Affect, Emotions, and Feeling

In the face of a need for greater understanding of affect and its role in any feature of human experience, one would naturally turn to psychology for enlightenment. And, given the naiveté with which we often assume that disciplines other than our own have developed exhaustive analyses of basic areas of their domain, those outside the discipline of psychology might be surprised to find that, with respect to affect, the psychological landscape is more akin to a jungle than to a manicured garden. It is a landscape upon which there is some agreement about dimensions, climate, and a few other very basic features; indeed, it is admitted that the landscape exists—no mean feat, given biases that have existed about dealing with the topic at all. ¹ However, so little agreement is there about more refined aspects of this topic, that one of the basic prerequisites of scientific analysis, terminology, is itself yet to be standardized, making discussion all that much more difficult.