The basic idea behind this diagram is simple. First, the 'phyletic', or affect-regulation dynamics hardwired into our brain-mind, detect something in the face, voice, or body, that might indicate a "threat". "Threat", here, means anything that might be affectively unwanted. For example, Person A, who suffers with agoraphobia, in ruminating about how he looks as he walks in a social area, unconsciously indicates his state of mind by his eye gaze, facial expression, and body movements. Person B, in walking by person A, picks up a slight discomfort in his body before he swiftly turns his head in another direction. What happened here?
The social trauma of person A is unconsciously communicated as he struggles internally to regulate his negative affect. In his mind, his phenomenology is fear-based, as well as ridden with shame.
Person B's right amygdala notes it. That is, the phyletic, homeostatic, self regulatory processes of Person B's brain notes it, which is then instantly represented within his phenomenology as a sub-symbolic percept - that is, the "how" the person he just saw looks (anxious, uncomfortable, or threatening) as well as how it makes him feel (anxious, uncomfortable; "awkward" i.e. a dilute form of shame); however, he turns his head an instant later, and in doing so, has "regulated" his affect without actually symbolizing why he turned his head (for example, by saying, "this 'weird' person makes me want to turn away from him").
In this simplistic example, the phyletic memory, or the invariant, and unconscious mode of regulating the self, notes in person A's behavior a suite of actions that indicate threat. Threat here, to be sure, is enormously subtle: negative affect. Negative affect is interpreted as a threat by the brain because it compromises the functioning of the self, or, said differently, compromises the coherency of organism-environment relatedness. In addition, negative affect indicates low social status - or "beta status" - in that the organism who exhibits this behavior obviously has trouble making relationships with others. Since the human brain is ultimately shaped by the forces of group selection - or the "shared intentionality" that uses positive affect to bring individual human organisms into a common ground - an organism that exhibits negative affect activates threat-detection processes in the right amygdala.
The turning of the head is not-so much culturally learned as it too is phyletically instantiated. However, what IS learned is the knowledge brought to such facts: HOW the culture he developed within responds to negative affects is transferred and integrated within his mind-brain. This example is enormously simple, whereas a more complex example could work by activating certain consciousness-based, "reflexive social language" (Cozolino) processes that derive from past conditioning. The "grist" could come from past conversations with others, or what he observed in a third party or popular media, as a way to "deal" with negative affects.
An example from my own life, is how my father reacts when I decide to talk about certain "delicate" things - things which he himself has been relentlessly conditioned by past thinking/feeling and the environment he group up within, to dissociate from conscious reflection. So I'll say "how does that make you feel?" (after he describes to me a certain negative interaction he had) which causes a slew of actions; first, a slight pause - as if recognizing inside that he doesn't want to talk about this (this is the first part: threat detection); then he'll quickly say something that I know from past interactions he often says: he has preexisting "defense tactics" that become reflexively communicated when negative affects are activated. What's most interesting is the abrupt transformation of affect. What appeared to bother him a moment earlier has been replaced by an apparently (or deceptively) positive affect, oriented towards a different mental object. His "instrumental avoidance" is language-based, no doubt more related to the left side of the brain, and the left amygdala, than the right side (which detects the threat). He uses the "self-constructions", or what he says about himself and how he thinks about himself, and these are linked with positive-affects (more often than not; although dissociative processes may also activate negative affects like anger, jealousy, or resentment following a negative percept).
Point is, the psychological dissociation described above is simultaneously a neurological dissociation between the hemispheres. What the phyletic right hemisphere picks up, and seeks to notify consciousness of, is dissociated by the culturally-conditioned left hemisphere, as the 'knowledge of the right', is incompatible with the interests, goals, and sociocultural-embeddedness of the left.
This way of seeing things is perfectly consistent with existing neuropsychological research that lateralizes negative affect more to the right hemisphere (indicating a concern with threat detection) and positive affect to the left hemisphere. Again, this makes perfect sense, as threat detection is more of a holistic phenomenon, and thus unconscious,, whereas inclining the organism to some potential good recruits consciousness, which is lateralized to the left hemisphere. Thus, "instrumental avoidance", when considered in terms of neural darwinism, is happening all the time, from birth onwards, as the organism-self uses past positive images/affect associations to distance itself from negative affects.
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