Emotion and Affect

MAJOR FUNCTION, PROCESS, AND OTHER OBSERVABLE ENTITY CONCEPTS

DEFINITIONS 

Affect

• Zajonc describes affect as “the manifestation of an emotion as perceived by an observer (objective experience of the emotion)”.
• Trzepacz & Baker describe affect as the “external and dynamic manifestation of a person’s internal emotional state”(Trzepacz & Baker, 1993).
• Nussbaum describes affect as the “observable behaviors that are expressions of emotion” (Nussbaum, 2013).
• The APA defines affect as “a pattern of observable behaviors that is the expression of a subjectively experienced feeling state (emotion)… In contrast to mood, which refers to a pervasive and sustained emotional “climate”, affect refers to more fluctuating changes in emotional “weather” (APA, 2013).

Brainstorming/synthesis of above sources:

Feeling

• Wikipedia defines feelings this way: “Feelings are best understood as a subjective representation of emotions, private to the individual experiencing them” (Wikipedia, 2015).

Emotion

• Emotion is a subjectively experienced state – associated with activation (arousal) of specific brain regions, neurotransmitters, physiological response and mental states including “appraisal of situations and contexts” (Thoits).
• Wikipedia describes an emotion as “a subjective, conscious experience characterized primarily by psychophysiological expressions, biological reactions, and mental states” (Wikipedia, 2015).

Emotional State

Think about the constructs of emotional state versus emotion versus feeling.

• An emotional state exists regardless of conscious awareness of the state; this is the neurophysiological reaction involving parts of the brain known to produce the experience of emotion.
• The experience of an emotional state is an emotion or feeling (subjectively experienced emotion)

Mood

• Mood is a longer-lasting emotional state; it’s believed the while neurotransmitters play a primary role in emotion, mood is controlled more by neuro-peptides in the brain; less intense state than emotion.
• Wikipedia describes mood as “diffuse affective states that generally last for much longer durations than emotions and are also usually less intense than emotions” (Wikipedia, 2015).
• The DSM-5 defines mood as “a pervasive and sustained emotion that colors the perception of the world… In contrast to affect, which refers to more fluctuating changes in emotional “weather,” mood refers to a pervasive and sustained emotional “climate” (APA, 2013).
• The MSE manual describes mood as “a person’s predominant internal feeling state at a given time” and distinguishes mood from affect in terms of subjective experience (mood) versus objectively observable manifestations. They go on to describe mood as a “consistent, sustained feeling state” that is “more likely to vary over hours and days than minutes and seconds” and affect as the “moment-to-moment expression of feelings” (Trzepacz & Baker, 1993). They define mood as being “what the patient reports as his or her predominant emotional state”.
• DSM-5 guidebook defines mood as “sustained and pervasive feeling states” (Black & Grant, 2014)

Attributes of emotion

Attributes of emotion and affect

• Latency (time to onset of detectable or consciously experienced emotion relative to evoking stimulus)
• Lability (measure of a refractory period during which certain – opposite? – emotions can or cannot be evoked)
• Valence (negatively or positively valanced)
  • Quality (e.g., sad, happy, content, hopeful, afraid)
• Intensity (measure of strength of emotion from absent to all-encompassing)
• Range (breath of emotion; negatively to positively valanced; variation in qualities; variation in intensity?)
• Reactivity (threshold of eliciting stimulus required for activation of specific emotion; can be emotion-specific or general emotional reactivity).

Attributes of mood

• Duration
• Quality
• Valence
• Intensity
• Lability(?) (the definition of mood implies that lability is not relevant; shorter durations – i.e., is there such a thing as rapid cycling moods or is there only labile emotion states that overshadow moods?; at a neurophysiological level do the neuropeptides implicated in mood exist at only very low levels, or are they just overshadowed by neurotransmitters; do levels of neuropeptides fluctuate rapidly thus leading to rapid changes in neurotransmitter levels? Seems that this can only be assessed at neurochemical level)

Patterns of emotional experience and/or expression

• Lability - a short refractory period for any given emotion, allowing a different emotion to be elicited in a smaller-than-typical elapsed time period

• Emotion can also be regulated through processes most authors describe using terms like (f) 

  • Maintaining
  • Amplifying
  • Attenuating

This table is based on a terms used the forms (questions, picklist values) of an EHR of one health system

Summary of RDoC conceptualization of concepts related to emotion (Research Domain Criteria) (see https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research/research-funded-by-nimh/rdoc/index.shtml)

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