Affect theory

Affect theory may refer to theories from philosophy, psychology, or the humanities. Definitions and applications vary across psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, medicine, interpersonal communication, literary theory, critical theory, media studies, and gender studies, among other fields.

In psychology, affect 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.

Psychological affect theory is usually attributed to the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, introduced in the first two volumes of his book Affect Imagery Consciousness (1962). Tomkins uses the concept of affect to refer to the "biological portion of emotion," defined as the "hard-wired, preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms that exist in each of us," which, when triggered, precipitate a "known pattern of biological events". However, it is also acknowledged that, in adults, the affective experience is a result of interactions between the innate mechanism and a "complex matrix of nested and interacting ideo-affective formations."