What is an affect? How does it differ from feeling and emotion?
Donald Nathanson argues that when an affect has been triggered it means that a stimulus has activated a mechanism that releases a known pattern of biological events. Each affect unfolds according to a precisely written programme. These patterns are part of our evolutionary heritage and are genetically transmitted. Affects are unvarying physiological mechanisms.
A feeling occurs when an organism becomes aware of an affect. Only animals that have higher consciousness can become aware that they are having an affect. Even still, we may be unaware that an affect has been triggered, if, for example, we are focused on something else. If you were brought up in a particular culture that denies certain feelings then you will not be able to recognise them when they arise. Affect is biology, while feeling is psychology.
Each affect gets triggered over the course of a lifetime for an individual and that occurs in a particular context. When you get embarrassed as an adult you get embarrassed is a situation that resembles one in which you were embarrassed before. As a child develops memory becomes linked with affect. An emotion is a complex combination of affect with memories and with the affects they trigger. If affect is biology, emotion, says Nathanson, is biography.
Affect is universal; we all share the same affects. Where we differ is how each ‘remember’ our experiences of innate affects. Each person’s experience of anger, for example, will depend on their history – past affective experiences with anger.
An affect lasts only a few seconds, a feeling lasts long enough to recognise it, and an emotion lasts as long as we keep finding memories that trigger that affect.