Affect
Authors: Vittersø Joar 
Published: February 2025

The term affect is used in a multitude of ways in the wellbeing literature, and this chapter identifies three diverging clusters of definitions. One considers affect to be an umbrella term, a top-down concept under which moods, emotions, feelings, and other kinds of affect are taxonomically organized. A second group of definitions holds affect to be a bottom-up phenomenon. Here, affect is taken to be a fundamental or primitive building block, a “natural kind” that is present in all other concepts referred to as affective or emotional. On this view, an emotion is not a kind of affect but contains affect as one of its constituents. The third cluster of affect definitions uses affect as a synonym for other concepts, such as moods, emotions, or feelings.

The HTW uses affect as an umbrella term, and the chapter proceeds by surveying the major kinds of affect, such as temperament, mood, emotion, feeling, and evaluation. For emotions, three groups of theories are examined. They consider emotions to be basic, continuous, or constructed, respectively. Among the presented approaches, one of the basic theories, referred to as the communicative theory of emotions, appears to be the most promising. The theory offers a list of nine basic emotions, among which the “big four” of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear are the best exemplars. According to the communicative theory, basic emotions are psychological primitives and therefore cannot be separated into lower-level states that are not themselves emotions.

A feeling state is part of an emotion but is not limited to emotions. In contrast to emotions, feelings are always present in a conscious mind, and they reflect what it is like to have a subjective experience on a moment-to-moment basis. A feeling informs us if we are OK or in need of tending, and it comprises four components: valence (pleasure/displeasure) tells us how good a stimulus is; quality identifies the nature of what we are feeling; intensity accounts for the importance of the feeling; and duration tells us how long a feeling is lasting.

An evaluation is another kind of affect; it represents a valuation mechanism and is quite similar to a feeling in terms of functions. However, evaluations are not restricted to being consciously experienced and can be integrated into other mental processes, such as perception. A promising approach has been developed by Shizgal, and it suggests that a good-bad evaluation interacts with nonevaluative dimensions to generate a value judgment.

The last part of the paper provides an account of emotional happiness and emotional interest. Emotional happiness has many different meanings, but two major conceptualizations are easily identified. One associates happiness with active goal pursuits and with the execution of plans that are progressing well. The second conceptualization links happiness with low-effort activities and with goal achievement and the fulfillment of needs. The HTW refers to happiness in this latter sense as a harmony feeling. Emotional interest is related to learning and exploring unfamiliar territory. It often occurs when we are confronted with a challenge and when skills are developed. Interest therefore belongs to a category called “opportunity feelings.” Harmony feelings differ from opportunity feelings both functionally and phenomenologically. Hence, it is unfortunate that mainstream wellbeing research tends to collapse them both into the grab-bag notion of “positive affect.”