The affective grounds of the mind. The Affective Pertinentization (APER) model

Abstract

The paper presents the Affective Pertinentization model (APER), a theory of the affect and its role it plays in meaning-making. APER views the affect as the basic form of making sense of reality. It consists of a global, bipolar pattern of neurophysiological activity through which the organism maps the instant-by-instant variation of its environment. Such a pattern of neuropsychological activity is constituted by a plurality of bipolar affective dimensions, each of which maps a component of the environmental variability. The affect has a pluri-componential structure defining a multidimensional affective landscape that foregrounds (i.e., makes pertinent) a certain pattern of facets of the environment (e.g., its pleasantness/unpleasantness) relevant to survival, while backgrounding the others. Doing so, the affect grounds the following cognitive processes. Accordingly, meaning-making can be modeled as a function of the dimensionality of the affective landscape. The greater the dimensionality of the affective landscape, the more differentiated the system of meaning is.

Following a brief review of current theories pertaining to the affect, the paper proceeds discussing the APER's core tenets – the multidimensional view of the affect, its semiotic function, and the concepts of Affective Landscape and Phase Space of Meaning. The paper then proceeds deepening the relationship between the APER model and other theories, highlighting how the APER succeeds in framing original conceptualizations of several challenging issues – the intertwinement between affect and sensory modalities, the manner in which the mind constitutes the content of the experience, the determinants of psychopathology, the intertwinement of mind and culture, and the spreading of affective forms of thinking and behaving in society. Finally, the unsolved issues and future developments of the model are briefly envisaged.