Abstract

Optional-I a.k.a. Bliss Theory provides that the emotional system is (down-)regulated by the optional activity of self-attributive belief (and therefore not downregulated when that activity is not carried out).

The high virtues, which may be understood in emotional/motivational terms,
the central messages of each major religion,
the psychology of sports and other high performance activities,
and the unconditional, that is to say irrational, emotional flow states of serenity and bliss:

are all instances of avoidance of, of not carrying out, self attribution.

This short paper seeks to characterize the elements of this theory and lay out a path toward empirical verification of its claims.

Introduction: prerequisites to a Nomological Network

Nomos = Law. A construct, even a latent one not directly observeable, should have distinctive predictive validity in the real world. To do anything with a construct it must be:

• measureable so you can say you have some of it, and

• reliable, that is, autocorrelated, so whatever you have, you actually have, and it doesn't disappear next time you measure it. Comparing frequency of agreement between observers vs by chance (Cohen's Kappa. Cmopare vs its weaknesses 1) on test/retest (which should show validity but is low even with self-report changing or SR not changing but DSM diagnosis changing) or 2) on record & rate by interviewer/others (which may be highly correlated without validly predicting reliability across interviewers - who could ask different questions and go in different directions, suggesting unreliability despite correlatedness between interviewer & coders on a recording.)

• real in the sense that it is there even if you look at it from different angles; different measures of the same thing converge to each other, since the thing isn't just the one or other measure, but a real thing that all the measures of it measure (convergent validity),

• it is its own category for whatever it is; if something else is supposedly different but looks the same when actually measured, then maybe you measured the other category: your categories are not different. Your construct should be different from the other nearby constructs; so, measures of it should find the thing to be actually different from the same measures on the confused-other option. If you can't discriminate between your construct and another, then yours isn't actually a different idea. (discriminant validity)

A measure including its internal structure (sum/average, product, ..) should remain stable when generalized theoretically or practically.

A construct is valid if inferences are valid (accurately predictive) from measures of it to predicted (real world, criterion) consequences, using the logic of its theory. Its implications should be explored and known, Validating it means clarifying its logic and describing any problems and methodological solutions: What does the construct and its measurements mean to us, to subjects, how did the idea come about, how general or context- or individual-specific is it? What are the dimensions of the data (SLOT Self-report, Life-outcomes, Other-report, Test/psychophysiological tests)? Are they about description, capability, behavior past or observed, recordings, (school etc.) records, observer effects or hidden observer, under producer task.

So, justify your methods describing their source process, why they are appropriate to theory & circumstance, call out likely sources of variance. Have a theory of the instrument (including S- and O-data) & how it measures the construct, how much information goes in, how different are the various items. Variance sources may include artificiality, ego-presentation, incomprehension, hidden effects, observer effects.

Preferably, provide predictions of phenotypically diverse 'criteria'. Explore widely, apply widely, then generalize appropriately, for science and for applications.

Control for method effects which might falsely support convergent validity; look for trait-nested method effects.

Item response theory asks us to estimate the std deviation of the measurement for each subject and each item. A necessary idea?

Chester & Lasko 2021, .. Validation of Experimental Manipulations (Ms).. Experimental validity means the experimental manipulation has its strongest effect on the target construct and theoretically appropriate effects on the nomological network surrounding it. An experiment run on the fly is unexplored as to EM validity. Preferably do pilot construct validation, manipulation check (MC) (did this indeed manipulate what we say?). Have a protocol. Set N by pilot estimates, estimate the EM's effects on the whole nomological network.

Prefer experimental realism to avoid artefacts of bias, observer effects, Watch group differences, fatigue, unreliability, invalidity. Is the M-to-construct pathway causal?

Review related knowledge theories and NNs. Capture the full range of the construct, and differentially measure it and others in the NN accurately, make suitable predictions about group differences & test them.

Watch the nomological shockwave of an experimental manipulation hitting direct and indirect latent targets, missing confounders. Minimize noise, instrument effects, nonspecific spatter effects. Validity test even pilots, to be sure you are on target, check the M had its intended effect by measuring the target construct and show it is influenced by M. Check comprehension, wakefulness, attention). Use discriminant validity and the MTMM pattern to show specificity and estimate the shockwave.

"Minimally intrusive validation assessments are preferable to overt self-report scales. " (Hauser et al 2018)

So: Have multiple Ms, with multiple conditions, use within-participants work, randomly assign (this is core to experimental validation), describe pilot validity checks and M checks, use benefits of previous Ms where they exist.

Use M checks in the pilot to simplify the main study.
Face validity is not enough. single-item self-report is not enough.
MCs themselves need validation.
Estimate time course of effects.

Review and justify versus all the checklist items (Chester & Lasko)

Baseline concepts in the space of [I] Theory

Consider its logic and axioms.

Prerequisite, logical, constructs comprising a default, indeed tautological, understanding of the emotional process include:

• P: Perception,
• E: Emotional Evaluation,
• X: eXecution of an emotional assessment

as well as data structures:

• s: Situation or circumstance (as facts)
• a: emotional Assessment (whereby facts are laden with Attitudes)

These constructs logically characterize the emotional process and are the result of logical analysis (into the self-evidently orthogonal dimensions of fact vs attitude vs action) rather than empirical study.

Any organism which reacts to its environment with any degree of situational appropriateness, that is, is capable of multiple actions or responses such as directional movement or distinguishing food from non-food, (hence this applies to paramecium as well as to human) and has evolved priority selecting and implementing systems, can be understood in light of these constructs: can be considered to itself take note of facts (P), to evaluate those facts according to a motivational hierarchy (E), and to implement its motivational assessment (X).

Even more axiomatic, I assume

• that we are modelling organisms,
• that the modelled organism carries out this perception/action loop more or less continuously
• that it has and repeatedly updates internal *representations* which relate to its external and internal environment,
• that at least part of those representations are "experienced" by the organism through the various "qualia of experience" which are evolved information-representing features in some sense present to the inner eye of the organism,
• that the relations of internal representations with environment are a partial correspondence, which may be termed "perception" or "belief" in the domain of fact (P and s above), and "attitude" or "reaction" or "motivational/emotional features" ( a above) which are not strictly factual but nevertheless may be evolved conjointly with the factuality of those representations.

Hence organisms experience things and respond more or less appropriately.

To formalize this logical process model, I take the following characterization as uncontroversial and axiomatic:

P>s | E>a | X

That is, perception yields situational understanding, emotional evaluation based on that yields an emotional assessment, and the emotional implementation system uses that to execute its motivational/emotional choices, which are the prioritization of some things over others and the alignment of internal resources toward that priority.

Adding [I]

This attribution is informational in the sense that the organism's internal representation of things includes information. Among the logical assertions made by its representations, such as, "The cat is on the mat", might be some that include reference to itself, such as "I see that cat", "That is my cat", or "I like that cat". These assertions may be more or less factual, more or less performative (made into fact by the act of their assertion), more or less supported by qualia of experience (one of which is the qualia of the non-verbal experience verbalizeable as (intransitive) "I am"), more or less motivational/emotional, more or less involved and embodied in internal and external responses and actions. These distinctions may develop relevancy but for now we may simplify. Self-attribution is the believing thought that some aspect of the situation s bears upon self. Either that aspect is me, or is mine, or somehow says something about me.

Paramecia and humans constantly reevaluate their circumstances to respond appropriately, humans constantly impose a moral assessment of how things are and ought to be, using that assessment to guide their actions.

N+V Humor Theory uses [Inner Judgement] instead of [I]

Veatch's "N+V" Humor Theory came this far, in asserting Humor occurs if and only if the organism views the situation simultaneously as (V), a subjective moral violation, and (N) not so, that is "normal" or "benign", including positive and neutral together but NOT negative.

The simultaneity condition implies a rapid, discursive, even parallel, motivational review process continuously going on in the humor-capable organism. So far so good.

And in the initial version of Bliss Theory the definition of the bliss or flow state was by means of the non-operation of the Inner Judge (a name for that motivational review process). Shut it up, you get flow state.

And perhaps that is the truest statement of Bliss Theory, but it seemed that the involvement of Self Concept was so powerful in regulating emotion, that optionality of Self Attribution could almost equally capture the same contrast. Does it seem to you that the primary activity of the Inner Judge in figuring out how to feel about and respond to things is specifically by measuring progress in the Story of My Self? If so, perhaps

[I] == [Inner Judgement].

I()

We very typically maintain a detailed and emotionally annotated mental model of ourself and its story, status and progress: that bundle of virtues and vices, memories and experiences and capabilities, of relationships and places. We do not just choose, but we are in a sense bound to use that model motivationally. To give ourselves agency in the matter, say, we use it to know how to feel about things, and to reason about plans and goals and how things are going for us. It is reasoning machinery applied to the task of reasoning about the reasoner, the organism which is doing the reasoning, and it is widely, self-servingly, and (driven by fear and panic, greed and arrogance) thought to be useful, so that we can get our emotions and lives under some kind of control, why, because it is not about mere facts, but about motivational and emotional information: how we feel about things. N and V must be basic to its categories if N+V Humor Theory is true, but we may imagine an inner logical machinery calculating N and V most basically but ramified with our associative, eventually predicative, and especially negation-asserting mental capabilities. It may apply a trichotomy of Violation, Neutral, and Positive. It certainly to makes use of the dimensions of Time, Person, Place, to yield fundamental contrasts of Past/Future, Self/Other, Near/Far (etc.?), and within such archetypal landscapes to assess not just what is going on but what is the moral/motivational/emotional assessment of what is going on, has gone on, might go on.

In short, the predicate I() can apply to anything we like, but then the particular trick of our emotional system applies. Whatever s to which we say I(s), the emotional system implements the feeling associated with having that attribute. It slaves to the attribution.

This is the claim that Bliss Theory makes regarding the human emotional/motivational system:

It is DOWN-regulated.

(A spatial metaphor may help. It is as though there is a weight in the form of a hand or object or wall or ceiling, pressing down upon your heart. As if it is heavy, it is above, it is pushing down on you, and it has a certain feeling; it has the feeling of the deepest motivational knowledge, the babyhood or toddlerhood or child or preteen or teen learning that if you don't do THIS right then you'll get THAT, where THAT is the withholding of mother love, or the falling into the abyss, or some such heavy and urgent potential loss. Others' mileage may vary. Then whatever success you achieve, it just postpones the damage and loss for some while,

The model here is that our motivational systems have a knowledge hierarchy, and some knowledge is more abstract inclusive and supercategorical, and this downregulatory force or feeling is on the very abstract side, as it applies to about everything. Even happiness, is barely happiness under its heavy hand.

¬I()

That is Bliss Theory.

• At the level of reasoning, what we may write as I(s) occurs, when the organism reasons that it thereby knows something about itself.
• At the level of subjective experience, that curious qualia of an intrinsically but not contrastively "I am" experience, can be co-experienced along with other qualia relating to any aspect of any situation.
• At the level of emotion, through the emotional consistency or constraint feature claimed here, whereby self-attributional believed thought constrains emotion, we generate, we experience, we get the feeling which that thought implies for us, and not just passively but also through our motivated action we further elaborate our ongoing emotionally colored story of Me.

We have seen the assumptions, concepts, and baseline model, and central construct of this theory.

The Nomological Network of [I]

Hence the construct I() modulates the relationship between the circumstances s and alternative emotional experiences of those circumstances.

I() may perhaps be measured by probes detecting the above emotional characteristics under conditions of self-construction and non-self-construction.

• Something bad happened.
• It happened to you, how do you feel about it on a scale of 1-7?
• It happened to someone else, how do you feel about it on a scale of 1-7?

Operational Definitions

Example Content

Below is an example of a draft of your capstone paper (Part I):

Study paradigm (and operational definition of the DV): “My lab studies what makes it possible for young children to delay gratification. To study this under controlled conditions, we created a laboratory paradigm in which children are invited, one child at a time, to a room with few distracting objects, except for a table, a desk bell, and a chair. They are told that if they'd like to have two treats (e.g., marshmallows) they will need to wait until the experimenter returns. If they do not want to wait they can ring the bell at any point and bring the experimenter back and the wait is over. But if they do that, they can only have one treat. This paradigm is described in more detail in ... (references).

Theory/hypotheses: My program of studies is aimed at understanding the effect of cognitive control at the following 3 stages of information flow: attending to the reward; thinking about the reward; and thinking about the experience of consuming the reward. We hypothesize that preventing the activation of an anticipated experience of consuming the reward, either by down-regulating the sensory input (e.g., by covering the reward so it's not visible) or by activating alternative mental representations (i.e., thinking about something else, not the reward), or by focusing on more abstract aspects of the reward (e.g., focusing on the shape of the reward, not the taste), will make waiting easier, and increase the amount of time children wait in order to receive the more desired reward.

A prototypical visual representation of the nomological network and operational definitions of the constructs (from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/mpr.1497): [The above figure is a generic one, so please adapt it or make one from scratch (you can use MS Word to “insert” ovals, text boxes, draw arrows, etc.). Following the convention used in structural equation modeling, all visible variables (manipulations, outcomes) are shown in rectangles, while all the latent constructs are shown in ovals.]

In the figure above, X1, X2, and X6 are "indicators" (i.e., measures) of Construct E. X3, X4, and X5 are manipulations intended to affect Construct F. Construct E and F are theorized to affect Construct G. X7, X8, and X9 are indicators of Construct G.

In my case, there will be an arrow from experimental manipulation X1 below (covering the reward) to Construct A, “activation level of the mental representation of the reward.” Experimental manipulation X2 asks the child to think about something fun they did recently (vs. thinking about the reward). An arrow goes from this to Construct A. In other words, in this paradigm, Construct A is operationalized by a manipulation. But it would be ideal if a manipulation check is done to make sure that the construct is actually influenced by these manipulations. That’s shown by an arrow going from Construct A to the manipulation check measure. Construct A is theorized to increase Construct B, "anticipation of pleasurable experience with the reward." So there is an arrow from A to B.

This particular nomological network includes a mediator: Construct B, which mediates the effect of Construct A on Construct C.

You can measure Construct B and use that in a Baron and Kenny (1986) mediation analysis. Or, you can manipulate B for an “experimental causal chain” mediation analysis (e.g., Spencer, et al., 2005; Pirlott & MacKinnon, 2016). [Inclusion of a mediator, and talking about how you’d do mediation analyses, is optional, but if you include it, I’ll read it and share my thoughts on it with you, in hope my comments will be helpful if you actually do mediation analyses in the future.]

An arrow goes from Construct B to Construct C, "desire to have the reward right now." And there is an arrow from that to a visible, outcome variable, Y1: "time it takes for the child to ring the bell.” This is the outcome variable. Y2 is an alternative outcome variable (e.g., rating of how frustrated the child looks while waiting).

B: anticipation of pleasurable experience with the reward

C: desire to have the reward right now

X1: covering the reward

X2: think about something fun

X3: Manipulation of B for use in an experimental- causal-chain mediation analysis A: activation of the mental representation of the reward Y1

Measure of B for use as a mediator in a Baron-Kenny (1986) mediation analysis Manipulation check to see if Construct A is in fact activated Y2

[In your capstone paper, please also include a paragraph in which you describe how you’d test construct validity. Please use a broad definition of construct validity, as the validity of the whole configuration of theory- construct-measurement/manipulation. Here’s how it goes: If the data turn out exactly as you predicted, maybe everything is fine. But, if your research is like mine, often the results are a little (or a lot) different from predicted. Then we need to ask questions such as the following. What’s not right (i.e., is in need of revision): the utility/meaningfulness of the constructs? The theory connecting the constructs (e.g., the arrows connecting Construct A to B, and then B to C)? Any of the measures (i.e., arrows going from constructs to visible indicators)? Or any of the manipulations (i.e., arrows going from experimental procedures to constructs)? This is the moment scientific progress occurs! This could involve considering alternative ways of manipulating or measuring the constructs (e.g., instead of asking the child to think of something fun they did, you could play something distracting on a computer). You could use a conceptual version of MTMM, in which you see if alternative versions of the same constructs result in the same findings (supporting convergent validity, broadly defined). In addition, for a more complete conceptual validation, you’d want to see if something different happens if you replace these measures or manipulations with those that are not supposed to measure or influence these constructs (i.e., these measures and/or manipulations are for constructs that are irrelevant to the theoretically proposed processes). This addresses discriminant validity, broadly defined. [This section is intended to get you all thinking along these lines – a good faith effort is all that counts for this! What you describe may include measures and manipulations that might not exist (yet).]

Part II