[kszx]

Similar to my model, which is itself quite intuitive to someone who likes economic modelling: I like to think of emotion as a function of the change in the expected discounted sum of lifetime utility.

First, utility is a measure satisfaction at any point of time, which can be a function of many variables, including relationships, food, wealth etc.

Discounted utility means that changes in soon satisfaction levels have a higher impact than changes in satisfaction that are still a long time away.

And the fact that I use the expected value of the function allows for biases abd inconsistencies, which are obviously very frequently observed.

[EDIT: typo]