## Summary Affect is the umbrella term for the felt tone of experience — the domain that covers emotions, moods and feelings as variations of the same underlying thing. The adjective is "affective", as in *affective neuroscience* or *affective states*. It is the word Dr. James Gross reaches for when he talks about the whole territory at once (see [[James Gross]]). The three everyday words are not synonyms; they differ in duration, intensity and object: - **Emotion** — short, intense, object-directed: fear of the dog, joy at the news. Rises, peaks, passes in seconds to minutes. - **Mood** — longer and lower-intensity, often with no clear object: irritable all afternoon, vaguely anxious all week. The background colour the day is painted in. - **Feeling** — the conscious experience of either: what it is like to have the emotion or the mood. ## The two dimensions Research typically measures affect along two axes: **valence** (pleasant to unpleasant) and **arousal** (calm to activated). Excitement and contentment are both positive in valence but opposite in arousal; anxiety and depression can share valence but differ in arousal. Plot anything felt on these two axes and you have the standard map of affective science. ## An older word for it The eighteenth-century moral philosophers — Hume, Adam Smith — spoke of the "passions and affections". **Affections** is the archaic version of the same term, surviving in theology, moral philosophy and phrases like "evenness of affection". Outside those corners it now reads as quaint, and its second meaning (fondness, tender attachment) muddies it. Spinoza's *affectus* is translated either way. For modern writing, "affect" is the word. ## Why the word matters Naming the category matters because regulation works differently at different levels: an emotion can be reappraised on the spot, a mood calls for situation or attention changes, and a trait-like affective style calls for practice over years (see [[Feeling Strategies]] for the regulation landscape, and the notes it draws on: [[Emotions]], [[Positive Emotions]], [[Negative Emotions]], [[Universe of Emotions]]). --- `Concepts:` [[Emotions]] · [[Positive Emotions]] · [[Negative Emotions]] · [[Equanimity]] `Knowledge Base:` [[James Gross]] · [[Feeling Strategies]] · [[Lisa Feldman Barrett]]