AccScience Publishing / JCBP / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/JCBP025260048
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REVIEW ARTICLE

The central role of emotion-driven self-organization in consciousness

Ralph D. Ellis1*
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1 Department of Philosophy, School of Arts and Sciences, Division of Humanities, Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
JCBP, 025260048 https://doi.org/10.36922/JCBP025260048
Received: 25 June 2025 | Revised: 4 September 2025 | Accepted: 16 September 2025 | Published online: 13 October 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Psychotherapy and Clinical Psychology)
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

This paper brings together, from an enactivist and self-organizational perspective, two separate but parallel streams of research on the role of emotion in conscious and cognitive processes. There is already an extensive and growing body of research on the subcortical and limbic influences on the neuroplasticity of many brain functions, including cortical ones. At the same time, among cognitive theorists and philosophers of mind, there has been renewed interest in the enactivist and dynamical systems structure of mental processes, with growing attention to emotion as a driver of action affordances and action imagery that shape consciousness. However, there has been little attention to the way these two streams can enhance each other’s explanatory coherence. Neuroplasticity emerges as a common thread linking both streams. The theory of self-organization, as applied to emotion-driven enactivity in conscious functions, can serve as a conceptual bridge between these two emerging areas of research. Here, we offer a theoretical framing of the endogenously action-initiating dynamics of consciousness and its neural substrates as driven and shaped by emotion, with implications for both clinical intervention strategies and empirical research.

Keywords
Neuroplasticity
Emotion
Enactivism
Self-organization
Neurophenomenology
Embodied mind
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
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Journal of Clinical and Basic Psychosomatics, Electronic ISSN: 2972-4414 Print ISSN: 3060-8562, Published by AccScience Publishing
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