Affect

Affect, simply defined, is used interchangeably with the words feeling, emotion, and mood. Differentiation among these terms has always been a source of challenge and confusion in psychology, not only theoretically but also practically. Likely, one reason for this confusion is that these terms convey the characteristic of valence as a highly subjective feature. Valence means evaluation, varying from negative to positive, and is defined as a measure of how pleasant or unpleasant a stimulus is. Ostensibly, to better understand the term affect, it is necessary to have a definition for each of these terms. This entry seeks to clarify the use of terms associated with the word affect.

Affect is a broad term that typically replaces the other terms in valence-related literature. This replacement, however, mostly occurs for what is referred to here as emotion. The influential theorist in the field of emotion and emotional expression, Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991), always used the term affect in his works. He believed that affect is what endows intensity to one’s behavior; it represents the way the body prepares itself for action in a given circumstance. According to him, affect is composed of responses involving respiratory system, blood flow changes, facial expressions, vocalizations, and viscera, responses over which one has little control.

Feeling describes anything received by the sensory system. It can identify the smoothness or roughness of a surface, the perception of hunger or thirst, or the sense pressure, pain, or pleasure. Valence may be involved (i.e., affective feeling), but not all the time. One feature of feelings is that they are personal, biographical, and social—that is, every individual has a set of sensations that are compared with previous experiences. Thus, feelings help one interpret and recognize the quality of an experience. Another feature is that external stimuli have a crucial role in creating what one feels (e.g., smoothness of a velvet fabric, pleasure of tasting ice cream). In these circumstances, a feeling subsides when the stimulus is no longer present.

Emotion is a way through which an organism maintains the relationship with its environment. [Page 57]In 1999, Paul Ekman argued that happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise were the basic forms of emotions. Emotions are experiences of short duration, something similar to a reaction with an identifiable cause; they are intense feelings directed at someone (e.g., seeing a good friend and feeling happiness), an event (e.g., dealing with a rude client and feeling anger), or even a former thought. Emotions are mostly expressed via facial expressions and tone of voice (prosody), but they can also have an impact on the entire body; when people are sad, they are still and quiet, and when they are happy, they move rapidly and intentionally.

Emotion is under the control of a dynamic system that is an interconnected network of brain structures, including hypothalamus, thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal and cingulate cortices. These structures create a loop and project to each other reciprocally, which results in the state of the system changing in a consistent and regular way. Thus, an increase in the activity of the system occurs due to, for instance, the awareness of the presence of something (e.g., a bee, creating the emotion of fear) or the occurrence of an event (e.g., hearing an acquaintance speaking in an insulting way, creating the emotion of anger) that facilitates or hinders an individual’s goals and concerns.

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