Abstract
In this paper we sketch a new framework for affect elicitation, which is based on previous evolutionary and connectionist modeling and experimental work from our group. Affective monitoring is considered a local match–mismatch process within a module of the neural network. Negative affect is raised instantly by mismatches, incongruency, disfluency, novelty, incoherence, and dissonance, whereas positive affect follows from matches, congruency, fluency, familiarity, coherence, and resonance, at least when an initial mismatch can be solved quickly. Affective monitoring is considered an evolutionary-early conflict and change detection process operating at the same level as, for instance, attentional selection. It runs in parallel and imparts affective flavor to emotional behavior systems, which involve evolutionary-prepared stimuli and action tendencies related to for instance defensive, exploratory, attachment, or appetitive behavior. Positive affect is represented in the networks by high-frequency oscillations, presumably in the gamma band. Negative affect corresponds to more incoherent lower-frequency oscillations, presumably in the theta band. For affect to become conscious, large-scale synchronization of the oscillations over the network and the construction of emotional experiences are required. These constructions involve perceptions of bodily states and action tendencies, but also appraisals as well as efforts to regulate the emotion. Importantly, affective monitoring accompanies every kind of information processing, but conscious emotions, which result from the later integration of affect in a cognitive context, are much rarer events.
Highlights
An organism with the ability to discern adaptive from maladaptive conditions has a much higher chance of transmitting its genes than an organism without this ability
Brains possessing the capacity to distinguish these conditions, and to steer behavior in more adaptive directions, must have developed early in evolutionary history. This fundamental ability has been linked by Johnston (2003) to the most basic quality of emotions: positive and negative affect are generated by the nervous system “to those aspects of the environment that were a consistent benefit or threat to gene survival in ancestral environments” (p. 173)
Similar competitive network modules have formerly been used to model competitive learning (Murre et al, 1992; Phaf, 1994) and attentional selection (Phaf et al, 1990; Duncan, 1996). The analysis of these functions in terms of competition suggests that organisms capable of attentional selection should be able to monitor processing affectively, and that affective processing should not be limited to humans
Summary
An organism with the ability to discern adaptive from maladaptive conditions has a much higher chance of transmitting its genes than an organism without this ability. In our simple connectionist implementation, changes in level of competition within network modules are monitored, resulting in low-frequency oscillations of neural activity in the case of mismatch, and high-frequency oscillations in matching conditions. According to the hypotheses emerging from the evolutionary simulations, synchronized gamma oscillations both signal positive affect and facilitate attentional flexibility, thereby increasing information transmission (Heerebout and Phaf, 2010a,b). In terms of our network model, the quick resolution of competition evokes Rpo activation, which gets involved in a push–pull process with the Vpo node resulting in a gamma oscillation. For affective monitoring we postulate that match–mismatch, which is a dynamical property of processing, serves as the only evolutionary-prepared signal, whereas the behavior systems may be directly activated by definite classes of evolutionary relevant stimuli, for instance intense stimuli, snakes, spiders, faces, babies, etc., as well as by stimuli learned during ontogenesis. The varying results in conscious conditions lead us to the conclusion that the most straightforward evidence for affective monitoring can be found when confounding influences of conscious constructions have been minimized
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