According to the dictionary, affection it is a “tender feeling of affection for something or someone”. Although it's not as common a word as love and affection, for example, you must have heard about him around, right? Despite having this more general meaning, did you know that affect is a very important concept for the study of human psychology? We have prepared an article for you to understand the details of the study of this topic and demystify this concept. Check out!
What is affect for psychology?
Affection is a set of subjective perceptions that mainly involve feelings and emotions and that help us understand the world, give meaning to life and to life and to establish bonds with other people. Using a very poetic metaphor, affective life is what gives brightness, warmth and color to human coexistence, which would be cold, dull and tasteless if it weren't for its presence.
Here's an example: a wedding is just a wedding, but it stops being a wedding when you and the person you love are getting married, right? Mourning is another good example: when we mourn the departure of someone who has died and will no longer be with us, we are expressing the affection we feel for that person who has just left.
Still, according to the most widely accepted definitions, it is a psychological dimension that encompasses, in a complex, individual and unique way, a set that involves emotion and feeling. Before moving on, it will be necessary to conceptualize emotion and feeling, words often used synonymously, but which have different meanings for psychology.
the emotions
Emotion is a complex reaction that is episodic (that is, it is not permanent) and that involves a biophysical modification, that is, a physical change in our body. Some examples: when a movie touches us and we cry, we are manifesting the emotion in a biophysical way; when we look into the eyes of those we love and our pupils dilate or our heart beats accelerate, we are manifesting an emotion; when thinking about something that causes us nervousness or anxiety and we break a cold sweat or feel discomfort in the pit of our stomach, we are being impacted by emotion.
Feeling, in turn, is a long-term, non-episodic psychological state that is always accompanied by a subjective (psychological/mental) dimension. Emotion, as already explained, results in a biophysical reaction; the feeling, no, so we cannot know what a person is feeling (since it is a psychological condition) unless he tries to express his feelings in words, because the feeling is not without physical reaction. It is possible, for example, to stare into the eyes of someone we love very much and not express any physical reaction at all. It is possible to feel a lot of hatred for something or someone, but nothing in our body denounces this negative feeling.
After all, affection is…
This term can be defined as the relationship that is established between people based on their emotions, their feelings and a very subjective and priceless sense, which is the value we give to the emotional experiences we go through (examples: when we feel that we are loving someone with an intensity never felt before, when a death causes us a very deep sadness, when a frustration takes possession of us like never before, etc.).
Affectivity, in short, interferes in a very sensitive way with our thoughts and gives them values, form, hue and content. It is said that cognition (thought, the way we articulate what we think and say) and affectivity (a set of emotions, feelings and value) are an indivisible whole, because we think from what we feel and feel from what we think; both are independent, but extremely interrelated and, in a way, dependent, yes.
What types of affection are there?
There are three possible analyzes when we talk about types of affect, because the study of psychology does not follow a single line and different authors think in different ways. The simplest analysis separates affects into positive (love, affection, fraternity, compassion, generosity, etc.) and negative (hate, disgust, displeasure, frustration, disappointment).
A second analysis “dissects” affect into four basic types of affective experiences, which include emotions and feelings, already mentioned, but we will revisit them to expand the understanding:
- Emotion: originates from an object or event, has observable bodily reactions, is episodic and short-lived, automatic/unconscious and externally oriented, as it can be observed.
- Feeling: they are not observable, since they happen internally, they are prolonged and have a long duration, they are not of great intensity, like emotions, they are not associated with an immediate stimulus and normally arise when we reflect on our emotions.
- Mood (mood): emotional state in which the person is at a given moment; it is deeply dependent on the emotions you have felt recently and the feelings that are going through you at the moment.
- Passions: very intense affective state, which directs the individual's attention and disposition in a single direction, be it a person, an object or an activity, inhibiting other interests.
Another methodology
A third methodology separates affections into four categories, based on the people with whom we are relating and to whom we direct this affection, which is generated based on the emotions that these people cause us and the feelings we develop for them:
- Family affection: as the name implies, it is that affection related to our family members, which can be maternal affection, paternal affection or any other type of affection that is linked to someone who is our relative and with whom we live not for affinities, but because they are part of our family nucleus;
- Fraternal affection: this is the affection we feel for friends and for the people we like and who are part of our lives because we choose, that is, they are the people we get close to because of affinities, because of the way we feel when we we are close to them, because of the attention they give us, etc.;
- Romantic affection: type of affection that is related to a love relationship, in which there are romantic and/or sexual feelings. It is related to fraternal affection, but with these people we have sexual, physical and sentimental relationships that we do not have with all the other people who are part of our lives;
- Self-love: this is the affection you feel for yourself, that is, the affection you feel for yourself and the way you care for and like your own person.
What can lack of affection cause?
Broken affective bonds and lack of affection can cause serious consequences in a person's life. The breaking of maternal and paternal emotional bonds, for example, caused when there is parental abandonment, can profoundly affect the development of a person from the first years of life.
The absence of fraternal affections, that is, friends, can greatly affect a person's self-esteem, who may end up seeing themselves as uninteresting, lonely and abandoned. The same can happen if the person is unable to establish romantic affections, which can cause low self-esteem and shake their perception of themselves as interesting and/or physically attractive.
Often, the shakes in affective bonds affect us in a way that we can't even measure, so it's important to explore all your relationships in therapy, talking about the development of each of your affections and understanding where relationships were shaken, for that there is a lack of affection and how affective bonds can be reestablished or definitively discarded from their lives.
You may also like
- Inform yourself about the importance of a simple hug!
- Spread the affection feeling to many people and in different situations!
- Find out what is the relationship between affective need and childhood stage!
Affection, in short, is something that we all have and that we develop with people we like and also with people we don't like, in the case of negative affect. If you keep an eye on the affective bonds that are part of your life, you will be able to measure their impact on your personality and you will be able to take care of the lack of affection that can eventually get in your way.
