User:Elisabeth.Lavi/Affect (psychology)

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Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood. Affect is a commonly used term in psychology to describe how someone with a mental condition displays themselves during therapy sessions.

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Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood. Affect is the outward expression of feelings and emotions. Affect can be a tone of voice, a smile, a frown, a laugh, a smirk, a tear, pressed lips, a crinkled forehead, a scrunched nose, furrowed eyebrows, or an eye gaze. It’s really any facial expression or body movement that indicates emotion. Affect is what people use in communication with each other to decipher the way another person feels about something.

Dimensions of affect[edit]
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 (or avoidance) motivation.

It is important to note that arousal is different from motivational intensity. While arousal is a construct that is closely related to motivational intensity, they differ in that motivation necessarily implies action while arousal does not.

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 (i.e., what people like or dislike). Specific research has been done on preferences, attitudes, impression formation, and decision-making. This research contrasts findings with recognition memory (old-new judgments), 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 (Zajonc, 1980). 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 (Lazarus, 1982).This sets the setting for a discussion of core affect as a fundamental, universal, and psychologically irreducible aspect of the mind. The brain regions responsible for realising core emotion are then described, emphasizing its importance in mental life. The emotional circumplex is then presented as a mathematical formalisation for capturing key affective experiences. The circumplex may therefore be used to model and reflect individual variance in fundamental affective sentiments, which is connected to variability in the accuracy of emotional experience, according to findings from our own research.

Affects
Affect is seen as any feeling or emotion experience, ranging from misery to elation, from the most basic to the most sophisticated perceptions of feeling, and from the most normal to the most pathological emotional reactions Both mood and emotion are considered affective states, and are frequently defined in terms of positive or negative affect. Affect is one of the three traditionally defined components of the mind, together with cognition and conation.

In psychology, affect brings about an organism's interaction with stimuli.

Affect can influence cognitive scope (the breadth of cognitive processes ). Initially, it was thought that positive affects broadened whereas negative affects narrowed cognitive scope. However, evidence now suggests that affects high in motivational intensity narrow cognitive scope whereas affects low in motivational intensity broaden it. The construct of cognitive scope could be valuable in cognitive psychology.

Relationship to behavior and cognition[edit]
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 … [are] merely analytic categories."