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Circular causality of emotion and interoception

2016 review on interoception and emotion, Seth & Friston describe how interoception and emotional awareness aren't in a simple one-way causal relationship (neither one causes the other). Instead, they form a loop. The brain generates predictions about internal bodily states, and those predictions drive autonomic reflexes through active inference. At the same time, actual interoceptive signals feed back and update those predictions. Emotion isn't a separate thing layered on top of this, it's what any representation gets labeled with once it starts generating interoceptive predictions, and those predictions are always shaped by whatever exteroceptive (external) and proprioceptive (body position/movement) information is happening at the same time. So affect emerges from the prediction-error loop itself, not from interoceptive signals alone, and it can't be cleanly separated from the broader context the brain is also sensing
(Seth & Friston, 2016)
image-28.pngFigure 1. Inference and perception across different modalities. Green arrows represent exteroceptive predictions and prediction errors underlying perception of the external world. Orange arrows represent proprioceptive predictions (and prediction errors) generating action through active inference. Blue arrows represent interoceptive predictions (and prediction errors) underlying emotional processing and autonomic regulation. Integrated experiences of embodied selfhood emerge from the joint hierarchical content of selfrelated predictions across all these dimensions, including—at hierarchically deep levels—multimodal and amodal predictions.461x457

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