FIGURE 1.

Graphical illustration of the three-process model of emotion episodes (Smith et al., 2018b, 2019a,b; Smith, 2019). Here an event (either internal or external, and either real, remembered, or imagined) is represented in the brain at various levels of abstraction. This complex set of representations is evaluated in terms of its significance to the organism at both implicit (e.g., low-level conditioned or unconditioned responses) and explicit (e.g., needs, goals, values) levels, leading to predictions about the cognitive, metabolic, and behavioral demands of the situation. These predictions initiate an “affective response” with both peripheral and central components. This includes quick, involuntary autonomic and skeletomotor responses (e.g., heart rate changes, facial expression changes) as well as involuntary shifts in the direction of cognitive resources (e.g., attention and interpretation biases, action selection biases). This multicomponent affective response is represented centrally at a perceptual and conceptual level (e.g., valenced bodily sensations and interpretations of those responses as corresponding to particular emotions). Representations of events, evaluations, bodily sensations, emotion concepts (etc.) can then be attended to and gated into working memory (“conscious access”). If gated into and held in working memory, these representations can be integrated with explicit goals, reflected upon, and used to guide deliberative, goal-directed decision-making. The thick red arrows highlight the processes we explicitly model in this paper.