Core affect

The foundational construct of Barrett’s psychological constructionist (“conceptual act”) model of emotion, given its fullest neuroanatomical treatment in Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau & Barrett (2012). Core affect is not itself an emotion — it is a psychologically primitive, homeostatic barometer: the body’s continuous representation of whether something in the environment is motivationally valuable (good/bad, approach/avoid), realized whether or not the resulting state ever becomes conceptualized as an instance of a discrete emotion category. See lisa-feldman-barrett, basic-emotions.

Realized by a distributed, domain-general network

Not localized to any single structure. Lindquist et al.’s meta-analysis maps core affect onto amygdala, insula, medial and lateral OFC, ACC, thalamus, hypothalamus, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, basal forebrain, and PAG — see visceromotor-areas for the closely overlapping predictive-coding characterization of a similar region set (AIC, ACC, SGC, OFC) in Seth & Friston (2016).

Relation to homeostasis and to Craig

Core affect “shares much in common” (Lindquist et al.’s own framing) with the idea that bodily cues are a core ingredient in mental life — explicitly citing Craig’s homeostatic framework and Damasio. Where Craig treats affect as an ascending re-representation of homeostatic need, Barrett/Lindquist treat core affect as one input that must then be conceptualized (via prior experience, language, executive attention) before it becomes a specific emotional experience — conceptualization is the added step locationist accounts skip.

Not reducible to valence

The authors are explicit that a psychological constructionist account does not simply collapse “emotion” into positive/negative affect (as dimensional-model summaries sometimes claim): core affect can be conceptualized as a physical symptom, a simple mood, an instance of a discrete emotion, or even attributed to an external object itself (a food is “delicious,” a person is “nasty”) rather than experienced as one’s own reaction.

An unresolved ambiguity

Stapleton’s BBS commentary on the target article raises a genuine interpretive question the authors do not fully resolve: is core affect (1) a psychological feeling state, (2) the neural representation of interoceptive information, or (3) the bodily state being represented? The target article’s own language sometimes conflates these. This matters because equating “core affect” with “the representation of interoceptive information” risks assuming any biological value being tracked is necessarily experienced — a question the response essay does not settle.