Affect (psychology)

• 1. Introduction

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  Affect, in psychology, is the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood. It sounds simple enough. But the more closely researchers study it, the more they discover that the emotional life of a human being operates on multiple levels simultaneously, some of them hidden even from the person experiencing them.

  Wilhelm Wundt shaped the modern conception of affect in the 19th century, drawing on the German word Gefühl, meaning "feeling." That single word carries a weight that English struggles to match. It suggests something lived from the inside, not just observed from without.

  How does a feeling decide what we pay attention to? Can an emotion fire before the thinking brain has a chance to weigh in? And what happens when a person simply cannot identify what they are feeling at all? These are the questions that have driven researchers from the 19th century to today, and the answers have turned out to be stranger and more consequential than anyone first expected.

• 2. Three Dimensions of Feeling

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  Affective states vary along three principal dimensions: valence, arousal, and motivational intensity. Each captures a different quality of the emotional moment.

  Valence is the positive-to-negative spectrum of how an experience registers subjectively. It covers the consequences of an emotion, the circumstances that brought it about, and the raw subjective quality of how it feels. Arousal is measurable in the body: it registers as activation of the sympathetic nervous system, and it can also be reported by the person experiencing it. Motivational intensity is the hardest of the three to pin down. It refers to the strength of the urge to move toward or away from a stimulus.

  Arousal and motivational intensity are closely related but not the same thing. Arousal does not imply action. Motivational intensity, by definition, does. That distinction turns out to matter enormously once researchers start asking what affect does to the mind's field of vision.

  The American Psychological Association defined affect display in 2006 as "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect." The body, in other words, broadcasts what the inner world is doing, whether the person intends it or not.

• 3. Before and After Thought

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  Robert B. Zajonc argued in 1980 that affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding. His claim was striking: emotion does not wait for the thinking brain to finish its work. Zajonc went further, asserting that this pre-cognitive reaction to stimuli is primary for human beings and dominant in non-human organisms.

  Richard Lazarus pushed back in 1982. He argued that cognitive appraisal processes are keys to the development and expression of emotion. In his view, affects such as liking, disliking, or the experience of pleasure each result from a prior cognitive process that identifies features, finds value in them, and weighs them against each other.

  A third position, associated with Lerner and Keltner in 2000, holds that affect can be both pre- and post-cognitive. Initial emotional responses produce thoughts; those thoughts produce further affect. Antonio Damasio, writing in 1994, added that affect is not merely a passenger in rational thought but a prerequisite for it. Without the affective dimension, the research suggests, certain kinds of reasoning simply do not get done.

  Brewin proposed in 1989 two distinct non-cognitive processes that govern affective experience. The first are prewired dispositions, operating without conscious awareness, that select causally relevant stimuli based on salience and predictive value. The second are automatic processes, rapid and difficult to modify, that can be activated without intention or awareness. Both run beneath the threshold of deliberate thought.

• 4. Motivational Intensity and the Mind's Eye

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  Anger and fear, both high in motivational intensity, narrow what the mind can see. Sadness, which often carries low motivational intensity, broadens it. Disgust, despite its negative character, carries high motivational intensity and narrows attention just as anger and fear do.

  Researchers tested these ideas using the Navon attention task, where a large letter is composed of smaller letters. Broad cognitive scope shows up as faster recognition of the large letter; narrow cognitive scope shows up as faster recognition of the small component letters. Film clips inducing anger or fear produced reaction times on a flanker task that were not very different even when the flanking letters differed from the target, a signature of narrowed attention.

  Harmon-Jones, Gable, and Price extended the research to positive affective states using appetitive picture priming. They found that appetitive stimuli produced narrowed attentional scope, and that telling participants they would be allowed to eat the desserts shown in the pictures narrowed that scope further still.

  Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert, and Lang used the International Affective Picture System, which includes images of snakes, insects, attack scenes, accidents, illness, and loss. Participants rated each image on valence, arousal, and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin scale. The findings confirmed that emotion is organized motivationally: the intensity of activation in appetitive or defensive systems determines the emotional reaction.

  The evolutionary logic runs beneath all of this. In early human environments, seeing a lion elicited fear, a high-motivational-intensity state, and the appropriate response was to run. Narrowed attention to the immediate threat, rather than broad awareness of the surrounding landscape, was the adaptive choice.

• 5. Affect Tolerance and Its Absence

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  Psychiatrist Jerome Sashin defined affect tolerance as the ability to respond to a stimulus, one that would ordinarily be expected to evoke affects, through the subjective experiencing of feelings. Low affect tolerance means showing little or no reaction to emotion or feeling of any kind.

  The condition most closely linked to low affect tolerance is alexithymia, described as "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." Dalya Samur and colleagues found that persons with alexithymia show correlations with increased suicide rates, mental discomfort, and deaths.

  Mindfulness, defined as focusing awareness on the present moment while calmly acknowledging feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations without judgment, has been shown to help with affect tolerance factors including anxiety sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty, and emotional distress tolerance. Research has found that mindfulness produces increased subjective well-being, reduced psychological symptoms and emotional reactivity, and improved behavioral regulation.

  The clinical reach of motivational intensity research extends to substance use. Alcohol-related pictures caused narrowed attention specifically in persons who had a strong motivation to consume alcohol. Neutral pictures did not produce the same effect. The Alcohol Myopia Theory holds that alcohol consumption reduces available memory and narrows attention so that only the most proximal or striking sources fall within the attentional scope. This narrowed attention leads intoxicated persons toward more extreme decisions than they would make sober.

• 6. Mood, Memory, and Social Contagion

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  Mood involves tone and intensity, and, according to Batson, Shaw, and Oleson writing in 1992, a structured set of beliefs about general expectations of future experience of pleasure or pain. Unlike sharp emotional reactions, moods are diffuse and unfocused. Schucman, writing in 1975, noted they can last for days, weeks, months, or even years.

  Habitual negative affect and negative mood are characteristic of high neuroticism. Positive affect is strongly linked to social interaction. Seidner found support for the existence of a negative affect arousal mechanism in work on negative affect and white noise, specifically regarding the devaluation of speakers from other ethnic origins.

  College students showing depressive symptoms were better at retrieving contextual information in a source-monitoring paradigm task: they were more accurate at identifying which color box a word had appeared in, compared to non-depressed students. Sadness, associated with low motivational intensity, broadens attention to contextual detail; this experimental result is one of the more concrete demonstrations that the theory holds in a clinical population.

  Affect spreads between people through two distinct mechanisms. The first is emotion contagion: people automatically and unconsciously mimic non-verbal expressions, and this mimicry occurs even in interactions that take place via text alone. The second is emotion interpretation, where a person perceives an agent's emotion and reacts with complementary or situationally appropriate feelings. An agent who is perceived to be angry may also be presumed to hold high power. Affect, in this sense, is not only an inner state but a social signal that shapes how observers allocate status and trust.

• 7. Measuring the Unmeasurable

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  The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, known as the PANAS, is the most commonly used measure in scholarly research on affect. It is a lexical measure developed in a North American setting, consisting of 20 single-word items. Positive affect items include excited, alert, and determined; negative affect items include upset, guilty, and jittery.

  Some PANAS items turned out to be redundant or ambiguous for English speakers outside North America. That limitation prompted the development of the I-PANAS-SF, an internationally reliable short form comprising two 5-item scales. It has demonstrated internal reliability, cross-sample and cross-cultural factorial invariance, temporal stability, and both convergent and criterion-related validity.

  Mroczek and Kolarz developed an additional pair of scales, each containing 6 items, which have also shown acceptable validity and reliability across cultures.

  Verbal self-report remains an imperfect instrument. People may not know what they feel, or they may feel several emotions simultaneously. They may also conceal their feelings. For non-conscious affect, researchers use the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test, or IPANAT, developed by Quirin, Kazen, and Kuhl in 2009. The IPANAT was designed to circumvent self-report entirely by measuring emotional states that operate below awareness.

  A less obvious finding concerns the spatial dimension of emotional experience. Research has found a strong unconscious map between affect and vertical position, linking up with positive emotions and down with negative ones. This is embedded in everyday language: "sunny side up," "feeling down," and the heaven-versus-hell dichotomy all reflect it. Tolaas, writing in 1991, proposed that the origin of this vertical bias lies in early development, because infants spend most of their waking time on their backs looking upward toward caregivers.