“…Motives must be distinguished from conscious goals and intentions; motives ‘stand behind goals’ and stimulate the achievement of goals. If goals are not directly given in the situation, motives encourage goal formation. However, they do not generate goals, just as needs do not generate their objects” (Leontiev 1971).

Emotions are internal signals that reflect the relationship between motives and activities caused by motives. Alexey Leontiev reduced emotions to a reflection of meaning: “Emotional processes include a broad class of processes of internal regulation of activities. They perform this function by reflecting the meaning of the objects and situations that affect the subject, their significance for his life” (Leontiev 1971). It seems to us that this is not quite correct historically, because if meanings preceded emotions, then monkeys would be like robots, and we would now need to look not for a bridge from emotions to meanings, but for a bridge from meanings to emotions. In fact, meanings arose from emotions. Emotions still are a large part of the content of meanings, if only because they reflect processes in the body. “Primordial emotions are the subjective element of the instincts which are the genetically programmed behavior patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain and hunger for specific minerals etc.” (Denton et al. 2009). Meaning is a symbolization and mediation of emotions.

In humans, emotions, as one of the origins of meaning have gone beyond the instinctive response to signals: in the long evolutionary process of mediation, the emotional content of meanings has been partly rationalized so that meanings and emotions form a unity. Humans do not have meaningless emotions: they explain emotions in order to understand them. Meaning, in turn, has a certain emotional significance. This significance comes to the fore in values as meanings ordered by preference: Milton Rokeach called values “cognitive representations and transformations of needs” (Rokeach 1973, p. 20).

This understanding of values emphasizes their reflected and mediated nature. There is also another understanding that seeks to emphasize the continuity between the biological and the cultural in humans, according to which needs and values (as representations of needs) are not an exclusive feature of humans, but are inherent in all living beings: “Value is a more abstract category than organisms, since it is the one thing that all organisms pursue” (Frisina 2002, p. 217). Values are both subjective and objective phenomena: they are given to humans in their imagination and in their being. For the subject, the circumstances of the environment, things, events all appear as values: positive (goods or opportunities) or negative (evils or risks).

Human feelings—both direct perceptions and emotions as motive-oriented feelings—are always meaningful, they are to some extent abstract or mediated. Meanings, in turn, are to some extent sensory, they are always concrete or material. The dual nature of meaning as generalization and feeling is evident in etymology. We use the terms “meaning” and “sense” synonymously, since in Russian there is a word for both: smysl. The sensory and concrete side of smysl (sense) is indicated by its etymological origin in some European languages, where it is derived from “feeling.” The abstract and communicated side of smysl (meaning) becomes clear in Russian word smysl that is derived from “think,” “we send” (Chechulin 2011).