Chapter 24 — Emotion

Emotional Associations and Tags

STLR does not attempt to explain how emotion is biologically produced.

Instead, it asks a narrower functional question:

Can emotional associations connected with an experience be retained with Tags and become active again later?

In STLR, they can.

Emotion and Memory

Memory is formed from Tags, Hard-Links, and groups of Tags. Many memories may carry little emotional association, while experiences involving fear, happiness, sadness, comfort, pain, or excitement may develop stronger emotional associations.

For example:

• strong happiness may create positive associations
• strong sadness may create sadness-related associations
• strong fear may create fear-related associations
• strong comfort may create comfort-related associations

When related Tags activate later, these associations may influence the current experience.

Different People Form Different Emotional Associations

The same event may not create the same emotional associations for everyone.

One person may retain a strong emotional response. Another person may retain very little emotional association with the same kind of event.

Over time, this may help explain why people react differently to similar situations. One person may become optimistic, another cautious, and another relatively unaffected.

In STLR, these differences can partly reflect the different Tags and Hard-Links formed through each person’s earlier experiences.

Old Associations Can Affect New Experiences

When a new experience occurs, related Tags may activate first.

If those Tags carry emotional associations, the old associations may influence attention, interpretation, and the way the new experience is retained.

The earlier and later experiences do not need to be identical. A Reference between them may be enough for an older emotional association to affect the current response.

Example: Seeing an Airplane

The first time a person sees an airplane, the experience may involve strong novelty, surprise, excitement, or fear. Because few airplane-related Tags already exist, the first experience may create strong emotional associations.

The next time the person sees an airplane, the older airplane-related Tags may activate. Their emotional associations may also become active.

Because the airplane is no longer completely new, the response may be weaker. In other situations, an earlier association may amplify the later response. Previous emotional associations can therefore reduce, strengthen, or otherwise change the emotional response to a similar experience.

First Experiences

This may help explain why many first experiences feel especially emotional:

• first love
• first job
• first airplane ride
• first public speech
• first major success
• first major failure

A first experience often contains more novelty and fewer existing Tags that prepare the system for what will happen. Later experiences are processed through related Tags and expectations that already exist.

Emotion Influences Future Learning

Emotional associations may affect more than recall. When related Tags activate later, those associations may influence:

• attention
• expectation
• preference
• avoidance
• confidence
• future memory formation

This can create a feedback loop:

• an experience forms Tags, Hard-Links, and emotional associations
• later activation brings back related associations
• those associations influence how a new experience is noticed and retained

A Functional Perspective

STLR does not claim that emotion itself is simply information stored inside Tags. It does not explain the biological production or subjective experience of emotion.

The narrower proposal is that emotional associations connected with an experience can be retained and later reactivated with related Tags.

This allows STLR to connect the effects of emotion with memory, learning, attention, expectation, preference, and future behavior without claiming to provide a complete theory of emotion.