ABSTRACT
People gravitate to the things that make them feel good. Pleasure and pain are individually defined and lie on a continuum of affective states. Emotions are cognitive linguistic constructs used to give meaning to affective states. Emotional meaning is what differentiates humans from the animal world. We can assess the emotional meanings given to affective states. However, the nature of affect is auto-responsive and instinctual. Thus, while we grasp for individually defined meanings of feelings or affective states, we move toward pleasure and away from pain. One problem or a limiting factor associated with the study of hedonism is the paucity of normative studies. The pathology of hedonism has received attention through the ages and must be examined to understand normative hedonic responses. Pathological hedonism is the extreme of originally normative hedonic response. The alcoholic, the drug addict, the sex addict, the compulsive spender, the food addict, and the gambling addict engage in hedonism carried to the extreme. The pathology, originally used to mask pain, turned to compulsive addictive behavior.
