Context makes it possible to relate what happened to how it felt and under what circumstances. It is a first-class part of the atom, not decorative atmosphere. “Triangulation” describes the joint interpretation of Memory, Feeling and Context; it does not establish a causal or statistical procedure.
Context records include people and their names, places, time, situations, topics and other relevant circumstances. Each record MUST retain its identity, source, and whether it is recorded, user-confirmed or inferred. Names alone must not be treated as unique person identities. A context record should distinguish the original occurrence from a later recall when that information is available.
4.1 Detection
Context may be supplied directly by a person, available in source metadata, or extracted from recorded content. An implementation may identify named people, places, temporal expressions and situations in text or media. These are permitted input routes, not a prescribed detection model.
Detection MUST preserve evidence references or source wording where available and distinguish an inferred interpretation from an explicit statement. Recording time is not automatically the event time; a mentioned person is not automatically present; a mentioned place is not automatically the event location. Ambiguous identities and times remain unresolved rather than silently merged.
4.2 Influence on a feeling
A context item can relate to the atom generally or influence a specific affect state. A scored influence link MUST identify the context item, affect state, interpretation revision, strength, source and any confidence assessment.
For example, “At the hospital, seeing Sarah made me feel relieved” supplies place, person and situation context and explicitly links seeing Sarah to relief. It does not establish an exact influence strength or establish that the hospital contributed equally.
Influence evidence may come from:
| Evidence | What it supports | Limitation |
|---|---|---|
| Direct user assessment | A reported contribution and, if asked, reported strength | Subjective report, not independently established causality |
| Explicit relational language | A stated context–feeling association | Often establishes a link without a numeric magnitude |
| Qualifiers such as “slightly” or “mostly” | An inference about relative strength | Numeric mappings are not established by this standard |
| Repeated context–feeling patterns | A hypothesis of association across memories | Frequency and co-occurrence do not establish causal influence |
A proposed storage scale is [0, 1]: zero is explicitly assessed no influence; one is the strongest influence within the declared method; null means unknown. The scoring procedure and its calibration are not established. An uncalibrated system must retain a qualitative assessment or null rather than invent a precise score. High confidence that a relationship exists does not imply strong influence.
4.3 Proximity
Closer context dots mean stronger contextual influence on the linked emotion; farther means weaker influence. Unknown influence must appear in an identified unscored area or listing rather than be positioned as weak influence.
Once a comparable influence score exists, a proposed display mapping is:
distance = near + (1 − influence) × (far − near)
Here 0 < near < far are declared profile parameters. This formula is a display convention, not a psychological scoring model. Angular placement may aid readability; radial distance carries influence. The emotion's VAD values and coordinate position must remain unchanged.
One context item may influence multiple feelings with different strengths. A view may show the context of a selected feeling or use linked appearances of the same context record. It must not imply that a single point satisfies incompatible distances. Duplicate appearances do not create new records. Layout constraints must not silently distort the relationship being displayed.
4.4 Contextual similarity
Keep three comparisons distinct:
| Comparison | Basis |
|---|---|
| Memory similarity | Content or experience |
| Feeling similarity | Corresponding affect states and VAD |
| Context similarity | Shared people, places, temporal relationships, situations or topics |
Similar circumstances can produce different emotions. Similar emotions can occur in different circumstances. Contextual similarity can support suggested clusters and clouds, but must retain its evidence and comparison method. Unknown context is not a mismatch.
No universal similarity formula, feature weights or clustering thresholds are established here. Influence links context to feeling within an interpretation; similarity compares circumstances across memories. Neither score may stand in for the other.