Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

7
Affect and Proto-Affect
in Effective Functioning
andrew ortony, donald a. norman,
and william revelle
We propose a functional model of effective functioning that depends on
the interplay of four relatively independent domains, namely, affect
(value), motivation (action tendencies), cognition (meaning), and
behavior (the organism’s actions). These domains of functioning all need
to be considered at each of three levels of information processing: the
reactive, the routine, and the reflective levels. The reactive level is primarily
a hard-wired releaser of fixed action patterns and an interrupt
generator, limited to such things as processing simple stimuli and initiating
approach and avoidance behaviors. This level has only proto-affect.
The routine level is the locus of unconscious, uninterpreted expectations
and well-learned automatized activity, and is characterized by awareness,
but not self-awareness. This level is the locus of primitive and
unconscious emotions. The reflective level is the home of higher-order
cognitive functions, including metacognition, consciousness, and selfreflection,
and features full-fledged emotions. In this framework, we
characterize personality as a self-tunable system comprised of the temporal
patterning of affect, motivation, cognition, and behavior. Personality
traits are a reflection of the various parameter settings that govern
the functioning of these different domains at all three processing levels.
Our model constitutes a good way of thinking about the design of
emotions in computational artifacts of arbitrary complexity that must