Research Report: Affective Entanglement as a Mechanistic Basis for Quantum-Like Contextuality in Psychopathology

This report develops a mechanistic account of affective entanglement as the basis for quantum like contextuality in psychopathology. Quantum probability theory provides the formal architecture, modeling emotional and cognitive states as superpositions that collapse under measurement, with contextuality, incompatibility, and entanglement emerging as core structural properties. Within the Core Emotion Framework (CEF), these quantum like effects arise through operator fusion, in which separable functional operators transition into non separable, entangled configurations. Such fusion restricts the accessible state space and produces the clinical rigidity characteristic of disorders such as BPD, where emotional processing collapses into a narrow, inflexible attractor. A formalization using operator pair state vectors and entanglement metrics (e.g., von Neumann entropy, Concurrence) links these dynamics to measurable behavioral signatures. The framework generates testable predictions, including CHSH type inequality violations under high arousal and heightened order effect sensitivity in fused clinical populations. This approach reframes psychopathology as a problem of entanglement structure rather than categorical dysfunction and suggests therapeutic interventions aimed at decoherence based detangling to restore flexible operator dynamics.