An ancient presumption has long been accepted as self-evident: humans respond to reward and punishment (Skinner, 1969; O'Dougherty et al., 2001; Rilling and Sanfey, 2011). This focus on reward (approach) and punishment (avoid) has long been a central feature of models of learning (Mowrer, 1973). Thus, the presumed ability to swiftly identify all individuals, groups, or anything else as either positive or negative would seem to address this fundamental concern (Cosmides and Tooby, 2000; Brandt et al., 2015). As Lodge and Taber (2005, p. 456) put it:

Here, emotion is tasked with identifying the reward-punishment status of any object or activity under consideration. Valence remains a presumed scientific concept, for example, in investigations of campaign sentiment (Geer, 2006), and, it is central to utility theory and prospect theory, as well, each of which attends to gain or loss, punishment or reward (Skinner, 1969; Kahneman and Tversky, 1979).

This valence conception leaves unresolved whether emotion serves:

The valence conception of emotion leaves neither theoretical nor empirical space for any other emotions. When valence research explores the influence of “core affect” it, perhaps unintentionally, acknowledges that there are other emotions, the non-core variants. The use of the phrase “core affect” seemingly offers a semantic justification for such research as needing only to consider “core affect” (Russell, 2003; Bakker et al., 2021). Besides, that presumption carries considerable weight as there is little empirical evidence that at any given time people experience one and only one affect response. On the contrary, the evidence is that multiple emotional responses are ever-present (Abelson et al., 1982; Watson and Tellegen, 1985; Watson et al., 1988; Watson and Clark, 1994; Marcus et al., 2017; Neuman et al., 2018).

The fundamental claim is that this “affective tally” serves to guide choices, such as, for example, which candidates to support and which to oppose. What is typically absent is any consideration of non-“core” emotions and what roles they might play in impacting choices.

A common measurement of valence, the feeling thermometer, gathers data that preclude its falsification (Zavala-Rojas, 2014; Marcus, 2022). It remains presumed valid when it is used to measure “affective polarization” (Jost et al., 2022). People choose between how much they like or how much they dislike the target of inquiry. The measurement prevents people from giving non-confirming responses.¹³ The data cannot test the internal validity of the construct. Other approaches to measuring valence have been used. For example, experiments use exposure to a stimulus thought suitable to trigger an affective response so briefly that it cannot be consciously perceived (Lodge and Taber, 2005). As previously noted, the validity of this approach rests on confirming that the stimulus induces the intended emotion and does not impact other emotions. Such demonstrations are exceedingly rare (Marcus, 2022).

Beginning in the 80s and continuing since, research uniformly demonstrates that when people are able to report their feelings with an available list of emotion words, their responses cannot be reduced to one dimension (Abelson et al., 1982; Marcus, 1988; Brader et al., 2019). These studies have generated some limited post-hoc theorizing. One response, by those wedded to the idea of valence, is to preserve the status of valence by labeling one of the two evident dimensions as “valence” or “core affect” (Rahn and Rudolph, 2000; Russell, 2003). However, once the measurement of fear and anger began to be concurrently examined, the scientific validity of “negative” emotion, either as a dependent or as an independent variable, collapses. This is because fear and anger, the principal components of “negative” emotion, each have different antecedents and different downstream consequences on thought and action.

In sum, the concept of “negativity” remains in use because researchers and reviewers ignore the extensive research showing negativity is a concept that conflates two contrary emotions. Furthermore, they employ methods of data collection that preclude securing data that could challenge its validity (Marcus, 2022). Put succinctly, fear and anger are distinct properties. They do not share an underlying “negative” property (Watson and Clark, 1994; Lerner and Keltner, 2001; MacKuen et al., 2010; Lambert et al., 2019).

Valence remains widely used by many without any acknowledgment of the challenges valence scholars have long failed to address. Those using valence simply disregard contrary evidence (Hibbing et al., 2014; Brandt et al., 2015; Fournier et al., 2020; Bellovary et al., 2021; Johnston and Madson, 2022; Schumacher et al., 2022).

As to the first of the two neuroscience considerations, that emotion is deeply engaged in the preconscious processing of sensory and somatosensory signals, there is Lodge and Taber's “hot cognition” account (Lodge and Taber, 2005). As to the second, there has been no recognition of the fundamental character of preconscious processing as massively multi-channel concurrent appraisals, especially as to emotion (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986; McClelland and Rumelhart, 1988).

Needless to say, valence does not account for the entirety of affect but, more importantly, the negative segment of valence is a confound of two discrete “negative” affects, fear and anger. This is especially problematic when these two components are not stable as to their respective contributions to the confound across different circumstances. In conclusion, valence remains in force because it is sheltered. Its continued use is a testament to its enshrined status for those who remain loyal adopters.

As Moors (2017, p. 1) puts it: “The basic premise of appraisal theories is that emotions are caused and differentiated by an appraisal process in which values are determined for a number of appraisal factors such as goal relevance, goal in/congruence, un/expectedness, control, and agency.” Contained therein are two core claims:

Hence, there is a clear idea of what emotions are: emotions are subjective feelings expressed in consciousness.

Little progress has been made in developing a comprehensive taxonomy of emotions. Ekman, early on, proposed six “basic” emotions based on his analysis of facial expressions (Ekman and Oster, 1979). In that same period, Izard proposed 10 emotions (Izard, 1977). Shaver et al. (1987), using a lexical analysis of emotion words, claimed 25 distinct categories of emotion. More recently, Keltner et al. (2022) have proposed 20 emotions. There are yet other continuing efforts to secure a comprehensive taxonomy (Scherer, 1987; Cowen et al., 2019; Keltner, 2019; Scherer and Moors, 2019; Wiedman and Tracy, 2020).

If, as appraisal theorists generally hold, only one discrete emotion is generally manifest at any given moment, then the number of discrete emotions and their specific characteristics is of lesser importance. If only one emotion is manifest, then research can focus on that one manifest emotion. But of course, this determination rests on the same presumption that drives valence approaches, that at any given moment, one emotion is salient and therefore the only one that is consequential.

Many appraisal scholars acknowledge the difficulty of generating a taxonomy of emotions (Ortony, 2021). Even here, the focus is not on all variants of emotion. Little attention is given to whatever falls into the non-basic emotions class, let alone identifying what functions non-basic emotions might serve or what influences they might have.

While many studies compare a presumed set of basic, or discrete, emotions to other supposedly basic emotions, the choice of the emotions to compare is largely ad hoc (Trafimow et al., 2005; Young et al., 2011; Valenzuela and Bachmann, 2015; Harmon-Jones et al., 2016; Fridkin et al., 2020). There is infrequent reliance on a defined taxonomy to guide the selection. This often leads to selecting some emotion words, each presumed to identify a different emotion, even when some of those chosen emotion words have long been shown to be effective markers for the same emotion (Just et al., 2007; Bil-Jaruzelska and Monzer, 2022).

Studies that analyze one emotion are vulnerable to misspecification because such studies rely on the aforementioned presumption: that a given affect's influence can be accurately assessed without determining and controlling for the possible influences of other concurrent, and active, affective appraisals. That presumption has been shown to be unsound (Paulus et al., 2010; Marcus et al., 2017; Neuman et al., 2018; Marcus, 2021). More significantly, research focused on one specific discrete emotion often does not entertain the need to collect data that could test that presumption, thereby violating one of Popper's tenets.

Focusing on a specific emotion, often not attending to the emotion word emotion dilemma, invites a balkanized research literature that is largely inward-looking. This is not merely a hypothetical warning. For example, it continues to be a core presumption that threat elicits fear. Indeed, Choi et al. (2022, p. 1) speak of this clearly in a recent article: “…people are constantly exposed to threatening language, which attracts attention and activates the human brain's fear circuitry.” However, a considerable body of literature has demonstrated that fear is but one of the two crucial appraisals that threats elicit, anger being the other (Wagner, 2014). Furthermore, much of what has been attributed to heightened fear is actually driven by heightened anger (Vasilopoulou and Wagner, 2017; Amengay and Stockemer, 2019; Lambert et al., 2019; Marcus et al., 2019; Vasilopoulos et al., 2019; Wagner and Morisi, 2020). I will discuss this more fully in the penultimate section, below.

Psychology-based appraisal theories have largely focused on direct effects and treat affective appraisals as if they can each be understood without the consideration of other active affective appraisals.¹⁴ Appraisal research in psychology has largely been inattentive to research published elsewhere showing robust interactions between fear and diminished reliance on otherwise influential dispositions (Marcus and MacKuen, 1993; Marcus et al., 2000; Brader, 2005, 2006; Valentino et al., 2008) and that anger also has a robust interaction in enhancing political action (Valentino et al., 2011). In addition, research on anger shows a robust effect of anger-enhancing reliance on extant dispositions and blocking attention to contrary information and sources (Webster and Abramowitz, 2017; Suhay and Erisen, 2018; Vasilopoulos et al., 2019; Lüders et al., 2020). Much of this research is published in political science.

In psychology appraisal theories, the treatment of discrete emotions is focused on how each discrete emotion differs from other supposed discrete emotions. As a result, appraisal theories tend to treat each discrete emotion more as a constant rather than as a variable and by attending solely to the high range of any emotion, basic or not, any consideration of what lower ranges of any given discrete emotion generates in thought and action has been largely absent (Rempel et al., 2019).

Appraisal theory-directed research into emotions uses a diverse array of available analytic and operationalization practices to measure emotion. Many studies pay attention to the reliability and validity of their measures. However, especially with respect to validation, many of these efforts are undermined by inattention to the second of the two neuroscientific insights. I will take that issue up, later.

As to the Popper criteria, though some of the relevant research outside of the discipline of psychology gains some attention from some psychologists, it would be a stretch to say that psychologists are eager to explore what lies beyond their discipline's borders. As I noted earlier, the swift effort to disarm Zajonc's claim that cognition was not necessary to account for the influence of emotion on judgment is telling (Lazarus, 1982, 1984; Tsal, 1985).

In appraisal approaches, the issue of timing has been often ignored.¹⁵ Subjective feelings are not instantaneously available in conscious awareness. They become available well after sensory information arrives in the brain. Moreover, given the limited capacity of conscious awareness, the more fleeting, swiftly shifting, and less elevated appraisals are gated from being displayed therein. That leads to an often-unstated presumption that whatever seems to be the dominant affective state is the only influential affective state (Dias and Lelkes, 2022).

Investigations into subjective feelings can constitute a very restricted range of any given emotion. Until research demonstrates that emotion has no influence on human action and thought unless and until it is manifest as subjective feelings in conscious awareness, the failure to model the preconscious affective processes across their full ranges leaves us with misspecified models.

Attention to parallel processing has largely been largely ignored. As noted earlier, parallel processing is the fundamental feature of preconscious processes, while serial processing is the fundamental characteristic of conscious awareness.

The focus on a presumed singular dominant discrete emotion also impacts the use of manipulation checks to secure the validation of treatment effects. Validating that an experimental treatment impacts a specific appraisal is insufficient if does not also assess whether other concurrent appraisals are impacted (Marcus, 2022).

Another common presumption is that there is such a thing as a no-emotion condition (Wood and Rünger, 2016; Gasper, 2018; Gasper et al., 2019, 2021). While feeling states in consciousness can be quite low, and such are often described as non-emotional, that does not mean that the preconscious affective appraisals are inactive and inconsequential. Consider the influence across all levels of fear. At every level, fear has a consequence on thought and behavior. The lowest part of that appraisal's range, i.e., low levels of fear, signal an absence of novelty, or the unexpected. Low levels of fear enable efficient and deft focused reliance on the vast inventory of habits of thought and action (Marcus, 2002b). Research focusing only on the “high” end, emotions, those expressed in subjective awareness, i.e., in the mind, is not exhaustive of the range of influences that preconscious affective appraisals execute.

In sum, while neuroscientific research on neural processes has received some attention, attention to the centrality and importance of these multiple concurrent affective processes as prior to subjective feelings manifest in conscious awareness remains largely absent in appraisal theories (Brosch and Sander, 2013; Todd et al., 2020).

The research that later became the theory of affective intelligence, hereafter AIT, commenced in the 1980s in political science (Marcus, 1988). From the outset, it has been an appraisal theory. However, unlike the purpose of appraisal theory in psychology, the purpose of appraisal in AIT is to theorize what each preconscious affective appraisal identifies in the sensory streams and the downstream consequences that follow from each appraisal. AIT took its foundations from the work done by neuroscientist Jeffrey A. Gray (1985b, 1987). Gray viewed appraisal's task as assigning a value to sensory and interoceptive data arriving in the brain. However, rather than generating one value that results from one integrated appraisal, AIT argues that multiple concurrent focused appraisals are each tasked with ascertaining the status of a specific strategic feature.

The theory of affective intelligence from the outset adopted the two neuroscience premises (Marcus, 1988; Marcus et al., 2000). It adopted Gray's view that novelty identification was a central function of one of the preconscious systems. One output of this system, when it identifies novel conditions, is to diminish the otherwise normal reliance on the vast inventory of habits of thought and action (Marcus, 1988). It accepted Gray's insight that humans have two available judgment orientations. One, commonly labeled motivated reasoning, serves to enhance the default reliance on habits (Gigerenzer, 2008) and, the other, motivated deliberation, serves to enable reflexive deliberation so as to enable conscious self-awareness to function as an “error correcting space” (Gray, 2004). That insight has since become formalized in psychology as the dual-process model of judgment (Chaiken and Trope, 1999; Kahneman, 2011).

In brief, emotion is a central element in an array of preconscious neural processes, each of which assesses a strategically vital aspect of human action and interaction well before subjective feelings are expressed in conscious awareness (Öhman et al., 2000). Of particular importance is how these affective appraisals influence the shift from conditions of individual agency to collective agency and back (Valentino et al., 2009, 2011; Groenendyk and Banks, 2014).

The taxonomic structure of the theory of affective intelligence is not an array of emotion words that each define a specific state, such as joy, anger, or sadness. Rather each element in the emotion taxonomy of AIT is a range of the possible values of a specific appraisal: levels of fear identifying levels of apparent uncertainty being one such example.

Most importantly, emotions are not understood as binary categories, one is angry or not, elated or sedated, and so on.¹⁶ Emotions are rather the language of appraisals that are inherently variable. There are many emotion words available to use across the full range of each appraisal. For the appraisal of novelty, emotion words such as fearful, anxious, uncertain, worried, troubled, at ease, calm, surprised, and so on, all depict different values along the same underlying appraisal of how much novelty/uncertainty is present.

At the outset, AIT took as foundational the two neural systems identified by Gray (1987), one of these being responsible for monitoring and controlling the execution of habituated reward-seeking actions of thought and action and the other responsible for monitoring the uncertainty/novelty of external circumstances. Later, a third preconscious appraisal tasked with monitoring norm compliance was added (Marcus et al., 1995). This third preconscious system is fundamentally normative, as it identifies breaches in the execution of salient norms (Marcus, 2002b). However, AIT has not been especially interested in subjective feelings states other than to identify, and therein measure, the traces of preconscious appraisals (Marcus et al., 2017).

Jeffrey Gray offered a useful analogy to explain his understanding of emotions (Gray, 1985a). He analogized emotions pre- and post-awareness to color pre- and post-color awareness. In the case of color, three types of cells, called cones, arrayed at the back of the retina, are each sensitive to a different portion of the visual spectrum. One type responds to light in the red range of the color spectrum. Another type responds to the green range of the color spectrum. A third type responds to the blue portion of the color spectrum. Each of the very many cone cells generates a continuous electrical signal that reports to the brain, even as in consciousness we see any given object as having a singular generally temporally stable color. The preconscious appraisal of color is manifold, but any object is typically presented in consciousness as a single hue.

Color in awareness is a consequence of three different color appraisals. Before something arrives within the different ranges of human senses, it does not yet exist for us. Once it does, the human brain examines it via the array of human senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Given the value of these initial points of contact, the human brain gives special priority to securing answers to ongoing queries that have existential implications. One of these queries answers the question of whether this object (inanimate or animate) seems familiar. If so, past experiences can be very useful in predicting the forthcoming interaction. If not, then past experience will be devalued and set aside for new learning and the explicit development of new modes of interaction. Another of these queries asks the question, does this object (animate or inanimate) pose harm and/or constitute a norm violation? If so, resources should be mounted to protect against harm and mobilize to re-establish the norms that enable collaborative agency in matters large and small, intimate, and society-wide.

The human brain consolidates the multiple streams of information and down samples to accommodate the limited serial capabilities of awareness. In sum, the initial preconscious appraisals above take precedence over more descriptive processes that generate the later available multi-sensory representation of conscious awareness.

An important feature of these developments is a change from understanding emotion as a passive receptacle—as an emotional response—to understanding emotion as being active, ubiquitous, and continuous, investigation of current circumstances, i.e., emotion as emotional appraisals (Wolak and Marcus, 2007). Currently, AIT has a focus on three distinct affective appraisals:

Enthusiasm covers the range marking failure to success. Understanding the implications of each level in that range adds considerably to such questions as the persistence or abandonment of actions taken, or of actions anticipated. Procedural memory is deeply implicated in this process as it stores the various learned routines, in all their variants. These memorialized habits set up the expectation of success and the manner of adaptions that can swiftly be adjusted to meet familiar but variable circumstances.

Fear marks the range from all is familiar, normal, to sudden potentially grave uncertainty. Here also, attention to the lower level of the range which reports on the normality of the circumstances at that moment enables focused attention to the task at hand, and efficient reliance on the habits of thought and action (Bargh and Chartrand, 1999; Gigerenzer, 2008). Here again, the procedural and declarative memory systems are vital as they define the normal against which current circumstances are compared.

Anger focuses on the range from norm compliance to norm violation. Here, attention to the low-range reports on the ongoing actions of those distant, immediate, strangers and intimates, as to their evident norm compliance. As with the two other appraisals, memory is deeply engaged, especially procedural memory, where the majority of norms and prior experiences of harm are made available (Haidt, 2001; Holbrook et al., 2016). Appraisals at the lower level of this range enable collaborative and independent actions to be taken without doubts as to the trustworthiness of each and all. Such appraisals enable humans to anticipate swiftly whether others will be complying with the norms, given the place and circumstances.

Thus, for AIT, each appraisal generates values within the specific range of that appraisal. This differs from other appraisal theories that select an emotion word, presume it to be an actual emotion, and further presume that it can be properly studied in isolation from other emotions (Close and van Haute, 2020; Capelos et al., 2021; Coifman et al., 2021). Validation of the AIT taxonomy rests on research on the neural systems that subserve each of the identified preconscious emotion channels (Gray, 1987; Calder et al., 2001; Rolls, 2014; Caruana, 2017; Celeghin et al., 2017; Lüders et al., 2020).

An additional array of causal claims is prominent in AIT. AIT identifies affective appraisals that enhance reliance on extant habituated patterns of thought and action, specifically anger and enthusiasm appraisals. The novelty appraisal system is able to inhibit reliance on those self-same dispositions when novel/uncertain circumstances are identified. Thus, when fear elevates the fear system initiates explicit consideration of the novel contemporary circumstances freed from the otherwise constraining grip of extant convictions (Marcus and MacKuen, 1993; Tiedens and Linton, 2001; Marcus et al., 2019). The evidence is that these systems are largely parallel, concurrent, and remain largely independent of each other in their downstream influences (Miller et al., 2009; Marcus, 2021). This theoretical extension of the roles of emotion to interactions with extant dispositions remains largely opaque to many (March et al., 2018; Xu and McGregor, 2018).

As to politics, AIT has made important contributions to understanding why people defect, when and why people learn, when and why people rely on extant convictions such as party and ideological identifications, and when they abandon them, thereby opening up the possibility of persuasion (Brader and Marcus, 2013; Vasilopoulos, 2019; Erisen, 2020; Wagner and Morisi, 2020). Rather than seeing contemporaneous information flows as uniformly moving people this way or that, research has mapped how anger and enthusiasm strengthen existing reliance on political habits of thought and action, as well as binding people more strongly to their extant political identities, while fear inhibits that otherwise default reliance, thereby enabling both deliberation and reliance by individuals on self-aware considerations rather than on collective agency.

Notwithstanding that record, the causal claims of AIT are insufficient to fully account for emotions' numerous roles in human decision-making and agency. As described earlier, AIT incorporated what has become known as the dual-process model of judgment with affective processes accounting for when people really on fast preconscious control of thought and action and when people shift to later conscious awareness for reliance on reflexive deliberation. While AIT has given considerable attention to the reflexive part of that dynamic, it does not say much if anything about the role of subjective feelings either in the state of intuitive motivated reasoning or when people have shifted into the “error-correcting space” (Gray, 2004). It is not hard to see that void as a mark of theoretical incompleteness especially given the prominence of subjective feeling states in human experience (Tracy et al., 2007).

AIT has a substantial measurement literature (Marcus and MacKuen, 1995; Marcus et al., 2006, 2017; Marcus, 2022). The measurement work has focused on measuring emotions in surveys as most political science research is done with large surveys and survey experiments, hence requiring simultaneous data collection of the three affective appraisals. That presumes, even if properly done, that the preconscious appraisals will leave traces such that vetted instruments can derive robust reliable measures thereof. Not all will find the validation studies persuasive. The operationalized batteries developed by ANES (Brader et al., 2019) and its AIT precursor (Marcus et al., 2017) have been replicated and validated. However, more could and should be done to offer a sounder foundation for the measurement of preconscious affective appraisals.

As to the Popper criteria, AIT emerged from the discipline of political science, a discipline that has a long history of looking outside its boundaries for theoretical possibilities. The rational theory came over from economics, and theories of group formation, perceptual bias, and persuasion came over from psychology. Such disciplinary openness made it relatively easy to add yet another import, this one from neuroscience. Beyond that, AIT has shown some, if modest, interest in expanding its reach rather than defending its current formulation.

The two neuroscientific criteria were and are its primary foundations. However, there is little interest in exploring any independent roles for emotions as expressed as subjective feelings states within consciousness. Whether self-aware subjective feelings augment preconscious appraisals or act in some more independent fashion remains to be explored and incorporated into AIT (Tracy et al., 2007).

AIT began with a two-dimensional model adapted from Jeffrey Gray's seminal work (Gray, 1987; Marcus, 1988; Marcus and MacKuen, 1993). It later expanded by incorporating anger as a third preconscious appraisal (Marcus et al., 1995; MacKuen et al., 2010). Others have argued the case for disgust as being a robust appraisal distinct from anger (Rozin and Fallon, 1987; Kam and Estes, 2016; Clifford and Jerit, 2018; Aarøe et al., 2020). Extant research suggests that empathy would be an obvious candidate (Decety and Cacioppo, 2012; Decety, 2015; Decety et al., 2015; Decety and Cowell, 2016). Yet other preconscious appraisals are likely to be promoted by emotion scholars. More can, and should, be done to identify still other preconscious affective channels.

Gross (2015, p. 3), a leading proponent of emotion regulation advances this definition of emotion: “Emotions involve loosely coupled changes in the domains of subjective experience, behavior, and peripheral physiology.” This definition does not clearly differentiate emotion from other neural processes. It generally treats emotion as subjective feeling states.

Emotion regulation holds that people seek to manage their feelings so as to guide their actions. Emotion regulation is the thought that (Tamir, 2016, pp. 199–200):

There is no specific taxonomy guiding emotion regulation research. There is some ad hoc mention of presumed distinct emotions, as well as the mention of positive and negative dimensions of emotion as viable descriptors (Gross, 2015). There is little other than a broad generic claim, undifferentiated across all emotions, that subjective feelings serve as a standard for self-medication.¹⁷ Essentially, emotion regulation holds that subjective feeling states serve as end-state goals to serve as means to achieve environment fitness and that people actively choose to manipulate them to achieve a desired affective state. There has been some effort to identify the neural processes that are engaged with affective experience (Elkin et al., 2015). As the focus is on subjective feeling states as expressed in conscious awareness, there has been little attention to the actual timing of these processes, and no attention to parallel processing by which the multiple concurrent appraisals are simultaneously engaged in directing downstream actions of thought and action.

Emotion regulation is notably vague as to the actual causal claims emotion regulation advances. As Gross recently put the matter (Gross, 2022, p. 10):

That leaves a conspicuous void as to identifying the tactical options available to execute emotion regulation, affect by affect, or identifying the target level that serves as the desired standard, affect by affect. This leaves us without clarity as to whether the regulation is a process that takes place in conscious awareness or whether emotion regulation takes place during ongoing preconscious affective appraisals (Zhang et al., 2022).

In sum, the various accounts are quite vague as to where and when the regulatory process takes place, by what means it takes place, precisely what the desired end states are, from what “tool kit” regulatory efforts are drawn, and what controls which options are selected. Where and how does the regulation process override, or augment, the continuing incoming flow of affective appraisals as ever newer information is received? Moreover, if different affective appraisals serve different tactical and strategic functions, each of these operating concurrently, then we must ask if there are multiple ongoing emotion regulatory processes each specific to a given affective appraisal, or if there is one unified regulatory process attending to just one or to all of those ongoing affective appraisals.

As to the measurement model, those in the emotion regulation camp have used a variety of approaches (Elkin et al., 2015; Gross, 2015). The process of cycling each appraisal and the timing of subsequent consequences requires methodologies that can accurately monitor the timing of each concurrent appraisal. Furthermore, downstream processes that are influenced by the distinct channels of affective appraisal both as to activation and as to inhibition for each concurrent parallel process must have validated measurements. Such efforts, it is fair to say, are at a rather early stage of development and have not as yet developed to the point of being able to provide accurate estimates across all these requirements. For some useful contributions, see (Fox et al., 2000; Paulus et al., 2010; Herbert et al., 2011; Maratos, 2011; Frühholz and Grandjean, 2013).

What awaits is greater clarity on the following questions:

When does emotional regulation occur? And is that process uniform across all emotional appraisals?

How does emotional regulation actually integrate with the ongoing updating of preconscious affective appraisals? Are those separate streams of influence blended, in some constant or variable fashion?

What are the desired end states and are these constant or variable? And, are they the same circumstance to circumstance, and appraisal to appraisal?

Is there a taxonomy of regulation interventions, general, or specific to each emotional appraisal?

The idea of equipoise as a matter of health, proper decorum, and civility as an essential feature of a functioning social order has long been part of the western canon (Nussbaum, 1994; Locke, 1996). Thus, it was easy to refigure such pre-scientific understandings as emotion regulation. Until such time as those engaged in research under this rubric address the missing elements, it would premature to offer a final assessment. However, appealing and promising, at this juncture, as to the Popper criteria, an “incomplete” might be a generous assessment for this approach.

Preconscious affective appraisals are generally available and influential at roughly 100 ms (±, ~50 ms) after sensory signals arrive in the brain. Indeed, there is evidence of even earlier availability (Sawada et al., 2022). Yet, conscious feelings are not available until ~500 ms.

The general benefit of preconscious multiple processing is the speed of analysis. Rather than engaging in a serial process, step 1, followed by step 2, and so, until a final actionable understanding is generated and represented in consciousness, the multiple preconscious processes generate actionable understandings faster, more fully informed, with faster recycling, and with a greater range of sensory and interoceptive processing than is possible with conscious awareness (Marcus, 2013).

From an evolutionary fitness perspective, it would seem strange that the benefits of preconscious appraisals would be put on hold by as much as 300 ms before acting on each of those appraisals. The evidence is that such a delay is not normal practice (Williams et al., 2007; Paulus et al., 2010; Maratos, 2011; Maratos et al., 2012). Using a crude, biased, and late standard as the guide to enable humans to achieve evolutionary fitness would seem to be a rather strange arrangement given that swift, deft, and flexible appraisals best serve social collaborative success (Axelrod, 1983; Gigerenzer, 2008). The evidence is that people continuously rely on three concurrent appraisals: (1) changing levels of fear to assess the presence of novelty; (2) changing levels of anger to assess the presence of norm violations; and (3) changing levels of enthusiasm to assess the ongoing success of reward-seeking actions (Neuman et al., 2018).

Emotional regulation should not be abandoned as an analytic tool. On the contrary, this approach can be enriched and strengthened by more fully considering the insights brought to us by neuroscience (Gross and Barrett, 2011; Klimecki et al., 2018; Yih et al., 2018; Coifman et al., 2021). Hopefully, those who position their research within this rubric can offer a more complete account that strengthens the viability of this pathway.

Table 3 offers and overview of the status of the four approaches to emotion as a comprehensive theory of emotion.