For appraisal, different aspects of the situation and different goals are represented by different
neural populations. Positive and negative constraints between the aspects and the goals are captured
by excitatory and inhibitory synaptic connections between the neurons in the different populations.
Overall appraisal of how a situation fits or fails to fit with your goals comes about because of
parallel processing through the firing activity of the neural populations as they interact. Value
naturally enters the picture because the neural populations involved in the representation of the
situation and personal goals include ones in areas such as the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, and
the orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex that help to encode positive and negative features. An overall
assessment of value comes about when parallel constraint satisfaction combines the features of the
situation, goals, and values to compute the overall emotional coherence of the situation.