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Affective reflections and refractions within the BrainMind

The characteristic affects such as anger, fear, loneliness, desire, love and playful joy make emotions so important in our lives, and perhaps the lives of many other animals. Still, affect is such a slippery brain process, more easily discussed from first than third person perspectives, that there is little agreement on how to create a solid science of affective experience. Science is much better positioned to study objective entities of the world as opposed to subjective entities of the brain. Only because of advances in brain research, as highlighted in this issue, is progress finally being made on that slippery topic. Emotion science has been flourishing in psychology for almost a quarter of a century. Affect science is gradually catching up. Why make the distinction? Because affects, the valenced feeling aspects of certain brain states, are just a subset of the neurophysiological and psychological complexities that accompany all emotional and mo-tivational states. It is common for emotions to be parsed into behavioural, physiological, cognitive and affective components, with the affective components being most difficult to clarify in any scientific depth. Indeed, without affective feelings , there would be little of substance left to the concept of emotions—the behavioural, physiological and cognitive components can never hang together as a coherent description of emotions. However, affect science remains burdened by sterile controversy (Ortony & Turner, 1990; Panksepp, 1992). Many remain excessively committed to the classic Wundtian dimensions of valence and arousal as being the most coherent ways to talk about affects (Barrett, 2006). Others do not deny the empirical utility of such approaches , but advocate evidence-based visions of the brain being an evolved beehive of many distinct affects, ranging from anger to hunger, from fear to thirst, from joy to disgust, from grief to love (Denton, 2006; Panksepp, 1998, 2007a). How is one to make sense of such divergent views? Clearly, controversy currently outweighs agreement (Barrett et al. Perhaps some clarity can be had through conceptual analyses (Ekman & Davidson, 1994). Affects come in various flavours: Some are strictly sensory, such as the delight of honey on the tongue and the excruciating ache of gouty joints. Some are clearly linked to very specific visceral bodily states, from hunger pangs to the dreadful dehydration that can fill the mind with excruciating thirst; others are of a more nebulous variety , not well understood, such as bodily exhilara-tion and fatigue. Yet others, although …