Emotion and Cognition: Types of Affect
Herbert Simon (as quoted in McLeod 1991), at the 1981 Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, observed, "I have some impression, in moving from one paper to the next, that we are indeed the tradtional blind men, now touching one part of the elephant, now another. Affect is a word of everyday language that is subject to the impression of all such words--perhaps to more imprecision than most. Its various meanings are connected--that's how they arose in the first place--but not synonymous." Susan McLeod (1991), has clearly differentiated among the different forms of affect such as feelings, emotions, moods, motivations, drives, and instincts. Her definitions are as follows:
Affect is a generic term for such states that subsumes the states that it describes. For example, emotion is an affective state, but all affect is not emotion.
Emotion is one type of affect. Many researchers believe that, like colors, emotions consist of primary and secondary emotions which stand alone or combine to form any emotional state. These researchers cannot, however, agree on which emotions are primary and secondary. They fall into the camp that views emotions separate from cognition. Other researchers consider emotion to involve bodily activity and the cognitive interpretation of that activation. They believe that emotion and cognition are tightly coupled.
Moods, like depression, happiness, and sadness, are less intense than emotions and are more subtle affective states.
Feelings can be either emotions or bodily sensations that are part of an affective experience, like feeling hungry.
Attitude refers to a psychological state which is develops as a result of experiences over time. Attitudes influence us to act in certain ways, responding to the world in a relatively consistent manner. Unlike a feeling, an attitude is a readiness to respond rather than a response itself.
Anxiety is a situational response to either life in general or intensely to one particular circumstance.
Beliefs or belief systems are judgments of the credibility of a concept.
Values are central beliefs about how to behave.
McLeod differentiates these types of affect according to two dimensions: intensity and stability. This approach situates, for example, "emotions [as] intense but unstable . . . attitudes [as] less intense than emotions but more stable; and beliefs [as] less intense and more stable than attitude" (p. 102). In a reaction to McLeod's work, Kristie Fleckenstein (1991) considered looking at affective states along a two different dimensions: affect and cognition. This approach illustrates an affective / cognitive dance along a continuum:
This continuum supports the idea that emotion and cognition are inextricably linked which encourages the examination of emotion as having properties similar to those of cognition.
feather images © Tara Prindle 2000, NativeTech: Native American Technology and Art. Internet URL: http://www.nativetech.org
Emotion and Cognition © Courtney Glazer 2000