The Core Emotion Framework as an Integrative Architecture for Affective Science

Emotion science has long been divided across cognitive, affective, and motivational traditions, each offering partial but valuable insights into how emotional episodes unfold. This paper introduces the Core Emotion Framework (CEF) as a structural architecture designed to clarify the minimal components required for an emotional event. The CEF organizes emotional activity into three centers—Cognitive (Head), Affective (Heart), and Conative (Gut)—each defined by a distinct set of operators. Rather than proposing a new taxonomy of emotions, the framework offers a way to describe how emotional configurations emerge dynamically across perception, relational meaning, and action readiness. A worked example illustrates how the CEF captures the lived complexity of an emotional rupture. The goal is to provide a conceptual scaffold that supports interdisciplinary dialogue and empirical extension.