It extends the coherence models described in week 8 to model emotional cognition. Units have excitatory and inhibitory links between them, and activations that represent the acceptability of the element that the unit represents. But they also have valences , which represent positive and negative emotions. Units can also have excitatory and inhibitory valence links, which represent emotional connections. Procedures Just as activations spread through a neural network, so do valences.
Valences spread along valence links, and also along activation links.
Overall emotional assessment is measured by the valence of a unit after the network has settled. Applications Intuition Gut feelings are intuitions that emerge from emotional parallel constraint satisfaction. The decision to trust or not to trust someone usually involves an emotional judgment based on explanatory, conceptual, and analogical coherence. Empathy is a kind of analogical transfer that creates links between the source and the target that allows valences to spread. Persuasion works the same way.