Joy Confidence, Pride, Courage Honor
(Success, optimums Camaraderie, Liking, Love Devotion
safety, growth ) Appreciation, Gratitude, Loyalty Compassion
Multipurpose Liberation, Flow, Inspiration Exuberance
need-meeting Amusement, Delight, Glee, Hilarity Mirth Divinity
successes and “right” Respect, Elevation, Admiration Unity
states of human being. Anticipation, Reminiscence Reverence
Tolerance, Acceptance, Forgiveness Mercy
Enthusiasm, Ambition Zeal
MORAL UTILITY: Generosity
Optimal external states: MORAL UTILITY: Grace
Maximize in the landscape Optimal internal states: Maximize elicitors in mindscape Rapture
(Environmental “shoulds”) (Optimal cognitive and behavioral “shoulds”)
Figure 3:
Interactive meaning dimensions within basic and complex feeling tones
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Emotional Sense 46
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