CONCEPT
Affective Framing
Thompson's term for the organism's pre-reflective, emotionally charged orientation toward its situation — the valenced ground without which deliberate reasoning cannot orient itself.
Affective framing names the cognitive function of emotion in Thompson's enactive framework. Emotion is not a disruption of cognition or a separate faculty that interferes with reason; it is a form of cognition at the level of valence — the organism's evaluation of its situation as going well or going badly, as supporting or threatening its well-being, as calling for approach or withdrawal. This evaluation is not the product of deliberation; it is the ground on which deliberation stands. The organism that confronts a situation first feels the situation — feels it as threatening, promising, comfortable, disturbing — and the feeling orients the subsequent cognitive activity, determining what data is relevant, what analyses are worth pursuing, what responses are even in the space of consideration. Without an affective frame, the organism confronts a situation in which everything is equally salient and nothing is significant — the condition that Damasio's patient Elliot exhibits with clinical precision.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Thompson integrates Antonio Damasio's clinical findings on the