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Emotion: The Self-regulatory Sense - PubMed

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Emotion: The Self-regulatory Sense

Katherine T Peil. Glob Adv Health Med. 2014 Mar.

Abstract

While emotion is a central component of human health and well-being, traditional approaches to understanding its biological function have been wanting. A dynamic systems model, however, broadly redefines and recasts emotion as a primary sensory system-perhaps the first sensory system to have emerged, serving the ancient autopoietic function of "self-regulation." Drawing upon molecular biology and revelations from the field of epigenetics, the model suggests that human emotional perceptions provide an ongoing stream of "self-relevant" sensory information concerning optimally adaptive states between the organism and its immediate environment, along with coupled behavioral corrections that honor a universal self-regulatory logic, one still encoded within cellular signaling and immune functions. Exemplified by the fundamental molecular circuitry of sensorimotor control in the E coli bacterium, the model suggests that the hedonic (affective) categories emerge directly from positive and negative feedback processes, their good/bad binary appraisals relating to dual self-regulatory behavioral regimes-evolutionary purposes, through which organisms actively participate in natural selection, and through which humans can interpret optimal or deficit states of balanced being and becoming. The self-regulatory sensory paradigm transcends anthropomorphism, unites divergent theoretical perspectives and isolated bodies of literature, while challenging time-honored assumptions. While suppressive regulatory strategies abound, it suggests that emotions are better understood as regulating us, providing a service crucial to all semantic language, learning systems, evaluative decision-making, and fundamental to optimal physical, mental, and social health.

Keywords: Emotion; bio-values; complexity; computational dynamics; connectionism; cybernetics; development; epigenetics; feedback; morality; self-organization; selfregulation; sensitivity.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1

Feedback. (Adapted from de Rosnay, 1979.)

Figure 2
Figure 2

The expanded categorical definition of emotion.

Figure 3
Figure 3

The two types of feedback. (Adapted from de Rosnay, 1979.)

Figure 4
Figure 4

How coupled positive and negative feedback yields stimulus-response behavior. (Adapted from de Rosnay, 1979.)

Figure 5
Figure 5

The Tit-For-tat self-regulatory code.

Figure 6
Figure 6

The Self-regulatory code in the black control box.

Figure 7
Figure 7

How the Tit-for-tat code serves dual self-regulatory "purposes": self-development and self-preservation.

Figure 8
Figure 8

Modern feedback cycle with feed-forward cognitive elaborations and complex feelings.

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