Chronic Overreacting as Proportionality-Collapse Wrong Attractor: The Amplification Architecture, Calibrated-Response Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Graduated Reaction

Chronic overreacting is a behavioral and affective pattern in which an individual's emotional and behavioral response systematically exceeds what the magnitude of the precipitating stimulus warrants. Unlike acute anxiety, which is a future-oriented arousal state, or depression, which constitutes a suppressive displacement, chronic overreacting is defined by a proportionality collapse: the mapping from stimulus intensity to response intensity becomes grossly amplified, nonlinear, and self-reinforcing.

In this paper we situate chronic overreacting within the Displacement Framework, formalizing it as a wrong attractor W in psychological state space. We identify the amplification architecture — the threat-amplification loop, progressive sensitization, and identity entrenchment — as the mechanistic substrate of the attractor. We define the Calibrated-Response Basin B(S^0) as the set of states from which graduated, proportional response is dynamically accessible, and characterize how chronic overreacting forecloses this basin through boundary erosion and threshold collapse.

Nine formal propositions govern the dynamics of onset, maintenance, and exit. We conclude with an account of exit dynamics — the conditions under which the agent re-enters B(S^0) and recovers graduated emotional regulation — and with a discussion of the pattern's relationship to emotional dysregulation, trauma sensitization, and histrionic personality organization. The framework yields a geometry of both the problem and the return.