Affect terminology: instinct, protoemotion, emotion
Document type: Architecture terminology addendum
Status: provisional terminology / architecture note
Date: 2026-06-09
Home cluster: docs/architecture/affect_primitives.md
Related: harm-affect register, relief/safety streams, proto-feelings audit, 603 lineage hazard-survival work
Purpose
This note records a terminology distinction that should be used when reading or extending the affect-primitives register.
The terms instinct, protoemotion, and emotion overlap in ordinary language, but they should not be treated as exact synonyms inside REE.
The proposed distinction is:
Instinct = preloaded prior / policy scaffold.
Protoemotion = runtime primitive affective-control signal.
Emotion = higher integrated appraisal state.
This keeps REE from collapsing inherited structure, active control signals, and later narrative/social appraisal into one word.
Definitions
Instinct
An instinct is a preloaded prior or policy scaffold over salience, learning, action, and control.
It is not necessarily a hard-coded behaviour. In REE terms, an instinct can preload:
- what should be attended to;
- which state changes should be treated as salient;
- which action families are plausible;
- which learning rates should rise;
- which thresholds should shift;
- which mode switches should become easier or harder.
So the instinctive form is not:
threat -> always run left
but rather:
threat -> raise precision,
narrow attention,
bias freeze / escape candidates,
increase harm learning,
lower threshold for avoidance commitment.
Protoemotion
A protoemotion is a primitive runtime affective-control signal generated when a state activates, violates, or resolves one of these priors/scaffolds.
Protoemotions modulate:
- attention;
- action-selection pressure;
- learning rate;
- commitment threshold;
- precision / gain;
- mode switching;
- memory tagging.
Examples in the current REE register include or border on:
fear / threat-state,
relief,
safety,
blocked agency,
effort / fatigue,
autonomic rebound,
soothing / comfort.
These are not merely labels for feelings. They are control signals with downstream computational consequences.
Emotion
An emotion is a higher integrated appraisal state built from protoemotion plus additional structure:
protoemotion
+ memory
+ context
+ self-model
+ social meaning
+ narrative / reportability
+ action history
Full emotion therefore belongs to later, more integrated REE versions. V3 mostly handles protoemotional control primitives and their architectural substrates.
Relationship between the terms
The relationship is:
Instinct is the preloaded bias.
Protoemotion is the active control signal.
Emotion is the interpreted / integrated state.
An instinct may produce or bias a protoemotion, but the two are not the same thing.
A protoemotion may be partly learned rather than fully instinctive.
A reflex may be instinctive without being protoemotional.
An emotion may include protoemotion without being reducible to it.
Examples
Threat / fear
Preloaded instinct:
threat cues should bias freezing, avoidance learning, attention narrowing,
and high-priority harm prediction.
Protoemotion:
fear / danger-state becomes active and alters E3 scoring, harm learning,
action suppression/release, and future avoidance.
Emotion:
fear as reportable experience, contextualised by memory, self-model,
appraisal, and social meaning.
Relief
Preloaded instinct:
aversive offset after a directed action should be treated as important.
Protoemotion:
relief fires as an event-locked aversive-offset reinforcement signal and
teaches that the preceding action was escape-relevant.
Emotion:
relief as experienced, remembered, interpreted, and narrated in context.
Safety
Preloaded instinct:
reliable threat absence should reduce defensive commitment thresholds and
permit approach / exploration.
Protoemotion:
safety is a learned prospective predictor that threat is absent; it gates
commitment-release and approach.
Emotion:
felt safety, trust, calm, or reassurance in a larger self/social context.
Boundary with reflexes and drives
A useful local stack is:
Reflex:
fixed local stimulus-response pattern.
Example: withdraw from sharp pain.
Instinct:
preloaded prior or policy scaffold.
Example: threat should bias freezing / escape learning.
Drive:
homeostatic or motivational deficit gradient.
Example: hunger, thirst, fatigue, social need.
Protoemotion:
primitive affective-control signal that changes attention, learning,
action thresholds, valuation, and mode.
Example: fear, relief, safety, wanting, aversion, curiosity.
Emotion:
protoemotion plus appraisal, memory, context, social meaning,
narrative, and self-model.
This distinction lets REE model instinct without requiring fully hard-coded behaviour, and model protoemotion without prematurely claiming full human-like emotion.
Design consequence for REE
The 603 lineage illustrates why this distinction matters.
The system did not merely need a generic fear instinct. It needed:
- a trained harm valuation pathway;
- a working threat / safety signal;
- escape-affordance linkage;
- action-contingent relief/safety credit;
- bounded E3 action-selection authority.
The protoemotional signals only become behaviourally useful when the relevant representational and action-selection substrates are wired.
Therefore, future REE design should avoid treating instincts as whole behaviours and avoid treating protoemotions as narrative emotions.
Use this rule:
Instincts preload priors.
Protoemotions express those priors as live control pressure.
Emotions integrate those pressures into self/context/narrative states.
Status
This is a terminology addendum, not a new mechanism or claim. It should be folded into docs/architecture/affect_primitives.md when that file next receives a safe architecture-reference edit.