Whereas James focused on the importance of raw sensory processing of somatic, visceral, vascular, and motor cues from the body as the basic building block of the mind, Wundt focused on the mental counterpart of those internal cues, which he called “affect.” 1Īffect, according to Wundt, is a feeling state that is a fundamental ingredient of the human mind. Constructivist approaches are united in the assumption that the mental phenomena people experience and name (e.g., “thoughts,” “emotions,” “memories,” and “beliefs”) are events that result from the interplay of more basic psychological ingredients that are not themselves specific to any single psychological phenomenon. Wilhem Wundt (1998b/1897), along with William James (1890), crafted the first psychological constructionist approaches to psychology ( Gendron & Barrett, in press). We describe how core affect forms a basis for learning and grounds consciousness for other senses like seeing. Finally, we end by describing our most recent research on how affective variation has important psychological consequences that reach beyond the boundaries of emotion. We then describe evidence from our own laboratory demonstrating that the circumplex can model and represent individual variation in core affective feelings that are linked to differences in the precision of emotional experience (termed emotional granularity). Next, we present the affective circumplex as a mathematical formalization for representing core affective states. We then describe the brain areas that are responsible for realizing core affect, illustrating its central role in mental life. This sets the stage for discussing the contemporary view of core affect as a basic, universal, and psychologically irreducible property of the mind. In this review, we begin with a historical account of the concept of affect in psychology. It allows researchers to talk about emotion in a theory-neutral way. A cautious term, it allows reference to something’s effect or someone’s internal state without specifying exactly what kind of an effect or state it is.
In the science of emotion, “affect” is a general term that has come to mean anything emotional. In modern psychological usage, “affect” refers to the mental counterpart of internal bodily representations associated with emotions, actions that involve some degree of motivation, intensity, and force, or even personality dispositions. Historically, “affect” referred to a simple feeling-to be affected is to feel something. In science, and particularly in psychology, “affect” refers to a special kind of influence-something’s ability to influence your mind in a way that is linked to your body. In English, the word “affect” means “to produce a change.” To be affected by something is to be influenced by it.
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