Why You Do the Things You Do

Affect has been broadly described as a valenced (positive-to-negative) experience in consciousness that changes each moment and guides what people do. The concept has roots in the origins of modern psychology, as it was coined by Wilhelm Wundt in the 19th century after the German word for feeling (Barrett, 2017).

The term affect has been used in countless different ways since then, and given the considerable advancements in neuroscience and psychology over the past two centuries, it is notable that it has still eluded a consensus definition.

In August 2025, I published my own attempt at characterizing affect, which I call the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025). The conceptualization is grounded in the contemporary neuroscience perspectives of Predictive Processing (Clark, 2023) and Active Inference (Parr, Pezzulo, & Friston, 2022). It also draws inspiration from Ecological Psychology (Gibson, 1979; Withagen, 2022) and my own clinical experiences.

Below I provide a high-level overview of the AMF, with the intention to explore each of these areas in more detail across other posts.

How Should We Think About Affect?

If affect is a positive-to-negative feeling in consciousness, where exactly does it come from? Which processes of the brain produce it and which do not? While we still don’t have completely clear answers to these questions, a lot can be understood by synthesizing the evidence that’s currently available, which indicates that a wide range of processes seem to sway affect.

In order to better understand affect, it is first helpful to understand an evolutionary argument for the purpose of animal brains in the first place. In their article, Why an Animal Needs a Brain, Sterling and Laughlin (2023) discuss the nematode worm, stating:

C. elegans’ brain is small compared to the brains of arthropods and vertebrates, but it supports a rich variety of behaviors. C. elegans’ brain finds the optimal locations for temperature, acidity, food, and mates – and stores the locations for subsequent visits. Moreover, the worm manages to choose optimally among them […] obey[ing] a utility function widely used to model human consumers, and as in many other animals, its subjective values are learned, a process that requires dopamine signaling (Katzen et al., 2023). (p. 9)

c. elegan

Source: Drawing by Adam Haynes-LaMotte

They go on to suggest that the purpose of brains is to create a behavioral repertoire that can adapt to changing contexts that become worth remembering as organisms enlarge and experience more meaningful regularities in their environments (Sterling & Laughlin, 2023). To put it simply, brains are for generating and carrying out contextualized goals, and even animals with the simplest brains (in this case, just 302 neurons) clearly demonstrate this in their behavior.

These momentary contextualized goals are always updating, and are thought of in the AMF as part of the ever-ongoing intrinsic brain activity that requires about 20% of the body’s total energy, regardless of the current situation or task (Raichle, 2015). Affect represents an important part of the context informing the brain’s ever-shifting goals—specifically, the evaluative part.

In the AMF, affect is defined as an evaluative common currency in consciousness that is attached to the brain’s goals and can be swayed by a combination of interoceptive senses, meaning-making processes, the processing dynamics of exteroceptive senses (sight and hearing), and the proprioceptive signals used to control the body.

It is a common currency in the sense that it allows people to appraise and decide between a range of different types of experiences. For example, someone may consider between spending their time eating an ice cream cone, riding a roller-coaster, sitting and reading on a park bench, checking the latest news, doing a puzzle, or spending time with friends. Affect in all its evaluative forms is what allows the brain to decide between these options and carry out the actions required to see progress through toward a goal.

Affect is used to evaluate between options

Source: Drawing by Adam Haynes-LaMotte

Main Elements of the Affect Management Framework (AMF)

Rather than suggesting that there’s one affective value that is sought at all times, the AMF highlights a set of elements that, considered together, collectively help explain a broad range of affective phenomena and their influence on decision-making. These include:

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Goals. Affect is attached to a person’s (meaningful) goals. For example, compare how your affect changed while watching a sporting event you were fully invested in, as opposed to one simply playing in the background. Merely having a goal is one way that we manage our affect (e.g., by preventing boredom). Pursuing and relinquishing different goals then represent the major ways in which we manage how we feel.

Interoception. Interoception, or the brain’s sense of the internal milieu of the body, is one way that goals are evaluated. For example, when stepping on a LEGO by accident, interoceptive pain signals and when they stop tell a person when they have satisfied the relevant goal. Interoceptive senses include pain, hunger, itch, temperature information, thirst, muscle fatigue, air hunger, cytokines, hormones, affective touch, sexual arousal, gastrointestinal sense, nervous system activation, taste, and smell.

Meaningfulness. The impact of goals on affective experience is highly contextual, and the meaningfulness of the goal is one factor that influences this relationship. It can most simply be described with the questions: “How important is this goal and why? What will happen or what will it mean if it is or is not completed?” The answers to these questions are variable across people and contexts but generally determine how strongly affect is attached to the goal, and consequently how motivated someone is to pursue it.

Certainty. Certainty represents an important aspect of all brain function, based on the idea that the brain implements ongoing hierarchical Bayesian estimation across sensory modalities. A sense of certainty/uncertainty has been described as a meta-cognitive feeling that is part of conscious affective experience (Loev, 2022), and is what allows animals to invest their efforts in worthwhile goals that are likely to be successful.

Agency. Rather than service passive or purely veridical computational purposes, the brain exists to promote acting in meaningful ways upon the environment. As part of implementing hierarchical Bayesian estimation, the brain must decide at each moment which goals are worth pursuing and which are not. Alongside meaningfulness and certainty, a sense of agency, or control of one’s effects on the self and environment, is necessary in making these decisions.

Exteroception. Alongside the semantic and interoceptive sources of affect, there also seems to be some amount of affect that can be attributed to exteroceptive processes in the brain. For example, studies have shown that faster processing speed and more familiar stimuli prompt increases in positive affect (e.g., Reber et al., 1998). Affect can also be impacted by sensory overload, in which a person feels overwhelmed with sensory stimuli (e.g., can happen in combat, medical ICU, parenting two toddlers that want different things).

Proprioception. Proprioceptive signals from the body play an interesting role in affect because they are control signals used for the specific purpose of moving the body through the world. Köteles (2021) suggests that proprioceptive signals contribute to certain affective qualities in consciousness, such as the sensation of the controllability of the body (e.g., which changes after lying immobile for 30 minutes) and to spatial orientation of the body.