Affect

In everyday English usage and when used as a verb, affect concerns the influence of something on another person or object.

'Affect' also has a number of specialised meanings:

In psychology, affect is an emotion or subjectively experienced feeling, or the involvement of such processes in a psychological system or theory. Contrast with mood, which is more sustained.

In abnormal psychology, affect can also refer to emotional expressiveness. Flat affect, constricted affect or restricted affect is a lack of emotional expression. Blunted affect is the incapacity to be aware of the emotional circumstances of other people. Inappropriate affect or incongruous affect is a mismatch between experienced emotion and its expression. Labile affect is unstable display of emotion. Shallow affect is emotion displayed for manipulating others and is not really felt.

Although not the mainstream usage, psychologist Edward Titchener used the word 'affect' in more specific way, to refer to a pleasantness-unpleasantness dimension of feeling.

Affective computing, an area of research in computer science aiming to simulate emotional processes, or make use of human emotion in human-computer interaction, derives its name from this word in the same way.

In literary aesthetics affect refers to the emotional sense created in the reader or receiver of a literary work. These affects may be broadly grouped by their mode of writing, and relationship with time. Catharsis the affect of dramatic completition of action in time. Kairosis the affect of novels whose characters become integrated in time. Kenosis the affect of lyric poetry which creates a sense of emptyness and timelessness.

In Linguistics, affect refers to the emotional tone of a text or an utterance. "Affective displays" are one of the five categories of kinesics.

Note: the word "affect" is also frequently, and wrongly, confused with "effect" which has completely different meanings.

See also