Joy Is Fragile Under Evaluation: A Threshold Model of Entry

Abstract

Joy is proposed as a thresholded affective regime whose entry depends less on reward intensity than on a transient reduction in evaluative monitoring. When monitoring load drops below a critical point, valuation can unfold without supervision, producing a discontinuous shift into a high-salience state. Re-engagement of monitoring collapses the regime. The model generates testable predictions about tolerance, measurement effects, and the behavioral conditions that permit or block entry.

Core claims

1. Joy is primarily an access problem, not an intensity problem.
   Intense positive affect often fails not because reward systems are weak, but because evaluative monitoring blocks entry.
2. Evaluative monitoring gates the regime.
   A control mode associated with comparison, conflict detection, cost evaluation, and self-checking acts as a bottleneck. When it relaxes below threshold, valuation can express itself.
3. Joy is a thresholded dynamic regime.
   Entry is discontinuous. Repeated null sessions followed by an abrupt transition are expected, rather than gradual training progress.
4. Joy collapses when monitoring re-enters the loop.
   The state fades when evaluation resumes, for example through comparison, duration prediction, meaning-making, or performance-checking, even if sensory input and dopaminergic tone are unchanged.
5. Tolerance may reflect faster monitoring, not weaker reward.
   Some cases of “tolerance” can be reframed as anticipatory re-engagement of evaluative control that prevents full emergence of the regime.
6. Persistence depends on delaying monitoring stabilization.
   Low-stakes, continuously interactive, non-optimizing and non-rhythmic engagement can prolong affect by preventing the control loop from stabilizing into a tracked procedure.
7. Measuring or optimizing the state can suppress it.
   Attempts to monitor, quantify, reproduce, or improve the state during induction tend to reintroduce the very mechanism that blocks access.
8. Value can remain intact without felt joy.
   A dissociation can occur where stimuli retain high value judgments while immediate affect is gated. Joy requires permission for value to be felt without supervision.
9. Behavioral structure is primary, anatomy is illustrative.
   ACC references are mechanistically plausible but not a required anatomical commitment. The framework is defined behaviorally, via monitoring-load constraints.
10. The model predicts a falsifiable transition signature.
    Expected markers include repeated clean failures, abrupt discontinuity, cross-context generalization, and persistence beyond acute stimulation.

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How to cite

Morin, F. (2025). Joy Is Fragile Under Evaluation: A Threshold Model of Entry. Preprint. Canonical page: https://florianmorin.com/papers/Precondition.html.