Affect constitutes the baseline neurobiological and phenomenological substrate through which sentient organisms experience and navigate their relationship with the environment. Rather than serving as a passive byproduct of cognition, affect operates as a continuous, dynamic barometer of somatic well-being, homeostatic equilibrium, and motivational relevance. In contemporary psychological science and psychiatry, understanding affect is fundamental to deciphering how raw physiological sensations are translated into conscious feeling states, clinical symptoms, and decision-making heuristics.
Affect
1. Concise Definition
In psychology and affective neuroscience, affect refers to the underlying subjective experience of feeling, emotion, or mood, as well as the observable physiological and behavioral manifestations that accompany these states. It represents an organism’s basic evaluative response to internal and external stimuli, characterized predominantly along the continuous dimensions of valence (hedonic tone ranging from pleasure to displeasure) and arousal (activation ranging from calm to excitation).
Beyond this dimensional view, clinical psychiatry utilizes the term in a more focused, semiotic manner: affect designates the immediate, observable expression of an individual’s emotional state as manifested through facial expression, vocal tone, bodily posture, and motor behavior during clinical evaluation. In this technical diagnostic sense, affect represents the transient, observable weather of mental life, contrasting with mood, which reflects the sustained, enduring emotional climate.
Consequently, affect bridges the biological and the psychological. It encompasses both non-conscious interoceptive feedback—the raw neurochemical signals generated by visceral, autonomic, and hormonal processes—and the conscious, subjective feeling states that inform cognitive appraisal and guide adaptive behavioral choices.
2. Etymology & Linguistic Origin
The term affect traces its linguistic lineage to the Latin noun affectus, meaning “disposition,” “state of mind,” “feeling,” or “passion.” This noun is directly derived from the verb afficere, a compound formed from the prefix ad- (“to” or “toward”) and facere (“to do” or “to make”). Etymologically, to affect literally signifies “to do something to,” “to influence,” or “to act upon.”
The term was assimilated into European philosophical discourse during the Early Modern period, most prominently through the work of Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics (1677). Spinoza made a critical technical distinction between affectio (an affection, or the state of being acted upon by an external body) and affectus (the continuous variation in an organism’s bodily power of activity and vitality). In late 19th-century German philosophy and early psychoanalysis, the concept was adopted as der Affekt, utilized by figures such as Sigmund Freud to describe the quantity of emotional energy or psychical drive attached to an idea.
English translation efforts of psychoanalytic literature by Edward Titchener and James Strachey solidified “affect” as a specialized psychological noun in the early 20th century. By shifting the stress to the initial syllable, English-speaking scholars distinguished the psychological construct from the common transitive verb “to affect” (meaning to produce an effect on), creating a discrete nominal categorization within psychiatric terminology.
3. Pronunciation & Grammatical Form
In its specialized psychological and psychiatric usage as a noun, the word is pronounced with the stress placed firmly on the first syllable: /ˈæf.ɛkt/ (AF-ekt). This acoustic profile distinguishes it strictly from the common verb form, which places lexical stress on the second syllable: /əˈfɛkt/ (uh-FEKT).
Grammatically, affect functions primarily as a non-count noun when referring to the general phenomenon of emotional sensation (e.g., “the influence of affect on cognition”). However, it can also function as a countable noun within psychiatric diagnostics and behavioral research to denote specific, differentiated emotional displays or categories (e.g., “the patient exhibited conflicting affects during the interview”).
Derivatives of the term permeate the social sciences:
- Affective (adjective): Pertaining to feelings, moods, or emotions (e.g., affective neuroscience, affective disorder).
- Affectively (adverb): In a manner characterized by or mediated through emotion.
- Affectivity (noun): An individual’s susceptibility or capacity to experience emotional states.
- Affectlessness (noun): A condition characterized by the complete absence of apparent emotional responsiveness.
4. Detailed Conceptual Explanation
To grasp the conceptual scope of affect, one must differentiate between its modern neuroscientific formulation and its traditional psychiatric application. In contemporary affective science, spearheaded by researchers such as James Russell and Lisa Feldman Barrett, affect is frequently conceptualized as core affect. Core affect represents a continuous, neurophysiologically grounded neurovisceral state that is perpetually present within conscious life, even in the absence of explicit, recognizable “emotions” such as fear or anger.
This core affect serves as an organismic dashboard that summarizes the metabolic costs, survival affordances, and homeostatic shifts occurring within the body. When the brain processes interoceptive signals—afferent information from the gut, cardiovascular system, and neuroendocrine pathways—it translates this physiological data into a simple phenomenological feeling: how pleasant or unpleasant one feels, and how energized or fatigued one is. Thus, core affect is not dedicated to a specific object; rather, it is a diffuse, free-floating background property of consciousness that constantly biases how external environmental inputs are interpreted.
In clinical contexts, affect shifts from an internal interoceptive metric to an external expressive currency. When a clinician evaluates a patient’s affect, they are observing motor outputs: facial mobility, pupil responses, speech cadence, rate and prosody, gesture fluidity, and postural alignment. Affect in this domain represents the outward manifestation of internal neurochemical states, serving as a vital diagnostic window into central nervous system functioning, personality dynamics, and psychopathological processes.
The boundaries of affect are traditionally demarcated by its temporal duration and intentionality (whether it is directed toward an object). While a full-blown discrete emotion (such as fear) is typically brief, intense, and explicitly directed toward an identifiable trigger (e.g., a predator), and a mood is prolonged, diffuse, and low in intensity (e.g., a week-long dysthymic haze), affect is the foundational, continuous neurobiological medium out of which both emotions and moods are constructed. Without the primal engine of affect, higher-order emotional episodes would lack phenomenological charge and motivational urgency.
5. Historical Development
The scientific conceptualization of affect has evolved across multiple centuries, shifting between purely mentalistic, strictly physiological, and integrated constructionist paradigms. During the philosophical enlightenment, René Descartes formulated emotional experiences as passions of the soul caused by animal spirits moving through the pineal gland. Baruch Spinoza subsequently dismantled Cartesian dualism by arguing that affects are modifications of the body by which its active power is increased or diminished, alongside the parallel ideas of those modifications in the mind.
The late 19th century witnessed the empirical formalization of affective processes. Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), laying the bedrock for evolutionary theories of affect by demonstrating that affective displays are conserved across species, serving essential communicative and survival functions. Concurrently, William James and Carl Lange formulated the radical James-Lange theory, proposing that affect is not the cause of bodily responses, but rather the sensory perception of those physiological changes as they occur: we do not run because we are afraid; we feel afraid because our brain perceives the physiological response of running.
The mid-20th century saw the emergence of deep intellectual divides regarding the primacy of affect versus cognition. In 1980, social psychologist Robert Zajonc published his seminal paper, “Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences,” arguing that affective reactions can occur completely independently of, and chronologically prior to, cognitive appraisal. This sparked a legendary debate with Richard Lazarus, who contended that cognitive appraisal is an indispensable prerequisite for any affective response to emerge.
By the late 20th century, neuroimaging technologies catalyzed the birth of affective neuroscience, pioneered by Jaak Panksepp and Joseph LeDoux. Panksepp mapped ancient subcortical brain systems that generate instinctual affective states across all mammals, demonstrating that affect is deeply rooted in ancestral subcortical and brainstem networks. Concurrently, cognitive psychologists established dimensional frameworks, culminating in the 21st century with constructionist models that view affect as an ongoing predictive process uniting internal homeostasis and external perception.
6. Theoretical Foundations
The scientific literature on affect is organized around three primary competing, yet occasionally complementary, theoretical paradigms: Basic Emotion Theory, Dimensional Models, and Psychological Constructionism.
Basic Emotion Theory, championed by Paul Ekman, Carroll Izard, and biologically reinforced by Jaak Panksepp, posits that affective experience is anchored in a discrete number of evolutionarily hardwired, universal emotional programs. Under this model, affects such as joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise possess dedicated neural circuits, distinct physiological signatures, and universal, non-verbal expressive patterns across cultures. Panksepp’s subcortical neural mapping of systems such as SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, and PANIC provides biological evidence that primary-process affective states operate autonomously below the neocortical mantle.
Dimensional Models argue against discrete categorical partitions, proposing instead that all affective phenomena emerge from coordinate combinations of continuous, underlying neurophysiological dimensions. The most famous of these is James Russell’s Circumplex Model of Affect. Russell proposed that affect can be mathematically plotted along two orthogonal axes: valence (horizontal axis: pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (vertical axis: deactivation to activation). Every psychological feeling—from serenity (positive valence, low arousal) to terror (negative valence, high arousal)—can be mapped as a single point within this two-dimensional Cartesian space.
Psychological Constructionism, articulated comprehensively by Lisa Feldman Barrett in the Theory of Constructed Emotion, posits that emotions are not discrete, modular entities located in specific brain regions. Instead, the brain uses core affect (the continuous interoceptive representation of internal bodily states) as raw sensory data. The brain then combines this core affect with concept knowledge, past memories, and linguistic categories through predictive coding to “construct” a tailored instance of an emotion that best explains the sensory input and directs adaptive behavior. In this framework, affect is the raw biological ingredient, while emotion is the culturally scaffolded meaning attributed to it.
7. Key Components, Types & Dimensions
To analyze affect systematically, researchers and clinicians decompose the construct into specific functional axes, biological subsystems, and expressive clinical variations.
- Core Dimensions of Affect:
- Valence: The subjective hedonic tone of the experience, evaluated on a continuous bipolar spectrum from acute distress/aversion (negative valence) to deep satisfaction/pleasure (positive valence).
- Arousal / Activation: The physiological mobilization and energy deployment of the autonomic nervous system, moving along an axis from profound sleep/torpor (low activation) to extreme agitation/vigilance (high activation).
- Motivational Direction: The behavioral imperative elicited by the affective state, categorized fundamentally into approach motivation (moving toward rewarding stimuli) or avoidance motivation (moving away from threatening stimuli).
- Clinical Types of Affective Presentation:
- Broad / Normal Affect: A healthy baseline characterized by a full, flexible range of emotional expression that shifts naturally in congruence with the context and narrative content of conversation.
- Blunted Affect: A notable reduction in the intensity, variability, and expressiveness of emotional manifestation; common in schizophrenia and severe depressive disorders.
- Flat Affect: The near-total or complete absence of outward emotional expression; the voice sounds monotonic, facial features remain immobile, and body language is starkly unresponsive.
- Constricted / Restricted Affect: A presentation in which the range of emotional expression is clearly narrowed or muted, held within a rigid, limited behavioral band.
- Inappropriate / Incongruent Affect: A stark discordance between the expressed emotional display and the actual content of thought or circumstance (e.g., erupting into laughter while recounting a traumatic death).
- Labile Affect: Extreme, rapid, and unpredictable fluctuations in emotional expression that bear minimal correlation to external environmental triggers (often observed in bipolar mania, pseudobulbar affect, or borderline personality organization).
8. Examples & Illustrative Cases
The operational reality of affect is best understood through tangible empirical and clinical scenarios illustrating how affect drives behavior, alters physiology, and manifests in pathological conditions.
Case 1: The Neurotypical Somatic Marker
Consider an executive preparing to deliver a high-stakes keynote address to international investors. Long before cognitive articulation occurs, the individual’s core affect shifts: heart rate variability drops, galvanic skin conductance elevates, and a visceral sensation of internal tension registers in the gut. This state—characterized by high arousal and ambiguous-to-negative valence—is affect in its purest somatic form. If the speaker appraises this state constructively as “adaptive excitement,” they channel the sympathetic arousal into dynamic performance. If appraised through a framework of threat, the affect transforms into debilitating cognitive anxiety.
Case 2: Schizophrenia and Flat Affect
A 24-year-old patient diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia sits for a clinical intake interview. When recounting a deeply distressing incident involving a family emergency, the patient’s face exhibits zero dynamic muscular contractions; their eyes remain fixated without expressive movement, and their speech lacks fundamental prosody, delivering catastrophic narrative facts in an unvarying, robotic tone. While the patient may report experiencing internal anguish upon self-report inquiry, their expressive affect is utterly flat. This disconnect highlights the critical neuropsychiatric divergence between internal feeling and motoric affective display.
Case 3: Pseudobulbar Affect (PBA)
A 68-year-old individual who recently suffered a bilateral stroke affecting corticobulbar projections exhibits sudden, unprovoked episodes of intense, convulsive weeping while sitting quietly in a dining room. The crying spell lasts for ninety seconds before abruptly stopping. When asked why they are crying, the patient expresses confusion, stating, “I do not feel sad at all; my face and voice simply began doing that on their own.” This neurological condition cleanly isolates the motoric, expressive machinery of affect from the subjective cognitive experience of mood.
9. Measurement & Assessment
Because affect comprises internal subjective sensations, neurochemical shifts, and external motoric behaviors, researchers and clinicians employ a multi-modal assessment battery spanning self-report psychometrics, autonomic biometrics, and observational rating systems.
In psychometric measurement, the most universally implemented self-report inventory is the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), developed by David Watson, Lee Anna Clark, and Auke Tellegen. The PANAS measures two broad, statistically independent affective dimensions: Positive Affect (PA), which reflects an individual’s level of enthusiasm, active alertness, and pleasurable engagement; and Negative Affect (NA), which captures unpleasurable engagement, subjective distress, and nervousness. To bypass linguistic limitations and cultural translation biases, researchers also use visual, non-verbal tools such as the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM), which uses pictorial, cartoon-like human figures to quantify valence, arousal, and dominance along continuous 9-point scales.
In physiological and neuroscientific laboratories, implicit and autonomic markers provide objective assessments of affect that do not rely on conscious self-reflection:
- Facial Electromyography (fEMG): Measures micro-volt electrical discharges produced by facial musculature. Activity of the corrugator supercilii (frowning muscle above the brow) indexes negative valence, while activity of the zygomaticus major (smiling muscle at the cheek) indexes positive valence, even when movements are imperceptible to the naked human eye.
- Autonomic Nervous System Indicators: Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) or skin conductance serves as a direct readout of sympathetic nervous system activation, reliably indexing physiological arousal. Concurrently, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) indicate vagal nerve regulation and parasympathetic flexibility.
- Neuroimaging Modalities: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) monitors blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals in key affective nodes, including the amygdala, anterior insula, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).
In clinical psychiatric environments, affect is formally evaluated during the Mental Status Examination (MSE). Clinicians do not typically administer paper questionnaires; instead, they observe the patient throughout the clinical encounter, explicitly documenting four key parameters: range (broad vs. restricted), intensity (normal, flat, or exaggerated), mobility/lability (fixed vs. rapidly changing), and appropriateness/congruence (aligned with thought content vs. mismatched).
10. Applications & Practical Significance
The operational framework of affect extends far beyond theoretical laboratory models, serving as an organizing principle across several practical disciplines.
In Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, affective dysregulation is recognized as a transdiagnostic risk factor cutting across depressive disorders, anxiety conditions, borderline personality disorder, and complex trauma. Modern evidence-based therapies, including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), shift the clinical target away from altering cognitive belief systems toward cultivating “affect tolerance” and emotional regulation. Clinicians train patients to identify primary visceral affect without reacting with secondary cognitive distortions, disrupting maladaptive avoidance loops.
In Behavioral Economics and Consumer Science, affect is the driving mechanism behind real-world decision-making. Paul Slovic’s affect heuristic demonstrates that individuals frequently make complex risk-benefit judgments based on rapid, intuitive affective evaluations (“How do I feel about this?”) rather than formal cognitive probability assessments. Marketing strategies and political campaigns systematically engineer stimuli to trigger precise affective states, knowing that positive valence diminishes perceived risk and enhances consumption impulses, while high-arousal negative affect (e.g., moral outrage) dramatically drives online social engagement.
In Affective Computing and Artificial Intelligence, engineers train computational systems to recognize, interpret, and simulate human affective states. Utilizing automated Facial Action Coding Systems (FACS), natural language processing algorithms that evaluate emotional prosody, and wearable biometric trackers, affective computing systems can estimate a user’s frustration, boredom, or focus in real time. This technology is applied in autonomous driving systems to detect operator fatigue, adaptive educational software that modulates lesson difficulty based on student stress, and automated mental health monitoring tools.
11. Research & Empirical Evidence
Empirical investigations over the past four decades have confirmed the fundamental role of affect across human cognition and neurobiology.
A transformative empirical milestone was formulated through the somatic marker hypothesis, advanced by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Studying patients with focal damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)—such as the famous historical index case Phineas Gage—Damasio and colleagues utilized the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) to demonstrate that individuals stripped of affective somatic signaling could intellectually calculate logical outcomes, yet repeatedly made disastrous real-life decisions. The vmPFC was shown to serve as an integrative hub that pairs cognitive scenarios with bioreactive somatic markers (affective “gut feelings”). Without this affective compass, rational cognition deteriorates into analysis paralysis or catastrophic risk-taking.
Neuroanatomist Joseph LeDoux conducted ground-breaking empirical studies isolating the neurocircuitry of conditioned fear in rodents, unveiling two distinct structural pathways for affective processing: a rapid, subcortical “low road” and a slower, cortical “high road.” The low road projects sensory information directly from the sensory thalamus straight to the lateral nucleus of the amygdala, bypassing the neocortex entirely. This empirical finding substantiated Zajonc’s earlier theoretical claim that affective survival responses can fire within milliseconds, long before the neocortex has consciously recognized the visual identity of a threat.
More recently, large-scale neuroimaging meta-analyses led by Kristen Lindquist and Lisa Feldman Barrett have challenged classical basic emotion views. By evaluating hundreds of fMRI studies, Lindquist and colleagues demonstrated that discrete emotions like anger, fear, and sadness do not possess dedicated, non-overlapping brain regions. Instead, these experiences recruit a shared, distributed neural network consisting of the anterior insula, amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate—a network primarily dedicated to interoception, predictive homeostatic regulation, and core affect generation.
12. Cultural & Cross-Cultural Considerations
While the capacity for core affect is a biologically universal trait of the human central nervous system, the way affect is experienced, valued, prioritized, and expressed varies substantially across cultural environments.
A foundational theoretical contribution in this arena is Jeanne Tsai’s Ideal Affect Theory. Tsai makes an essential empirical distinction between actual affect (how an individual genuinely feels at any given moment) and ideal affect (the affective state an individual values, desires, and actively strives to experience). Her cross-cultural research demonstrates that Western, individualistic cultures (such as the United States) overwhelmingly prioritize High Arousal Positive (HAP) affect, idealizing states such as excitement, enthusiasm, and euphoria. Conversely, East Asian, collectivist cultures (such as China, Japan, and Korea) consistently value Low Arousal Positive (LAP) affect, placing high cultural value on serenity, calmness, harmony, and emotional equilibrium.
These cultural divergences dictate expressive behavior through what Paul Ekman designated as cultural display rules. Display rules are socially learned norms that regulate how, when, and to whom affective states may be outwardly exhibited. Classic cross-cultural experiments by Ekman and Friesen showed that when watching distressing films in isolation, American and Japanese participants displayed identical facial grimaces and disgust reactions. However, when an authority figure was present in the room, Japanese participants masked their negative affect behind polite, neutral smiles in accordance with collectivist cultural imperatives prioritizing relational harmony, whereas American participants continued to openly express their distress.
Furthermore, linguistic anthropology reveals that cultures organize the affective realm using distinct lexical structures. Many languages contain untranslatable affective concepts—such as the German Schadenfreude (pleasure derived from another’s misfortune), the Japanese Amae (a comfortable state of dependence upon another’s benevolence), or the Portuguese Saudade (a deep, melancholic longing for an absent loved one). Psychological constructionists argue that these culturally unique linguistic categories do not merely describe preexisting universal states; they actively shape the phenomenological experience of core affect itself.
13. Criticisms, Debates & Limitations
The academic study of affect remains characterized by contentious theoretical debates, epistemological disputes, and methodological challenges.
The central fault line in affective science remains the uncompromising debate between Essentialism vs. Social Constructionism. Essentialist researchers (led by traditional evolutionary psychologists and basic emotion theorists) argue that reducing affect to continuous dimensions of valence and arousal strips emotion of its biological reality. They maintain that discrete emotions represent evolved, specialized adaptations that cannot be understood merely as arbitrary cultural labels pasted over diffuse physiological sensations. Constructionists counter that four decades of physiological research have failed to isolate a single unique autonomic or neural fingerprint for any discrete emotion, accusing essentialists of perpetuating modern neuro-phrenology.
A secondary methodological controversy concerns the Measurement Problem. Because subjective feeling is inherently private, researchers must fundamentally rely on self-report instruments (such as the PANAS). However, self-reports inevitably introduce cognitive contamination, social desirability bias, and semantic ambiguity: two research participants rating their “distress” as a 4 out of 5 may be experiencing vastly different neurochemical realities. Conversely, while objective biometric markers (like heart rate or skin conductance) offer precise data, they measure physiological arousal rather than meaning: a racing heart can signify fear, sexual attraction, intense athletic exertion, or caffeine consumption.
Finally, clinical diagnostics faces ongoing debates regarding cross-cultural diagnostic validity. Applying Western expectations of “broad, animated affect” as a universal baseline for healthy mental functioning can lead to the overpathologization of normative, culturally restrained affective styles among non-Western populations, risking inaccurate diagnoses of blunted affect, major depression, or negative-symptom schizophrenia.
14. Related Terms & Distinctions
Because vernacular discourse regularly conflates distinct psychological phenomena, it is vital to demarcate the technical boundaries separating affect from its conceptual relatives:
- Affect vs. Emotion: Affect is the broad, continuous, and diffuse neurobiological feeling state characterized by valence and arousal, often lacking an explicit cognitive object. Emotion is a discrete, short-lived, highly organized episode (e.g., rage, terror, joy) triggered by a specific event or appraisal, accompanied by coordinated physiological and expressive reactions.
- Affect vs. Mood: Affect is immediate, reactive, dynamic, and transient. Mood is a pervasive, sustained, and enduring emotional background that persists over hours, days, or weeks, possessing a lower intensity threshold and typically lacking a discrete trigger.
- Affect vs. Feeling: Feeling is the strictly internal, subjective, phenomenological conscious experience of an affective or emotional state (the “what-it-feels-like” quality), whereas affect encompasses both internal interoception and external behavioral/motoric manifestations.
- Affect vs. Temperament: Temperament represents an individual’s biologically based, genetically predisposed, and enduring lifelong baseline pattern of emotional reactivity, sensory sensitivity, and self-regulation, representing the constitutional foundation upon which transient affects arise.
- Valence vs. Arousal: Valence refers exclusively to the qualitative, hedonic tone of experience (pleasantness vs. unpleasantness), whereas arousal refers to the quantitative degree of physiological, metabolic, and autonomic activation (calm vs. excited), operating as entirely independent orthogonal axes.
15. Summary / Key Takeaways
- Affect represents the core neurobiological and experiential substrate of conscious life, characterized along the primary dimensions of valence (hedonic tone) and arousal (activation).
- In clinical psychiatry, affect denotes the immediate, observable behavioral expression of internal emotion (observed via facial expression, vocal prosody, and motor activity) as distinct from sustained, subjective mood.
- Major theoretical models debate whether affect is organized into discrete, evolutionarily hardwired circuits (Basic Emotion Theory) or assembled out of core interoceptive states via predictive cognitive processing (Psychological Constructionism).
- Empirical research demonstrates that affective signals (“somatic markers”) are fundamentally indispensable for logical cognitive reasoning, intuitive risk appraisal, and adaptive decision-making.
- Cultural display rules and ideal affect vary globally, dictating whether high-arousal or low-arousal states are valued and how emotional expressions are socially governed.
Ultimately, affect is not an evolutionary relic competing with cognitive rationality, but the vital neurobiological architecture that underpins perception, decision-making, and consciousness. Whether viewed through the microscopic lens of clinical evaluation or the macro-level models of affective neuroscience, deciphering the mechanics of affect remains foundational to understanding the human mind.
References
- Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Feldman_Barrett
- Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis
- Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 6(3-4), 169-200. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)
- Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_neuroscience
- Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161-1178. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumplex_model