Talk:Affect (psychology)

So much nonsense
First, it does not mean the EXPERIENCE but how it MANIFESTS to OTHERS. Second, 'The word comes from the German Gefühl' is also nonsense.

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 16 September 2019 and 18 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Evansalexawiki, Cbladh1.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 13:29, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Meaning of affect
Isnt affect also used to mean simply "current mood" (not appearance of mood)? It certainly is in one psychology book Ive read. Ben Finn 22:58, 3 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I have deleted the following: "The common usage of the word "affect" is solely as a verb or adjective ("affected"): here, the idea that the emotion expressed is not entirely sincere is implicit.  "Affect a  sadness you do not feel," one might be instructed before attending the funeral of an enemy.  "She seems a bit affected" would be an entirely natural sentence in colloquial English to express the judgment that a person is "putting on airs." "  The article is about the noun "affect" as a psychological phenomenon.  These other usages do not seem relevant.  ("Affected," in fact, comes from the noun "affectation" and not "affect.")
 * [Above comment unsigned]


 * As I can express it in layman's terms, the problem is that there are subjective feelings and displayed appearances that we associate with the subjective feelings. Some displays are feigned, deceptive. These could be possibly "willed" or possibly habitual. Some displayed emotions can even occur without the subject apparently experiencing the associated subjective state.


 * The term affect has been (is being ?) used to refer to both the displayed appearance AND to the subjective feeling and, in particular, to the level of intensity of the subjective feeling. I thought the particular sense of intensity was what was included in "valence".


 * Affect, however, seems to be the only one-word term available to separately describe the display so as to allow the potential for display not exactly corresponding to subjective feeling.


 * Is my understanding of all of this correct? Is there a definitive glossary that would help by providing an "official" desirable set of one-word terms that could be built around, without doing violence to ordinary language. We could use "see also" above the lead to direct folke to where they really want to go. DCDuring 19:36, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Marking this thread Resolved as the article has been rewritten and forked into separate articles since then; if related problems remain they should be re-raised in new topic threads at the appropriate article talk page. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 10:16, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi all I see that you have split into an aritcle on affect and one on affect display and I understand the reasons for this but I still think you need to really highlight the fact that in a mental health setting (at least in Australia - maybe not in the US), 'affect' refers to what is labelled on wikipedia as 'affect display'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.169.112.38 (talk) 06:44, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Affect logic
This section looks like nutty original research to me. Ben Finn 22:58, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Affective pool
affect in psychology is the subconscious emotions and feelings of persons. People, when making decisions, refer to their "affective pool" which has negative and positive tags and thus aids decision making. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.1.124.125 (talk • contribs).
 * Nonsense. First, there is no such thing as 'subconscious'. Do you mean 'unconscious'? Second, that's not what affect means at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.3.240.31 (talk) 19:50, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Luc Ciompi's research
The most famous researcher concerning "affect logic" is (the psychiatrist ?) Luc Ciompi from Switzerland. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 193.171.79.65 (talk • contribs).

Deleted jargonistic blather
I have deleted this section. Most readers are unlikely to understand it in its current form.

Here is what I deleted:


 * "Affects and moods give a direction to thought contents. In accordance with its phylogenetically developed purpose, the intellect is a “scanning mechanism” that searches for adequate realization options according to current drives and inhibitions. Particularly in complex societies, it is frequently seen how one-sided analyses can be performed by individual persons and interest groups and the problems of others are negated or undervalued. Analyses are sometimes derived from selfish anticipated solution approaches. The accuracy of the knowledge and the evaluation of various application options are frequently not kept separate here. Due to this presumptuousness justified by affect logic, pluralistic conditions are useful and necessary. If specific thought contents are highly engaged affectively, these are sometimes affectively “blocked” or corresponding theoretical alternatives are factored out. Under certain conditions, our reasoning ability exhibits a distinctive feature recognized by psychoanalysis in which certain one-sided, partially subconscious and misguiding decision preferences develop over the course of life for avoiding or escaping uncomfortable affects (e.g. fear). Apparent unambiguousness in “either x or y” is then frequently preferred to the view of the systemically interconnected variability of aspects of reality (“both x and y”). This can lead to contrasting theory formation. Examples for such opposing world views are rationalism and empiricism, materialism and idealism, left and right ideologies."

Su-Laine Yeo 08:04, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Clinical assessment
This article is completely off the mark. In clinical assessment, mood is the emotion being expressed; affect is the intensity. So one might say that a person's affect is "blunted", "flat", "neutral", "expansive", "intense" etc. I'll check my sources and rewrite completely. kibi 14:48, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * What is the resolution status of this issue? Has the material changed (here or at the Affect display article-fork), or is this problem still out-standing? —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 10:11, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Affect Display
According to the new (2006) APA dictionary, what's discussed here is "affect display". It is possible to have "incongruence" between "affect" and "affect display". According to the same source affect is the experience of emotion, but, in consulting other sources, I got somewhat different terms. I'm going to copy this text to a "Affect Display", either a new entry or if the existing entry is a stub or worse. DCDuring 23:48, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

I have created an article entitled Affect display which began with the complete text of this article. I edited it to a stub with the APA defintion of "affect display", a little of the balance of the text still in this article, and some links to sincerity, deceipt, self-deception, malingering. It's a start. Feel free to work on either this article or the "affect display" article. I don't think that the Affect article text as of the 30 minutes before the time of this comment was worth very much with respect to the generally accepted APA and psych. researchers' use of the term. DCDuring 00:22, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Feel free to revert
I have deleted sections preoccupied with the idea that incongruence of affect is an insincere attempt to fake a way out of an institution. Feel free to revert if you do not agree with my action. -- Mattisse 23:06, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Not much content in either article
Now that Wiktionary has more accurate definitions for affect and affective, there isn't anything in either article except the unreferenced reference to the arts. DCDuring 04:55, 30 September 2007 (UTC)


 * At the time I am writing this, the article has taken an excellent turn, imho. Thanks. --Robert Daoust 01:53, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Marking this Resolved since the sourcing and textual dearth problems have been solved (though sourcing style is an utter wreck; addressed separately below). —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 10:08, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Shouldn't this be merged with Emotion?
The word "affect" (noun) is not in wide public use. The APA definitions don't make a sharp distinction in meaning between "affect" and "emotion". Most articles and books on emotion spend some time making clear how the words are being used within the article or book.

Although the word "affect" may be used by clinicians to mean what the APA labels as "affect display", it would be confusing to build an article around "affect" to cover the "affect display" concept. There is now the beginnings of an "affect display" article.

Accordingly, shouldn't "affect" become a DAB page, letting users go to "emotion", "affect display", or even "feeling"? (APA reserve "feeling" for the subjective experience of emotion.) There may be other things that a DAB page could handle as well.

There is almost certainly some value on some parts of the "affect" article. A formal effort to merge might attract desirable attention to the effort to improve the emotion article and sort out the merge issues. Thoughts? DCDuring 18:54, 6 October 2007 (UTC)


 * We would not merge an article about a psychology term of art which describes apparent/experienced but sometimes self-delutional perception of emotion (or apparent/observed but often feigned display of alleged emotion, now a separate article at Affect display), with the article on "emotion" in general. We may well want Emotion to link to this article with main or a "See also" entry there, but these are obviously not redundant articles at all. At any rate, Affect already is a DAB page, and this is now Affect (psychology), so I'm marking this merge proposal moot. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 10:02, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Citation cleanup
Someone who cares a lot about this article needs to clean up the citation styles; the article is a confusion and annoying mix of inline &#91;1&#93;-style citations, correct but untemplated Harvard-style referencing, correct and Ref harv-templated referencing (I think, anyway; I'm pretty sure I saw some in there), and incorrect pseudo-Harvard referencing. Without a really clear reason for using Harvard referencing, inline citations are preferred at Wikipedia, per WP:CITE. And they need to use Cite journal, Cite web, etc., to provide and consistently format source details.

Even if a clear reason for Harvard style is available, this would still mean that the WP:CITE references need to be converted to Harvard style, and the bogus ones corrected to proper Harvard style, and all of them templated with our Harvard referencing templates instead of being bare text insertions (like ), since those provide no reader-useful links to Harvard-style footnotes. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 09:41, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Introductory section
The sentence below, which cites popular psychology, has no support in the scientific literature. It should be removed.

"One current theory in popular psychology, the lateralization of brain function, holds that one half of the brain deals mainly with the affective or emotional, while the other half deals mainly with the cognitive or rational. In certain views, the conative may be considered as a part of the affective,[2] or the affective as a part of the cognitive.[3]." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.17.36.229 (talk) 22:39, 18 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I've just rewritten the bit about lateralization but doubt it belongs in the introduction. If there's no objection, I'll remove it in a week. As for "conative" = "affective" "affective" = "cognitive", I have no problem with it staying, unless it is false. Anthony (talk) 03:37, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

The current intro is ridiculously short, I can only assume from past experience it's because people can't agree on anything, so they remove anything they don't like. Consequently there's almost nothing left. An absurd situation which makes WP a laughing stock, and an annoyance to try to fix. I think you people are mad.--Sanjam da prdnem na tebe (talk) 09:17, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Merge Affect Display into this article
It has been suggested (2 March 2008) that Affect display be merged into this article.

Disagree. Affect display is an important and broad enough subject to warrant its own article. This is like suggesting "Timber construction" belongs in the article "Timber", or "Baseball" in the article "Ball". Anthony (talk) 05:25, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Merge Affect (philosophy) into this article
It has been suggested (15 June 2008) that Affect (philosophy) be merged into this article.

Disagree. The point of this article is to give the psychological perspective on the term and concept - as opposed to that of other disciplines such as philosophy. Anyway, at the moment the Affect (philosophy) article is 3 bad sentences. Anthony (talk) 03:58, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Merge this article into Affective Science
It has been suggested (22 November 2008) that this article be merged into Affective science.

Disagree. One article (Affect - psychology) discusses a phenomenon as it is conceptualised in psychology. The other discusses a branch of science. It is not possible to properly deal with the meaning of affect in psychology in a couple of paragraphs under a subheading in Affective science. Each merits its own article. Your thoughts would be appreciated so we can resolve this soon. Anthony (talk) 03:58, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Meaning in art
Whose opinion would that be? Why is this category needed and if so, let's get some primary source reference material going. Otherwise, I move to delete. --Amy (talk) 07:01, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Functions of affect
Affect can be instrumental in decision-making and judgments. Affect serves as information, can spotlight information important for the decision, a motivator for information processing and behavior, and as common currency for comparisons. Peters, E., Lipkus, I., & Diefenback, M.A. (2006). The functions of affect in health communications and in the construction of health preferenes. Journal of Communication, 56, 140-162. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Songm (talk • contribs) 22:31, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Section from Affection - Psychology
I removed the section below from the article Affection (section Psychology). There was a proposal to merge this section with this article (Affect), but I thought it was wrong to keep the section there. So now I paste it here (apart from a part that was about affection). If anybody feels s/he wants to use parts of this section and paste it into Affect, you are so welcome! Lova Falk    talk   17:34, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

In psychology the terms affection and affective are of great importance. Experimentalists maintain that all emotional manifestations are forms of affection. Many psychologists have attempted to define or describe the nature of affection; however, experiments on feeling are difficult. Two characterizations of affection have been proposed. In the first, affective phenomena are divisible into categories of pleasurable and non-pleasurable. The main objections to this are that it does not explain the infinite variety of phenomena, and that it disregards the distinction that most philosophers maintain between "higher" and "lower" pleasures.. A second characterization is that every sensation has its specific affective quality, some of which may not have a precise name. Wilhelm Wundt maintains that there are three main affective directions which can describe all affective phenomena; these are (a) pleasure and displeasure, (b) tension and relaxation, and (c) excitement and depression.

Two methods of experiment on affection have been tried:


 * 1) The first, introduced by A. Mosso, the Italian psychologist, consists in recording the physical phenomena that accompany modifications of the affective consciousness. Thus it is found that the action of the heart is accelerated by pleasant, and retarded by unpleasant, stimuli; again, changes of weight and volume are found to accompany modifications of affection—and so on. Apart altogether from the facts that this investigation is still in its infancy and that the conditions of experiment are insufficiently understood, its ultimate success is rendered highly problematical by the essential fact that real scientific results can be achieved only by data recorded in connection with a perfectly normal subject; a conscious or interested subject introduces variable factors that are probably incalculable.
 * 2) The second is Fechner's method; it consists of recording the changes in feeling-tone produced in a subject by bringing him in contact with a series of conditions, objects or stimuli graduated according to a scientific plan and presented singly in pairs or in groups. The result is a comparative table of likes and dislikes.

unclear what arousal has to do with affect - suggest removing section
Perhaps merge section "arousal" with arousal? MathewTownsend (talk) 13:59, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

copyvio found
from Taxonomy of Learning By Roland E. Pittman - at least pages 10-11. See MathewTownsend (talk) 21:58, 13 December 2012 (UTC)


 * That book states, on page 127, that it was copied from Wikipedia, not the other way around. Therefore, if I understand correctly, the Wikipedia article is not a copyright violation. —Tanner Swett (talk) 03:56, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
 * yeah, it's from PediaPress, which is partnered with the Wikimedia Foundation, and all the content is taken from Wikipedia. Thus not a copyvio.  — Soap — 04:16, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Motivational Intensity
I propose a new subsection for this article that would be called "Motivational Intensity", which is a topic closely related to arousal (already addressed in relation to affect in this article). Maschone (talk) 21:53, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Affect can have at least three components, including valence, arousal, and motivational intensity. There is a subtle distinction between arousal and motivational intensity, but arousal involves the actual physiological response to a stimulus (such as breathing rate, blood pressure) whereas motivational intensity is the strength of the propulsion to avoid or encounter a stimuli . Arousal measurements can indicate motivational intensity, but they are distinct constructs. Differences in affective state can influence mental processes. One such cognitive process that has been the focus of research is cognitive scope, which can be described as broad or narrow and measured with tasks of attention, perception, categorization, and memory. Early research suggested that perhaps affect valence influenced cognitive scope, namely that negative-valenced affects (like sadness) confer narrow cognitive scope whereas positive-valenced affects (like happiness) confer broader cognitive scope. Most recently, another theory has emerged that the motivational intensity actually effects cognitive scope. In particular, induced disgust and sadness, negative affective states varying in motivational intensity (high motivational intensity and low motivational intensity respectively) resulted in differential consequences on an attention task, for example . So, this research among other articles have supported the idea that affect high in motivational intensity confer a narrower cognitive scope whereas emotions low in motivational intensity confer a broader cognitive scope. Maschone (talk) 03:01, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree with the proposal that motivational intensity should be new section.


 * Researchers Eddie Harmon-Jones, Philip A. Gable and Tom F. Price (2013) have been conducting research whether positive affect always broaden the mind and negative affect always narrows the mind. A main impact of the study was the influence of motivational intensity. The findings of the study showed that the positive or negative affective valence state had no impact on whether the mind was broaden or narrowed. Instead, the broadening and narrowing of the mind relied solely on the motivational intensity. Findings showed that high motivational intensity leads to a narrowed cognitive scope whereas low motivational intensity leads to a broadened cognitive scope. Studying and learning about the effects of motivational intensity is beneficial because it has been linked to studies of psychopathic patients and alcoholic addictions. With the addition of this section, it would be important to discuss the relationship motivational intensity has with affect and cognitive scope. As well as compare older research of motivational intensity with more recent research and discoveries.Kaseymoo1 (talk) 03:37, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

I also agree that a new subsection should be created for motivational intensity.


 * Researchers Eddie Harmon-Jones, Philip A. Gable and Tom F. Price (2013) gathered from their research that the effect of emotions depends on low or high in motivational intensity. Harmon-Jones focused on the changes of the N1 component when comparing emotive and neutral pictures. There was larger N1 amplitudes in response to appetitive and aversive pictures when manipulating local attentional scope compared to global. This shows that motivational intensity and attentional scope are bidirectional. Harmon-Jones’ experiment provides new evidence that the original idea that positive affect broadens and negative affect narrows only applies to low motivational positive affects and high motivational negative affects. This means that low motivationally intense affective states broaden cognitive scope and high motivationally intense affect states narrow cognitive scope, regardless of affective valence. Allong22 (talk) 06:34, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Conation???
Why is it given such prominence, let alone in the lede? --YeOldeGentleman (talk) 00:47, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Affect Tolerance edits
Just for the information of anyone watching this article, I am a student working on this section for a class in college. I am doing research and will be posting a paragraph or two with citations and links to further clarify this section. Cbladh1 (talk) 17:44, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Meaningless without examples of usage
Sorry but as a new student in psychology, this first statement tells me nothing useful without examples of usage of the word: 'Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood'. Strayan (talk) 04:06, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Psychology Capstone
— Assignment last updated by Thatbaddie205 (talk) 02:07, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Mind-Body, section 18
— Assignment last updated by Wc802 (talk) 17:05, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Mind-Body, section 16
— Assignment last updated by Jovanna.lanbaxter (talk) 17:34, 25 December 2022 (UTC)