Meaning comes before response.
Events matter through their relation to goals, expectations, control and significance.
Side 113
Emotion
A working model of emotion as coordinated changes in appraisal, physiology, attention, action readiness and social communication rather than as a single inner feeling.
appraisal→state→action→regulation→social context
04lenses
16working concepts
V0content
SS-1.0standard
What an emotion organizes.
Different theories emphasize different components, but a useful V0 separates the processes that jointly produce an emotional episode.
Pleasantness and activation are dimensions, not complete emotions.
Similar arousal can accompany fear, excitement or anger depending on interpretation and context.
Physiology changes the action landscape.
Autonomic, hormonal and motor preparation alter readiness without uniquely determining the experienced emotion.
Emotion biases what becomes easier to do.
Approach, avoidance, freezing, repair and confrontation are tendencies rather than compulsory commands.
Regulation can act at several points in the process.
Changing a situation, attention or interpretation is different from suppressing an already-developed response.
Choose which environments enter the system.
Avoidance can reduce exposure while also preventing learning, so timing and function matter.
Change what receives processing priority.
Attention can amplify threat, reward, ambiguity or competing information.
Change the meaning assigned to the event.
A different interpretation can alter downstream emotion without changing the external facts.
Alter expression after the response develops.
Suppression changes outward behavior more directly than the appraisal that generated it.
Emotions are also interpersonal signals.
Expression and interpretation shape coordination between people, but display rules and strategic behavior make signals imperfect.
Face, voice and posture carry information.
Expression can reveal state, influence others or be intentionally managed.
States can propagate through groups.
Attention, mimicry and shared interpretation can align affect without explicit instruction.
Cultures regulate what may be felt or shown.
Display expectations affect which emotions are amplified, hidden or recoded.
The same event changes meaning across relationships.
Trust, status, attachment and history alter appraisal and response.
No single measure is the emotion.
Self-report, behavior and physiology each capture only part of an episode and can diverge for legitimate reasons.
Access meaning and felt experience.
Reports are indispensable but depend on language, memory and willingness to disclose.
Observe choices and expression.
Behavior is contextual and can be strategic, habitual or constrained.
Track bodily change.
Heart rate, skin conductance and related measures index activation but rarely identify a unique emotion.
Interpret measures inside the situation.
Without goals and circumstances, identical signals can support very different explanations.
Emotion is a coordination process, not merely a label. The useful question is what changed in appraisal, body, attention, action tendency and context—and how those changes interact.