"At every moment, there is something a person or animal is trying to do (a goal) and a reason they are trying to do it (a context for that goal). In the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025), contextualized goals are constantly shifting in the brain, informed by the senses of the world and the body ( vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, interoception, and proprioception) as well as the semantic factors of meaningfulness, certainty, and agency."
"Interoception, or the brain's sense of the internal milieu of the body, is one way that the brain's goals are evaluated. For example, when stepping on a LEGO by accident, it is the interoceptive pain signals and when they stop that tell a person when they have satisfied the relevant goal. Several actions humans perform every day are evaluated interoceptively (e.g., eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, turning the thermostat up or down)."
"Because our affect is attached to our goals, the contextualized goals we take on and how and when we choose to pursue or relinquish them across similar situations can be described as different affect management policies. In this post, I hope to expand upon the affective side of the interoceptive senses as described in the AMF: Interoception and Its Idiosyncrasies"
Contextualized goals continually shift in the brain, informed by external and bodily senses and semantic factors like meaningfulness, certainty, and agency. Interoception senses the internal milieu and provides evaluative signals that indicate goal satisfaction or prompt goal creation. Common behaviors such as eating, sleeping, toileting, and thermostat adjustments are evaluated interoceptively. Interoceptive signals can be neutral but become evaluative when they prompt action. Affect is bound to goals, and patterns of adopting, pursuing, or relinquishing contextualized goals constitute affect management policies. Interoception overlaps the salience network and thus guides momentary attention; taste and smell partly function as interoceptive evaluative senses.
Read at Psychology Today
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