Emotional Realities Part 2: Affective Realism

How feelings drive our perceptions—and why it’s so convincing

Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno

In Part 1, we explored how the brain creates a working model of the world by predicting what’s most likely to happen next, and then simulating that prediction in real time. What we see, hear, and perceive isn’t just based on raw input from our senses: it’s shaped by what our brain expects to find.

We also began to explore the idea that our most basic internal feelings—what we call our affect—aren’t reactions to reality so much as part of how that reality is constructed in the first place. This phenomenon is called affective realism: the experience of seeing the world not as it is, but as it feels.

A Useful Illusion

When our brain predicts something—based on past experience, emotional charge, or even a fleeting worry—it doesn’t just wait to see if it’s true. It loads that prediction into our sensory system. We don’t just think we see a spider, we actually see one.

This same process can happen with anything our brain anticipates: a bear in the woods, a friend in a crowd, a mugger in the shadows. These simulations happen very fast. And they are adaptive: it’s better to see an imaginary bear than to miss a real one.

But what makes this process so powerful—and sometimes so destabilizing—is that it doesn’t just shape what we perceive. It also shapes what we feel and believe.

Our Inner Virtual Reality—A Blessing and a Curse

We usually think of the world as something “out there”—a stable, external reality that exists separately from our mind. But as we saw in Part 1, what we experience is largely a simulation, shaped by prediction, filtered through affect, and tuned to what our brain cares about most in the moment.

But our brain isn’t just simulating our sensory world, it’s simulating our conceptual world as well. This is why we’re able to communicate with each other about things that don’t appear to our senses: why a $100 bill is worth more than the paper it’s printed on. What a democracy is. Or a marriage. You can’t point to these things directly, but they’re real in the sense that we experience and believe in them by consensus.

Without this capacity, not only would our physical survival be at risk, but we would lose the foundation of our shared human experience. Our relationships, our institutions, even our sense of self, depends on our ability to construct and participate in collective simulations. And our ability to perceive those simulations is essential to our survival as a species.

That’s the blessing. So what’s the curse?

The curse is that these same systems can also produce simulations that are deeply flawed but just as convincing, especially under emotional strain. To someone with anxiety, the world seems dangerous. To someone with depression, it feels hopeless.

And yet to their friends or family, none of that may appear to be true. But if you’ve ever tried to talk someone out of their anxiety or depression, you know how difficult it can be.

Unlike sensory simulations, which update quickly with incoming data, our conceptual simulations are far more resistant to change. That’s what makes them powerful, and sometimes dangerous. They can cause us to misread situations, misjudge people, and even mistake a fantasy for reality.

This is part of how conspiracy thinking can take hold. If something feels true—especially if it helps explain something scary or confusing—it can override logic, evidence, and common sense.

It can also cause real harm in relationships. Let’s look at a concrete example.

Is My Wife Cheating on Me?

That was the question a new individual therapy client brought to our first session.¹ For the past six months, he’d been waking up in the middle of the night, convinced his wife was having an affair. The thought would seize him suddenly, with graphic flashes of imagined scenes looping through his mind until he was flooded with panic.

Because she was a light sleeper, his tossing and turning often woke her. She’d ask what was wrong, and he would launch into a desperate interrogation, searching for some clue, some way to resolve the unshakable sense that something was off. But no matter how thoroughly she reassured him, he could never quite find the answer he was looking for. This led to a string of emotionally charged 3 a.m. conversations that left both of them exhausted any no closer to relief.

In fact, it was his wife who suggested he schedule an appointment. They had been married nearly 40 years, and she didn’t know what else to do. By then, he had started sleeping on the couch.

External Problems Versus Internal Problems

In our first session, I wanted to get a clearer picture of his concern, so I began by asking him about any direct evidence he may have had of his wife’s cheating—suspicious texts, unexplained calls, odd credit card charges, questionable social media interactions. Nothing. So I asked about indirect signs: any emotional involvement with male friends or coworkers? Any past history of infidelity in her prior relationships or in either of their families? No again.

Finally, I said, “So, what makes you think she’s cheating?”

He paused. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”

That’s affective realism. When we have a bad feeling and we assume something must be wrong out there, in the external world, rather than inside of us. He had a bad feeling about his wife, and like many of us, he tried to solve for it externally: interrogating her, searching for proof, hoping that if he found the missing piece, he’s solve the puzzle.

To draw out this distinction I asked, “Would you ever consider hiring a private investigator? Just to settle it for good?”

He looked down for a moment, then said, “No. I think it’s me.”

Now we were getting somewhere. Distinguishing a feeling from its object gets a lot easier once we understand where feelings come from.

Which brings us back to something we touched on in Part 1: how feelings start inside the body. Let’s review and go deeper.

Interoception: The Sensations inside Your Body

Feelings begin as sensations: subtle signals inside the body, registered by our interoceptive system. This system monitors the internal state of our organs, tissues, glands, and immune responses. Like our other senses, it’s continuously gathering input and generating output, but instead of sights or sounds, it delivers a moment-by-moment readout in the form of internal sensory experiences.

We can become aware of this internal stream at any time. Right now, if you shift your attention inward, what do you notice? Can you feel the movement of your breath? Your heartbeat? Feelings of hunger or satiety? That’s interoception. And the more closely we look, the more there is to notice.

These sensations arise from our brain’s constant regulation of the body’s energy resources. If you’re about to stand up, your brain increases your blood pressure, so you don’t faint. If you need to run, it releases cortisol to fuel your muscles with glucose. If you’re injured, it sends cytokines to begin repair.

All of this activity is generated outside of our conscious awareness, but it’s happening constantly. And if we pay close attention, we can feel it.

Affect: How Interoception Feels

When you add up all those bodily sensations in a given moment, they combine to form what we call affect—our most basic, moment-to-moment sense of feeling good or bad, calm or energized.

Affect is defined by two dimensions: valence (whether something feels pleasant or unpleasant) and activation (whether our energy is high or low). At any given moment, no matter what we're doing, we're always somewhere on those two dimensions.

When we’re relaxed and content, that’s a pleasant valence with low activation. If we’re elated, it’s pleasant with high activation. Gloomy? That’s unpleasant and low. Enraged or panicked? Unpleasant and high.

Neuroscientists developed the affect circumplex to illustrate these dimensions together.² Notice that very different emotions—like anger and fear, or excitement and anxiety—are all relatively close together. That’s because affect isn’t the same as emotion. It’s more basic. Emotion involves meaning, context, and interpretation. Affect is simply how you feel at the most basic level, mainly in terms of interoception.

Image by Alan Macy

For example, if I ask how you’re doing, you might say, “Pretty good; a little tired.” That’s affect: positive valence, low activation. And if you check a little more deeply, you might notice the underlying interoceptions—a fatigue in your shoulders, a heaviness in your eyes, a soft numbness in your head.

Because interoception changes throughout the day, so does affect. It shifts in response to what’s happening around us or inside us—like a tense conversation, a sudden change in temperature, a spiraling thought, an unexpected memory. Our body constantly adjusts it’s energy resources in response to these signals, and our affect registers that recalibration.

But here’s where it connects to our sense of reality: our affective state isn’t only shaped by what’s actually happening. It’s also shaped by what we imagine might be happening, or what our brain thinks might happen next.

Studies show that when people watch videos of skiers, their interoceptive patterns resemble those of actual skiers.³ The same is true when we watch suspenseful films. Our body tenses and our heart rate increases, even though nothing is happening to us directly. Our affect shifts, because our brain is responding as if the input is real.

Feeling Is Believing

When I meet someone new, and my brain predicts something might go wrong, my body responds, even before I’ve had a chance to think. I might feel a little edgy or on guard. That internal shift becomes a signal: something's off. Without realizing it, I start scanning for confirmation. I look for things that don’t sit right, and ignore what might be reassuring.

Now I’m not just thinking about a negative person—I’m experiencing one. That’s how a simple prediction becomes a self-reinforcing story. My brain simulates them as someone to be wary of, and because the feeling fits the picture, I believe it.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. To our paleolithic brain, assuming danger was the safer bet. Better to be wrong than caught off guard.

But here's the problem: the person my brain is simulating and the person standing in front of me are two different people.

We can see this most clearly in extreme cases, like racial or gender discrimination. We don’t process someone as an individual; we see them as a member of a group and then apply what we think we know about that group to the person. That simulation becomes the person we respond to rather than the actual person.

Affective Realism Pervades our Experience

This isn’t a rare event—it’s happening all the time. How we feel shapes what we see, and what we see feels like the truth. The qualities we assign to people, places, and things—good, bad, or neutral—don’t feel like interpretations. They feel like facts.

That’s why our favorite foods are delicious and the ones we dislike are disgusting. The art we love is beautiful; the art we don’t is ugly. People we agree with seem insightful. The people we don’t agree with are mistaken.

Psychologists call this naïve realism—the belief that we see the world objectively, and that people who see it differently must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.⁴

Affective realism goes a bit deeper. If we feel bad, something is bad. The emotion becomes the evidence.

Of course, sometimes a bad feeling does mean something’s wrong. Like when our phone buzzes with a text that confirms our worst fear. But just as often, the feeling comes first, like that jolt of unease when we read an ambiguous message from our partner: We need to talk. From there, our mind is liable to spin up a vivid worst-case scenario. That cascade—starting in the body, amplified by the mind—is how we end up feeling certain something’s wrong, even when there’s nothing concrete to point to.

A study of judges in Israel showed they were more likely to deny parole just before lunch.⁵ Their brains interpreted the discomfort of hunger as a “gut feeling” that the prisoner might be dangerous. In another study, people saw neutral faces as more smiling when they were first induced to feel good, and more frowning when they were induced to feel bad.⁶ The faces didn’t change—their affect did, and that was enough.

Because affective realism is baked into the underlying circuitry of our brain, there’s no way to stop it from happening. But we can stop assenting to our feelings as indicators of self-evident truths. The more clearly we see how affect shapes what we perceive, the more space we have to respond constructively.

My Wife Is My Best Friend—and My Worst Nightmare

In the example of the client I mentioned earlier, the wife he saw during the day was his best friend—familiar, funny, devoted. But the one he saw in the middle of the night was someone else entirely. A flirt. A liar. Someone capable of betrayal. Same person, two radically different perceptions.

Over the next couple of weeks, I asked him to track his interoceptive sensations and affect whenever these images of his wife arose, both the trusting ones and the fearful ones. What did it feel like in his body to think of her this way?

What we discovered was striking. During the day, when he pictured her infidelity, it felt mostly cognitive. An uncomfortable thought paired with a faint burning in his stomach, but not much more. In the middle of the night, though, he’d wake up nauseated and panicky, his heart pounding, his chest tight.

The thought would flash first—something was wrong—and within seconds, his mind would spin into vivid, involuntary images of his wife with another man. The more intense the imagery, the worse he felt. And the worse he felt, the more convincing the story became. It was a self-reinforcing loop, and by the time he came fully awake, he was tearful and on the verge of a panic attack.

This kind of dissonance isn’t uncommon. When we’re flooded, the part of us that trusts and knows our partner can feel inaccessible. In its place, our brain conjures a threat, because uncertainty paired with high affect demands an explanation.

After several weeks of this, something started to shift. Not because the fear had vanished, but because he started to recognize its architecture. In the middle of the night there was no new information, no evidence of anything. Just a powerful internal simulation, constructed by his own mind and fueled by distress. It felt like reality. But it wasn’t.

So we started working with that—not by debating the content of the story, but by learning to relate to it differently.

When he woke up in a panic, he’d turn his attention away from the imagery and toward the sensations in his body. Sometimes it was heat in his chest, other times a hollow ache in his gut. He’d breathe into those sensations, name them gently—this is fear—and remind himself, this is a simulation, not a perception. He didn’t try to banish the story. He just stopped assenting to it.

This practice wasn’t always easy, but it marked a turning point.

As the sensations became less threatening, the mental spiral began to lose its grip. And what had once felt like urgent evidence of betrayal started to register more like a familiar panic pattern—a nighttime echo of older fears that had little to do with his wife.

As his internal world settled, so did the space between them. He stopped waking her up in the middle of the night. She felt less accused, less confused. And gradually, trust—both in her, and in his own reality—began to rebuild.

In Part 3, we’ll walk through how he learned to recognize the simulation he was caught in—and how we can do the same. When we can observe our emotional reality without getting swept away, we can ease its grip and respond with more clarity.

Because when we stop believing every bad feeling is evidence of danger, we open the door to something better: clarity, connection, and the freedom to respond instead of react.

¹ This example is based on a real couple in my therapy practice. I have changed their names, demographics, and other information to protect their identities.

² Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1161-1178.

³ Hetland, A., Vittersø, J., Wie, S. O. B., Kjelstrup, E., Mittner, M., & Dahl, T. I. (2018). Skiing and thinking about it: Moment-to-moment and retrospective analysis of emotions in an extreme sport. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 971.

⁴ Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In T. Brown, E. S. Reed & E. Turiel (Eds.), Values and Knowledge (pp. 103–135). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

⁵ Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(17), 6889–6892.

⁶ Siegel, E. H., Wormwood, J. B., Quigley, K. S., & Barrett, L. F. (2018). Seeing what you feel: Affect drives visual perception of structurally neutral faces. Psychological Science, 29(4), 496–503.