Affect
The Basic Idea
Do you have a good poker face? Or are you the type of person who feels a small smirk come over their face and butterflies in their stomach when dealt a good hand of cards? When we try to hide something but end up giving it away through our body language or facial expressions, we are dealing with the power of affect. A key facet of social psychology, affect broadly describes the underlying subjective experience of internal emotions, moods, and feelings when we interact with people, situations, or stimuli.
It is important to note that there is some confusion regarding the definition of affect, as it is both used as an umbrella term to discuss these underlying emotional processes and as a shorthand for affect display. Affect display is the outward physical embodiment of these underlying emotions, such as body language and facial expressions. To return to our poker example, the excitement felt after getting dealt a good hand would be called affect, whereas the small smirk or nervous foot-tapping would be an affect display.
Stimuli do something more than arouse sensation; they give rise to processes of a different kind, to ‘feelings’ in a special sense; we do not merely take the impressions as they come, but we are affected by them, we feel them.
– Edward B. Titchener, English psychologist
