Abstract
<p>The sense of presence - the feeling of 'being there' in an environment - is a foundational concept in consciousness research, yet its relationship to human affect remains theoretically underdeveloped. Although presence and emotion are known to interact, prior accounts have treated this relationship as either unidirectional or have failed to specify which aspects of affect interact with which layers of presence. The present paper addresses this gap by proposing a model that maps mechanistic interactions between the layers of presence, as conceptualised by Riva et al. (2004), and the components of the human affectome, as taxonomised by Schiller et al. (2024). This paper argues that the affective features valence and arousal share bidirectional relationships with core presence, such that moment-to-moment affective quality both shapes and is shaped by the organism's felt engagement with the immediate environment. We further argue that the global affective concerns of trajectory and optimisation share bidirectional relationships with extended presence, such that long-timescale affective states both disrupt and are regulated by the organism's autobiographical, trans-temporal self. The hierarchy of affective concern, termed distance, is proposed to influence core presence unidirectionally, with more immediate concerns having greater impact than distal ones. These relationships are defended using a combination of empirical evidence from virtual reality research and convergent clinical observations from depersonalisation-derealisation disorder, depression, dementia and anosognosia. The model generates four testable hypotheses for future empirical investigation and offers a more granular and mechanistically precise account of the presence-affect relationship than has previously been proposed.</p>