Emotion

Every emotion in this framework is a reading of one gauge. All emotions appear to be triggered in response to the experience or anticipation of a gain or loss in life energy, which means the emotional system is not tracking events, relationships or meanings directly but tracking anima. Two variables produce the whole range. The first is direction, gain against loss, and the second is timing, anticipation against experience. Fear is anticipation of an attack on an anima source. Excitement is anticipation of access. Euphoria is the experience of life energy arriving, and depression is what chronic absence of it feels like. Boredom is the state of having no accessible interaction at all. This is why Marsh can treat emotions as diagnostic rather than as noise to be managed. An emotion identifies where energy is moving and in which direction, so a persistent one indicates a persistent transfer. It also underpins her account of personality, which is at least partly made up of emotional responses to anima attraction and repulsion, governed by whether conscious or emotional control over will is dominant. Personalities can be said to change when one takes over from the other, which is what happens visibly when drugs or illness let the emotional will dominate someone who normally has strong conscious control.

Basic emotion theory after Paul Ekman proposes a small set of discrete emotions with distinct expressions and physiology. Appraisal theories, from Magda Arnold and Richard Lazarus onward, hold that emotions follow from evaluations of a situation against a person's goals, which is the nearest existing structure to Marsh's account. Constructionist views such as Lisa Feldman Barrett's argue that emotions are assembled from more general affect rather than being natural kinds. Marsh's version is an appraisal theory with a single currency. Where Lazarus has a person evaluating events against many concerns, she has one thing being evaluated in every case, whether anima is arriving or being taken, which makes the theory far more parsimonious and correspondingly harder to falsify.