Affect (psychology)
Affect, in psychology, is the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood. It encompasses a wide range of emotional states and can be positive or negative. Affect is a fundamental aspect of human experience and plays a central role in many psychological theories and studies. It can be understood as a combination of three components: emotion, mood, and affectivity. In psychology, the term affect is often used interchangeably with several related terms and concepts, though each term may have slightly different nuances. These terms encompass: emotion, feeling, mood, emotional state, sentiment, affective state, emotional response, affective reactivity, and disposition. Researchers and psychologists may employ specific terms based on their focus and the context of their work.
History
The modern conception of affect developed in the 19th century with Wilhelm Wundt. The word comes from the German Gefühl, meaning "feeling".A number of experiments have been conducted in the study of social and psychological affective preferences. Specific research has been done on preferences, attitudes, impression formation, and decision-making. This research contrasts findings with recognition memory, allowing researchers to demonstrate reliable distinctions between the two. Affect-based judgments and cognitive processes have been examined with noted differences indicated, and some argue affect and cognition are under the control of separate and partially independent systems that can influence each other in a variety of ways. Both affect and cognition may constitute independent sources of effects within systems of information processing. Others suggest emotion is a result of an anticipated, experienced, or imagined outcome of an adaptational transaction between organism and environment, therefore cognitive appraisal processes are keys to the development and expression of an emotion.
Dimensions
Affective states vary along three principal dimensions: valence, arousal, and motivational intensity.- Valence is the subjective spectrum of positive-to-negative evaluation of an experience an individual may have had. Emotional valence refers to the emotion's consequences, emotion-eliciting circumstances, or subjective feelings or attitudes.
- Arousal is objectively measurable as activation of the sympathetic nervous system, but can also be assessed subjectively via self-report.
- Motivational intensity refers to the impulsion to act; the strength of an urge to move toward or away from a stimulus and whether or not to interact with said stimulus. Simply moving is not considered approach motivation
Affect display
Affect is sometimes used to mean affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect".Cognitive scope
In psychology, affect defines the organisms' interaction with stimuli. It can influence the scope of the cognitive processes. Initially, researchers had thought that positive affects broadened the cognitive scope, whereas negative affects narrowed it. Thereafter, evidences suggested that affects high in motivational intensity narrow the cognitive scope, whereas affects low in motivational intensity broaden it. The construct of cognitive scope could be valuable in cognitive psychology.Affect tolerance
According to a research article about affect tolerance written by psychiatrist Jerome Sashin, "Affect tolerance can be defined as the ability to respond to a stimulus which would ordinarily be expected to evoke affects by the subjective experiencing of feelings." Essentially it refers to one's ability to react to emotions and feelings. One who is low in affect tolerance would show little to no reaction to emotion and feeling of any kind. This is closely related to alexithymia."Alexithymia is a subclinical phenomenon involving a lack of emotional awareness or, more specifically, difficulty in identifying and describing feelings and in distinguishing feelings from the bodily sensations of emotional arousal" At its core, alexithymia is an inability for an individual to recognize what emotions they are feeling—as well as an inability to describe them. According to <> and colleagues, persons with alexithymia have been shown to have correlations with increased suicide rates, mental discomfort, and deaths.
Affect tolerance factors, including anxiety sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty, and emotional distress tolerance, may be helped by mindfulness. Mindfulness is a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations without judgment. The practice of Intention, Attention, & Attitude.
Mindfulness has been shown to produce "increased subjective well-being, reduced psychological symptoms and emotional reactivity, and improved behavioral regulation."
Relationship to behavior and cognition
The affective domain represents one of the three divisions described in modern psychology: the other two being the behavioral, and the cognitive. Classically, these divisions have also been referred to as the "ABC's of psychology", However, in certain views, the cognitive may be considered as a part of the affective, or the affective as a part of the cognitive; it is important to note that "cognitive and affective states … merely analytic categories."Instinctive and cognitive factors in causation of affect
"Affect" can mean an instinctual reaction to stimulation that occurs before the typical cognitive processes considered necessary for the formation of a more complex emotion. Robert B. Zajonc asserts this reaction to stimuli is primary for human beings and that it is the dominant reaction for non-human organisms. Zajonc suggests that affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding and be made sooner and with greater confidence than cognitive judgments.Many theorists consider affect to be post-cognitive: elicited only after a certain amount of cognitive processing of information has been accomplished. In this view, such affective reactions as liking, disliking, evaluation, or the experience of pleasure or displeasure each result from a different prior cognitive process that makes a variety of content discriminations and identifies features, examines them to find value, and weighs them according to their contributions. Some scholars argue that affect can be both pre- and post-cognitive: initial emotional responses produce thoughts, which produce affect. In a further iteration, some scholars argue that affect is necessary for enabling more rational modes of cognition.
A divergence from a narrow reinforcement model of emotion allows other perspectives about how affect influences emotional development. Thus, temperament, cognitive development, socialization patterns, and the idiosyncrasies of one's family or subculture might interact in nonlinear ways. For example, the temperament of a highly reactive/low self-soothing infant may "disproportionately" affect the process of emotion regulation in the early months of life.
Some other social sciences, such as geography or anthropology, have adopted the concept of affect beginning in the late 2000s. In French psychoanalysis a major contribution to the field of affect comes from André Green. The focus on affect has largely derived from the work of Deleuze and brought emotional and visceral concerns into such conventional discourses as those on geopolitics, urban life and material culture. Affect has also challenged methodologies of the social sciences by emphasizing somatic power over the idea of a removed objectivity and therefore has strong ties with the contemporary non-representational theory.
Cognitive effects of affect
There is a strong unconscious map between affect and vertical position, associating up with positive emotions and down with negative emotions. This is reflected in metaphors such as "sunny side up" and "feeling down", as well as the heaven-versus-hell dichotomy. Stimuli connected to emotions tend to bias visual attention toward upper and lower position. The origin of this bias is probably linked to early cognitive development; for example, Tolaas argues that it is because infants spend most of their waking time on their backs under a caregiver.Psychometric measurement
Affect has been found across cultures to comprise both positive and negative dimensions. The most commonly used measure in scholarly research is the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. The PANAS is a lexical measure developed in a North American setting and consisting of 20 single-word items, for instance excited, alert, determined for positive affect, and upset, guilty, and jittery for negative affect. However, some of the PANAS items have been found either to be redundant or to have ambiguous meanings to English speakers from non-North American cultures. As a result, an internationally reliable short-form, the I-PANAS-SF, has been developed and validated comprising two 5-item scales with internal reliability, cross-sample and cross-cultural factorial invariance, temporal stability, convergent and criterion-related validities.Mroczek and Kolarz have also developed another set of scales to measure positive and negative affect. Each of the scales has 6 items. The scales have shown evidence of acceptable validity and reliability across cultures.
Non-conscious affect and perception
In relation to perception, a type of non-conscious affect may be separate from the cognitive processing of environmental stimuli. A monohierarchy of perception, affect and cognition considers the roles of arousal, attention tendencies, affective primacy, evolutionary constraints, and covert perception within the sensing and processing of preferences and discriminations. Emotions are complex chains of events triggered by certain stimuli. There is no way to completely describe an emotion by knowing only some of its components. Verbal reports of feelings are often inaccurate because people may not know exactly what they feel, or they may feel several different emotions at the same time. There are also situations that arise in which individuals attempt to hide their feelings, and there are some who believe that public and private events seldom coincide exactly, and that words for feelings are generally more ambiguous than are words for objects or events. Therefore, non-conscious emotions need to be measured by measures circumventing self-report such as the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test.Affective responses, on the other hand, are more basic and may be less problematic in terms of assessment. Brewin has proposed two experiential processes that frame non-cognitive relations between various affective experiences: those that are prewired dispositions, able to "select from the total stimulus array those stimuli that are causally relevant, using such criteria as perceptual salience, spatiotemporal cues, and predictive value in relation to data stored in memory", and those that are automatic, characterized as "rapid, relatively inflexible and difficult to modify... minimal attention to occur and... activated without intention or awareness".
But a note should be considered on the differences between affect and emotion.