MESA Research Group is pleased to highlight new research from Dr. Skye C. Cooley and Jonathan McCoy, titled "Emotion as Constitutive of Consciousness: A Predictive Processing Framework for Autonomous Experience." This paper offers a bold reconceptualization of emotion's role in consciousness, arguing that rather than simply responding to reality, emotion actively generates the experiential world through predictive processing. Drawing on Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle and Lisa Feldman Barrett's constructed emotion theory, the authors demonstrate that affective states function as a primordial prediction layer — shaping embodied meaning before conceptual thought emerges.

The framework positions emotion as ontologically primary, proposing that archetypes emerge as stable attractor patterns in predictive space, recurring across cultures due to shared embodiment and evolutionary optimization. Narratives, in turn, bind these affective-archetypal experiences into meaningful, reality-constitutive sequences. Extending the model to universal scales, the paper proposes that consciousness operates across nested hierarchies, with individual experience representing localized instantiations of universal intelligence. The research presents testable predictions and explores implications for therapeutic transformation, contemplative practice, and participatory cosmology — bridging scientific rigor with deeper questions about the nature of experience.

This work reflects the MESA Research Group's commitment to transdisciplinary inquiry at the intersection of communication, cognition, and meaning-making. Cover image produced by Canva AI.