Affect theoryAffect theory is a theory that seeks to organize affects, sometimes used interchangeably with emotions or subjectively experienced feelings, into discrete categories and to typify their physiological, social, interpersonal, and internalized manifestations. The conversation about affect theory has been taken up in psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, medicine, interpersonal communication, literary theory, critical theory, media studies, and gender studies, among other fields.
Affective neuroscienceAffective neuroscience is the study of how the brain processes emotions. This field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. The basis of emotions and what emotions are remains an issue of debate within the field of affective neuroscience. The term "affective neuroscience" was coined by neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, at a time when cognitive neuroscience focused on parts of psychology that did not include emotion, such as attention or memory.
Dispositional affectDispositional affect, similar to mood, is a personality trait or overall tendency to respond to situations in stable, predictable ways. This trait is expressed by the tendency to see things in a positive or negative way. People with high positive affectivity tend to perceive things through "pink lens" while people with high negative affectivity tend to perceive things through "black lens". The level of dispositional affect affects the sensations and behavior immediately and most of the time in unconscious ways, and its effect can be prolonged (between a few weeks to a few months).
Affect measuresAffect measures (measures of affect or measures of emotion) are used in the study of human affect (including emotions and mood), and refer to measures obtained from self-report studies asking participants to quantify their current feelings or average feelings over a longer period of time. Even though some affect measures contain variations that allow assessment of basic predispositions to experience a certain emotion, tests for such stable traits are usually considered to be personality tests.
Affective computingAffective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science. While some core ideas in the field may be traced as far back as to early philosophical inquiries into emotion, the more modern branch of computer science originated with Rosalind Picard's 1995 paper on affective computing and her book Affective Computing published by MIT Press.
Sorrow (emotion)Sorrow is an emotion, feeling, or sentiment. Sorrow "is more 'intense' than sadness... it implies a long-term state". At the same time, "sorrow — but not unhappiness — suggests a degree of resignation... which lends sorrow its peculiar air of dignity". Moreover, "in terms of attitude, sorrow can be said to be half way between sadness (accepting) and distress (not accepting)".
Emotion recognitionEmotion recognition is the process of identifying human emotion. People vary widely in their accuracy at recognizing the emotions of others. Use of technology to help people with emotion recognition is a relatively nascent research area. Generally, the technology works best if it uses multiple modalities in context. To date, the most work has been conducted on automating the recognition of facial expressions from video, spoken expressions from audio, written expressions from text, and physiology as measured by wearables.
Discrete emotion theoryDiscrete emotion theory is the claim that there is a small number of core emotions. For example, Silvan Tomkins (1962, 1963) concluded that there are nine basic affects which correspond with what we come to know as emotions: interest, enjoyment, surprise, distress, fear, anger, shame, dissmell (reaction to bad smell) and disgust. More recently, Carroll Izard at the University of Delaware factor analytically delineated 12 discrete emotions labeled: Interest, Joy, Surprise, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Contempt, Self-Hostility, Fear, Shame, Shyness, and Guilt (as measured via his Differential Emotions Scale or DES-IV).
Affective forecastingAffective forecasting (also known as hedonic forecasting, or the hedonic forecasting mechanism) is the prediction of one's affect (emotional state) in the future. As a process that influences preferences, decisions, and behavior, affective forecasting is studied by both psychologists and economists, with broad applications. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith observed the personal challenges, and social benefits, of hedonic forecasting errors: [Consider t]he poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich .
Emotion and memoryEmotion can have a powerful effect on humans and animals. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events. The activity of emotionally enhanced memory retention can be linked to human evolution; during early development, responsive behavior to environmental events would have progressed as a process of trial and error.
