Affective States

the polyvagal theory suggests that affective and emotional states are dependent on lower brain regulation of the visceral state and the important visceral, tactile, and nocioceptive cues that travel between the brain and the periphery.

Porges advances a neurophysiological thesis that affective states are fundamentally products of autonomic visceral regulation rather than cortical construction, situating their origin in the body-brain signaling loop.

Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011thesis

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It is an understatement to say that at present we do not know how, precisely, affective states are generated within the brain. Primary-process affective consciousness (i.e., raw feels) may have evolved because such internal states allowed animals to make better behavioral

Panksepp identifies affective states as primary-process phenomena rooted in subcortical circuits, proposing their evolutionary function as enabling superior behavioral flexibility — while acknowledging the deep mechanistic mystery that remains.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998thesis

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The ‘pleasant’ and ‘unpleasant’ designations correspond, in a principled manner, to whether the underlying ‘global’ state of the body is generally conducive to the continuation of life and to survival, and to how strong or weak that life trend happens to be at a given moment.

Damasio argues that affective valence is not arbitrary but maps directly and principally onto the homeostatic condition of the organism, anchoring subjective feeling-tone in biological self-regulation.

Damasio, Antonio R., The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018thesis

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as clients attempt to manage states of overwhelming negative affect, their recognition and experience of positive affective states is inevitably impaired. Most traumatized clients lack the capacity to experience pleasure and joy in their lives.

Ogden demonstrates that trauma systematically compromises the full range of affective states, with the management of negative affect actively suppressing access to positive ones, yielding a clinical imperative for affective restoration.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis

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the mesocortical neuronal circuit, especially prefrontal descending cholinergic projections which modulate subcortical dopaminergic activity and thereby act as a regulator of sympathetic affective states, mediates its earliest affect regulatory function.

Schore identifies the orbitofrontal–mesocortical circuit as the neurobiological seat of early affect regulation, showing how experience-dependent development of this system shapes the individual’s capacity to modulate sympathetic affective states.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994thesis

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Negative affective states (i.e., aversion, dysphoria, or pain) are as important an aspect of hedonic processing as positive affective states of pleasure/euphoria.

Paulus establishes the symmetrical importance of both negative and positive affective states within hedonic processing, framing their interplay as central to understanding addiction and interoceptive self-regulation.

Paulus, Martin P., The role of interoception and alliesthesia in addiction, 2009thesis

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affective strategies are derivative of the evolutionary process that produced the polyvagal regulation. There is a consensus that affect is expressed in facial muscles and in organs regulated by the autonomic nervous system.

Porges situates affective strategies within evolutionary phylogeny, arguing that the autonomic nervous system is the primary expressive substrate through which affective states are enacted in mammals.

Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011supporting

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acutely brakes hyperaroused and hyperstimulated states, diminishes positive narcissistic affective coloring of self-representations, contracts the self, lowers expectations, decreases self-esteem, active coping, interest and curiosity, interferes with cognition and increases overt consciously experienced shame.

Schore maps the psychobiological mechanics by which shame-induced limbic circuit activation transforms affective states, collapsing positive hedonic tone and driving the self toward parasympathetic withdrawal and depressive affect.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting

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vitality affects or as ‘categorical affects,’ revealing the primary or the differentiated nature of the emotional states, respectively. For many researchers, affect is essentially a social signal.

Siegel distinguishes vitality and categorical forms of affective expression while underscoring the broadly held view that affective states serve fundamentally as social communication signals.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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a neurosymbolic affective representation of I-ness or ‘the self’ that may be critically linked to a primitive motor representation within the brain stem.

Panksepp proposes that the most archaic layer of selfhood is itself an affective representation anchored in brain-stem motor coordinates, linking affective states constitutively to the emergence of primal consciousness.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting

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the affective regulations of brain growth are embedded in early social interactions… socialization-induced cerebral hemispheric growth appears to reside in a mechanism that requires older brains to engage with mental states of awareness, interest, and emotion in younger brains.

Schore foregrounds the dyadic embedding of affective regulation in early development, showing that caregiver affective states directly shape the neurobiological growth trajectory of the infant brain.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting

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archetypes ‘as such’ and archetypal ‘images’ are instantiated via a prediction cascade over various cortical and subcortical systems… involving the high-level cortex, the low-level cortex, and subcortical/affective systems.

McGovern positions subcortical affective systems as the foundational layer in the instantiation of Jungian archetypes, integrating affective states into a predictive-processing account of depth-psychological structure.

McGovern, Hugh, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience, 2025supporting

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Positively valenced emotional states and more regulated, even states of mild interest and calm, are thought to be the left hemisphere’s range of affective experience.

Siegel maps hemispheric asymmetry onto affective valence, proposing that positive and negative affective states are differentially generated and processed across the two cerebral hemispheres.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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the emotive responses triggered by the engagement of drives, motivations, and emotions often constitute major perturbations of organism function and can result in major mental upheavals.

Damasio distinguishes the quiet perturbations of sensory qualia from the major organismic upheavals produced by drive- and emotion-linked emotive responses, calibrating the intensity spectrum of affective states.

Damasio, Antonio R., The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting

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positive affects (in contrast to the negative ones of depression, anger and disgust) did not have an inhibitory component; they were experienced as pure action.

Levine draws on Bull’s experimental work to distinguish positive from negative affective states at the somatic level, identifying the absence of inhibitory components as the distinguishing feature of joyful, expansive affect.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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This ‘overregulation’ indicates a reduced capacity to experience either positive or negative affect and may contribute to a low threshold of arousal in socioemotional contexts and to modulation imbalances.

Ogden describes how insecure-avoidant attachment installs chronic parasympathetic dominance that blunts the full range of affective states, impairing both positive and negative emotional availability.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting

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there is a progression from the earliest states of pleasure or discomfort to the basic or categorical emotions, such as fear.

Siegel traces a developmental trajectory in which undifferentiated hedonic affective states progressively differentiate into the categorical emotional repertoire through appraisal and experience.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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I will talk about three levels of emotion—background, primary, and secondary… I will refer to drives and motivations and pain and pleasure as triggers or constituents of emotions, but not as emotions in the proper sense.

Damasio clarifies the hierarchical taxonomy of emotional phenomena, distinguishing drives and pleasures as triggers of affective states rather than affective states proper, establishing terminological boundaries for the field.

Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999aside

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emotions are relatively brief responses compared to other more long-lasting states, such as mood… This sometimes led to the assumption that emotions were ephemeral — there-and-then-gone, fleeting states.

Lench interrogates the boundary between discrete affective states and more enduring mood conditions, challenging earlier assumptions about the temporal ephemerality of emotional experience.

Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018aside

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the orbitofrontal cortex, the critical control center of the affective core of the self that regulates affective and interactional function.

Schore identifies the orbitofrontal cortex as the neuroanatomical hub of an ‘affective core of the self,’ linking the regulation of affective states to the formation of self-structure and interactional capacity.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994aside

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