Structural-Constructivist Resolution in Affective Science: A Comparative Analysis of the Core Emotion Framework and Traditional Dimensional Models

The longstanding divide between discrete emotion theories and dimensional models has constrained affective science to low resolution descriptions of human emotional life. Traditional valence–arousal frameworks, while empirically convenient, collapse functionally distinct states into shared coordinates and offer limited explanatory power for psychopathology or computational modeling. The Core Emotion Framework (CEF), a structural constructivist architecture, resolves this impasse by defining emotional experience as the activation of ten irreducible functional operators organized across three centers of the Human Operating System. By treating emotions as operator level state vectors rather than positions on a hedonic plane, the CEF provides a mechanistic account of emotional regulation, clinical dysfunction, and synthetic affect. The framework distinguishes healthy modulation, fusion, and overflow dynamics; maps 500 lexicon terms and 300 microstates through the TS 6 symbolic vector schema; and offers a transdiagnostic diagnostic model grounded in operator agility rather than valence. Early pilot data support the discriminability of the operators, and the open validation program aims to confirm a ten factor oblique structure. The CEF thereby advances affective science from descriptive mapping to functional architecture, enabling high resolution clinical intervention, computational implementation, and cross domain application.