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Emotional Valence and the Free-Energy Principle

Figure 6

Boxplots of the mean posterior variance of state after the elicitation of factive (happiness or unhappiness) and epistemic (fear or hope) emotions and before the observation of the next sensory input.

(left) Mean posterior variance during the low volatility stages of the reference scenario. (right) Mean posterior variance during the high volatility stages of the reference scenario. The mean was computed for each of 100 simulations of the reference scenario. In both the low and high volatility stages, the mean was on average higher for the epistemic (low volatility: M = 0.68, SD = 0.03; high volatility: M = 1.07, SD = 0.19) than the factive (low volatility: M = 0.58, SD = 0.02; high volatility: M = 0.69, SD = 0.06) emotions and it was also on average higher during the high (M = 0.88, SD = 0.24) than the low volatility (M = 0.63, SD = 0.06) stages.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003094.g006