Think of a recent time when you were happy, perhaps because you enjoyed the convent joke at the start of this chapter, or more intensely because you got an invitation to visit a good friend in an exciting city. Such experiences are not raw wholes incapable of further interpretation; they have identifiable aspects. First, your happiness was not free-floating, but was connected with cognitive representations of the world, such as your friend and the city. You were happy that you were invited to make the visit. Second, conscious emotional experiences have a positive or negative character, in this case not just a feeling, but a good feeling. Third, conscious emotional experiences have an intensity, in this case a high degree in contrast to other situations that may make you only a little happy. Fourth, this emotional experience is differentiated from other emotions, including negative ones such as sadness and more or less intense versions of happiness. Fifth, emotional experiences begin and end: you start feeling happy as you first get the invitation and stop feeling happy when you get distracted by some annoying work task that must be completed. It would be pointless to try to give a mechanistic explanation of anything so vague as “what it feels like” to be happy, but the EMOCON
model has much to say about the five aspects of conscious experience just described.