Emotion as Love in Disguise: A Dynamic Love-Based Valuation Theory of Emotional Intelligence

Contemporary theories of emotion explain affective life through biologically prepared modules, cognitive appraisal mechanisms, predictive construction, dimensional organization, neural survival circuits, attachment regulation, adaptive computation, and error minimization. While each framework offers important insight, none fully explains why emotional intensity varies dramatically across contexts, why identical informational input yields divergent responses, or why certain commitments reorganize identity and override instrumental reasoning.This paper introduces the Dynamic Love-Based Valuation (DLBV) framework, proposing that emotional diversity emerges from a unified valuation architecture grounded in identity-relevant valuation, termed love. Love is defined not as romantic behavior nor as a discrete emotion, but as a structural valuation system operating across three qualitatively distinct phases: attraction, immersion, and union. Attraction preserves instrumental rationality and goal-directed evaluation. Immersion reorganizes valuation through identity expansion and potential subordination of rational constraint. Union stabilizes valuation within integrated attachment and responsibility.Within this framework, emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, joy, jealousy, guilt, gratitude, hope, and despair are interpreted as contextual modulations of valuation under specific informational conditions, including threat, violation, deprivation, alignment, rivalry, uncertainty, or loss. Emotional tone and intensity depend not solely on appraisal content or arousal magnitude but on the structural depth at which valuation operates.To move beyond conceptual synthesis, the paper proposes an experimental paradigm designed to test phase-dependent modulation of emotional intensity. The design operationalizes identity-relevant valuation across the three love phases and examines whether identical informational stimuli elicit systematically different affective responses depending on phase-structured commitment. The Dynamic Love-Based Valuation framework therefore offers both an integrative theoretical account and a falsifiable empirical program for investigating the structural architecture of emotion.