The Structural-Constructivist Case for the Core Emotion Framework: A Comprehensive Resolution to Theoretical and Methodological Pathology in Affective Science

Affective science has reached a critical impasse, characterized by profound theoretical fragmentation and the absence of a unifying model of human psychology.¹ For decades, the discipline has been polarized into competing paradigms—biological essentialism, dimensional reductionism, and radical social constructivism—each offering incompatible explanations of what emotions are, how they are generated, and how they are regulated.¹ This balkanization has severely limited the field’s capacity to generate cumulative theory, integrate neurobiological findings across levels of analysis, and develop coherent clinical or computational models of affect.² The Core Emotion Framework (CEF) resolves this fragmentation by replacing category based and dimensional models with a structural constructivist architecture of ten functional operators distributed across three somatic cognitive centers. Designed as a rigorous structural constructivist system, the CEF systematically bridges these historical divides.² By conceptualizing emotional episodes not as static states, biological essences, or arbitrary linguistic constructs, but as dynamic sequences of ten functional operators acting across three somatic cognitive centers, the CEF provides an explicit, non redundant, and structurally coherent resolution to the long standing dilemmas of affective research.² Keywords: Core Emotion Framework (CEF); structural constructivism; functional operators; somatic cognitive centers; affective science; emotion architecture; operator functionalism; interoception; distributed neural networks; allostasis; cognitive emotional integration; structural psychopathology; chronic fusion; scenario based measurement; psychometric modeling.