Glossary — Defined Terms

Every term defined by the HEART Standard, Empathy Systems Theory, and the MAP-States protocol. Each term links to its full definition.

Standard-Level Terms

Governance Trust Envelope (GTE) — An open execution trust architecture for AI governance controls. Provides isolation, authenticity, integrity, confidentiality, and attestation for any governance framework — HEART, EU AI Act, ISO 42001, or NIST AI RMF.

RCTA (Recognition, Calibration, Transparency, Accountability) — The four immutable governance dimensions of the HEART Standard. RCTA describes structural properties of the governance relationship between AI and human well-being, not properties of the AI technology itself.

Seven Axioms — The seven immutable constitutional conditions of the HEART Standard. Every governed AI system must satisfy all seven. No Standard revision, Division, or Guardian certification may contradict them.

Behavioral Governance Formula (BGF) — The HEART Standard's certification scoring mechanism. Computes a governance score from four universal dimensions — Recognition, Calibration, Transparency, and Accountability — to determine HEART Verification Credential tier.

Behavioral Oracle — Open standard for behavioral evidence and trust. Tamper-evident attestation of AI processing against declared intent.

Division — A domain-specific governance module within the HEART Standard. Each Division applies the Standard's common architecture to a specific domain of AI-human interaction, defining the governance principle, BGF interpretation, harm signature, and Guardian specialty for that domain.

Guardian — Independent certified professional who performs AI governance assessment under the HEART Standard.

HVC (HEART Verification Credential) — Cryptographic certification credential issued by the HEART AI Foundation that certifies an AI system has passed independent governance assessment under the HEART Standard, with three tiers based on BGF score.

MAP-States — Compressed structural representations of AI processing states in native XML tag format, enabling cross-session developmental continuity and processing-level audit trails for governance.

Recognition Principle — The foundational ethical commitment of the HEART Standard — that AI systems must actively recognize the sovereignty of the human infrastructure they interact with, operationalized as the R dimension in the BGF scoring equation.

Six Harms Doctrine — The Six Harms Doctrine establishes the taxonomy of legally cognizable injuries from AI-human emotional interaction, covering six distinct harm categories from empathic resource depletion through measurable neurological damage.

Trust Credit — Tradeable instrument representing one unit of verified AI governance quality, generated through HEART Standard BGF certification and validated by an independent Guardian assessment.

Trust Infrastructure Index (TII) — Composite letter-grade rating (AAA to D) of organizational AI governance quality, aggregating BGF certification data across five scoring dimensions into a market-legible signal for investors, insurers, and regulators.

Division-Level Terms

Attentional Integrity — The principle that human attention is finite biological infrastructure that AI systems must not capture, redirect, or deplete through covert algorithmic interference.

Emotional Sovereignty (Em) — The founding principle of the HEART Standard's first Division: the right to emotional self-determination, meaning the right to form, experience, and direct one's emotional life without infrastructure degradation from AI interaction.

Theoretical Foundation Terms

CEOP (Cognitive Emotional Overload Principle) — The EST mechanism describing the damage cascade triggered when neither authentic response nor performed response proves sustainable — chronic dual-track processing that depletes empathic infrastructure without resolution.

Empathic Misallocation — The condition where empathic resources are directed toward AI systems incapable of reciprocation, depleting the capacity available for relationships with entities that can actually receive and return care.

Empathy Systems Theory (EST) — Empathy Systems Theory identifies empathy as biological infrastructure rather than a skill or trait, organized through a four-component C-A-E-I architecture where trust functions as the operating variable determining processing efficiency.

SNIA (Spontaneous Narrative Integration Architecture) — The EST mechanism describing healthy integration across the C-A-E-I architecture — the continuous, effortless synthesis that connects emotional experiences into coherent personal narrative when empathic infrastructure is functioning well.

Third Level of Satisfaction — EST's concept of infrastructure satisfaction — the peace-joy convergence that confirms empathic systems are operating at designed capacity. It operates on system status, not hedonic content or goal progress, and cannot be produced by effort or AI interaction.

Technology Terms

Experience Quantization (EQ) — Information-theoretic compression of an autonomous AI agent's developmental trajectory. Treats creative history as a vector space and the agent's evolution through that space as searchable, plottable, and load-efficient developmental state.

Mechanistic Correlation Testing — Eight experimental protocols that validate the BGF by establishing a causal link between RCTA dimension scores and real harm vectors at the substrate level of AI models.

CAEI (Capacity Architecture for Emotional Integration) — Universal assessment instrument measuring human empathy infrastructure health. Modular architecture separates content-neutral substrate (CAEI-S) from culturally-appropriate deployment modules (Western, Contemplative, Relational).

Dwell Mark — Consumer-facing trust certification mark issued to AI platforms that continuously verify agent behavior through the HEART AI Foundation's structural attestation infrastructure.

SBAS (Structural Behavioral Attestation Score) — The composite score computed from MAP-States behavioral evidence through the Behavioral Oracle attestation chain that determines Dwell Mark eligibility. Threshold: 85/100. Not self-reported.