Thesis
Reference
Research on affect structure using Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models for the treatment of ordinal variables
ELEFANT-YANNI, Véronique Rica
Abstract
Regarding the persistent debate about the affect structure, the main criticisms concern the methodology. By means of questionnaire including indicators from all around the semantic circumplex, different response formats, an experimental situation that forces the participants to report their instantaneous affects, and state-of-the-art statistical tools with the Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models for the treatment of ordinal variables, these criticisms are adressed and we can conciliate the principal theories of affect structure with the same experimental setting. In particular, using the semantic items all around the circumplex we find three bipolar independent dimensions and using only the PANAS semantic items, we find two unipolar dimensions. A trend firmly established in social sciences, coherent from semantics to sociology allows considering affect dimensions of tension, valence and activation as being already all at once motivation, cognition and behavior. We hypothesize that the on-going monitoring system of affect consists of quantum information processing.
ELEFANT-YANNI, Véronique Rica. Research on affect structure using Generalized
Linear Latent Variable Models for the treatment of ordinal variables. Thèse de doctorat : Univ. Genève, 2009, no. FPSE 418
URN : urn:nbn:ch:unige-13422
DOI : 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:1342
Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:1342
Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.
Section de psychologie
Sous la co-direction des Professeures Susanne Kaiser (FAPSE) & Maria--Pia Victoria Feser (SES)
RESEARCH ON AFFECT STRUCTURE USING GENERALIZED LINEAR LATENT VARIABLE MODELS
FOR THE TREATMENT OF ORDINAL VARIABLES
THESE
Présentée à la
Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l’éducation de l’Université de Genève
pour obtenir le grade de Docteure en Psychologie
par
Véronique ELEFANT-YANNI
de NEUCHÂTEL
Thèse No 418
GENEVE
Mars 2009
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNRS 610- 057883.99 and PP001-106465).
In Memoriam
Jacques-Dominique de Lannoy Brussels 28.09.1938 - Geneva 06.06.2001.
I wish to pay here a modest homage to Professor de Lannoy who had a profound impact on my comprehension of the psychological functioning and on the importance that projection has on our construction of reality. Afterthought, I realized that his short article "Retour à Wundt?" (1984) already asked the essential questions to which my research on affect structure led me when he concluded: "It is extremely possible that from now on it is useless to study as such "emotion",
"motivation" or "cognition": divisions of the behavior into entities inherited of the old psychology of faculties which are no more justified, for want of anything better, than for reasons of didactic nature. Would the progress of psychology be at the price of going beyond them?"
Remember the ocean in the clock…
Abstract
In affective psychology, there is a persistent debate about the number, the nature and the definition of the affect structure dimensions. The main criticisms of the different positions concern the methodological aspects such as the choice of the semantic items, the definition of affect with respect to mood or emotion, the questionnaire format and the statistical methods used to analyze the data. By means of questionnaire including indicators from all around the semantic circumplex, different response formats, an experimental situation that forces the participant to report their instantaneous affect, and state-of-the-art statistical tools with the transfer of the Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVM) for the treatment of ordinal variables to psychology from the domain of statistics, these criticisms are addressed and we are able to conciliate the principal theories regarding the affect structure with the same experimental setting. In particular, using the semantic items all around the circumplex we find three bipolar independent dimensions and using only the PANAS semantic items, we find two unipolar dimensions. Finally, we propose a heuristic theorization of affect based on a trend firmly established in social sciences, coherent from semantics to sociology, which allows considering its dimensions of tension, valence and activation as being already all at once motivation, cognition and behavior. In the perspectives, we propose a theoretical model for the transition between the non-linear unconscious and linear conscious levels, in which the on-going monitoring system of affect consists of quantum information processing which collapses in a unified wave function of meaning along the three dimensions highlighted by the present research.
Index
ORGANIZATIONOFTHETHESIS ... 6
THEORETICAL SECTION... 9
INTRODUCTION ... 9
GENERALCONTEXT ... 9
AFFECTIVITY&AFFECTCONCEPTS ... 13
AFFECT'SPHENOMENOLOGICALAPPREHENSION ... 14
GENERAL PERSPECTIVE ON AFFECT ... 16
AFFECTIVEPHENOMENONTYPESOFINTERESTFOROURSTUDY ... 16
AFFECT ... 17
EMOTION ... 18
MOOD... 19
OTHERINTERESTINGCONSIDERATIONSFOROURSTUDY... 19
PHENOMENOLOGICAL RELATION BETWEEN AFFECT & EMOTION ... 19
AFFECT & EMOTION IN AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE ... 20
PASSION... 22
QUALIA ... 23
CONTEXT OF THE RESEARCH ON AFFECT STRUCTURE ... 25
SITUATIONOFTHERESEARCHONAFFECTSTRUCTURE ... 32
EXPERIMENTAL SECTION... 35
IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF THE EXPERIMENTAL PLAN ... 35
TYPEOFAFFECTIVEPHENOMENONS... 35
CHOICEOFSEMANTICITEMS ... 36
AFFECTSPACE ... 38
RESPONSEFORMAT ... 39
MEASUREMENTERRORS ... 40
METHOD ... 41
PARTICIPANTS ... 41
MATERIAL... 41
GENERALPROCEDURE ... 42
SEMANTICINDICATORS ... 43
STATISTICALMODELSFORORDINALDATA ... 43
RESULTS ... 50
DESIGNOFTHEANALYSES... 50
AFFECTSTRUCTURE... 52
SEMANTICBIPOLARITY... 56
DISCUSSION OF THE FINDINGS... 59
PERSPECTIVES ... 64
CONCLUSION ... 73
REFERENCES ... 76
APPENDICES... 92
APPENDIXA:QUESTIONNAIRE ... 92
APPENDIXB:SEMANTICITEMS ... 101
APPENDIXC:SEMANTICCIRCUMPLEX... 102
APPENDIXD:RESULTS ... 103
TABLE 1 ... 103
TABLE 2 ... 108
ORGANIZATION OF THE THESIS
A thorough research in the concepts of philosophy is the primary frame of any experimental research as they determine the reality of the world on which science is exerted. The historical pathway from psyche to psychology constitutes a red line for those who want to apprehend the principal debates that still exert an important influence on theories nowadays in affective sciences.
More especially as the psychological knowledge remained confused with philosophy for more than two millennia. It began with the ancient Greek philosophers who from an introspective effort theorized on phenomenological affect. Very early they name it the soul and credit it with a tripartite structure that corresponds quite well with the three-dimensional structure of affect highlighted by the present experimental research. Then, the famous soul-body problem of Plato's and Aristotle's Humanism nourished the metaphysical questioning of Scholasticism for centuries. The soul-body problem became in the 17th century the mind-body problem. While today part of the debate in affective sciences takes place around the two names of Descartes and Spinoza (Damasio 1994a, 2003), the fundamental trend of Scholasticism, in which the two great philosophers articulate their thoughts and theoretical systems to apprehend the conceptualization of affect, deserves to be better known. All the more so as it gave way to the first studies concerning the affect structure, which were realized at the end of the 19th century with the birth of psychology by Wundt, Titchener and Stumpf using introspection (see Reisenzein 1992, Reisenzein & Schonpflug 1992). They postulate that we can classify all our various affects according to the three dimensions of pleasure/displeasure, activation/depression, and tension/relaxation of which we can be conscious as their primary properties. What is before that regarding affect and its structure belongs to the philosophical tradition. To explore it in order to refine the comprehension that we may have of the concept of affect and the labels given to its dimensions is a necessary task but it goes beyond the purpose of this presentation although the present situation of the research on affect results from it.
In the theoretical section consequently, even if we refer from time to time to particular philosophical elements, we articulate our work to present in the introduction the pathway followed by the study on affect, the discrimination of affectivity from sensitivity, and an invitation to phenomenologically apprehend affect in the example of a common situation. That first part should give us a "subjective" knowledge of what is affect. Then we give a general perspective on affect which aims to better work out the concept compared to those of other close affective phenomenons studied in affective sciences, or used in philosophy. That second part should give us an "objective"
knowledge of what is affect. After that we are ready to define the general and particular context of the present research.
In the experimental section, we review the main important aspects of the experimental plan that were sometimes criticized in other studies with the purpose to eventually correct those weaknesses in our research. Next we detail the elements of the method, the procedure, and the innovative statistical tools we used for the treatment of ordinal data. Finally we present the results and their consequences regarding the affect structure and the bipolarity of its dimensions.
As with any research of this importance, one has a personal assumption of what one reasonably expects to find. And since we commonly perceive semantic terms, which characterize the affect a person feels, on a bipolar continuum, going from merry to sad for example, we were reasonably expecting to find results in favor of Russell's model with the two bipolar dimensions of valence and activation. More especially as it appears rather quickly that the PANAS questionnaire suffers from a conceptual defect. Indeed it considers only the high degrees of activation of pleasure and displeasure and ignores the low degrees of activation of pleasure and displeasure, which are felt most of the time and represent half of Russell's circumplex. Circumplex is a circular structure which is already widely acknowledged to represent semantic items related to affect in which the horizontal
plan and an innovative design for the data analysis that was impossible to implement when those bi- dimensional models were first postulated, the results support the hypothesis that affect structure has three independent bipolar dimensions, namely valence, activation, and tension. At first these results were unexpected, surprising, and difficult to replace within the framework of the controversy between Russell and Watson. It was thus necessary to widen the field of knowledge to investigate in the literature if affect had already been mentioned with three dimensions, even in a different terminology.
In the discussion of the findings, we put those results in perspective with the different theories presented in the general context. In particular we address the controversy between the affect structure models of Russell (Russell 1980a) and Watson (Watson & Tellegen 1985) for which the present research was undertaken.
In the perspectives, we outline a promising theoretical framework that seems in continuity with the concept of affect through history, coherent and having a great explanatory power. We propose the on-going monitoring system of affect as a candidate for the unconscious quantum information processing, which would collapse in a unified wave of conscious meaning along the three dimensions highlighted by the present research allowing a continuous transition. To undertake the same experience using a subliminal presentation of the stimuli with different timing in milliseconds could bring us some interesting results for future developments.
In the conclusion, we remind of the principal results of this research concerning the affect structure and the bipolarity of its dimensions.
THEORETICAL SECTION
INTRODUCTION
GENERAL CONTEXT
Historically, force is to note that the first psychology is popular psychology since everywhere where there are human beings, psychology has its place. It first consists of a subtle knowledge which rather rises from feeling than reasoning. Affects are central in our own experience of the world. An immediate mode of knowledge opposes to the mediate understanding. Innate positive or negative affects support attraction or repulsion and build the foundation of moral conscience, which with sympathy allow us to live together. Various languages shape different way of perceiving and identifying feelings according to what is culturally acceptable, however what is not named is different of what is not felt. Over the time, this popular psychology develops a vocabulary to characterize the states of heart, sentiments, moods, emotions or any affectively charged event that reflect our layman's understanding of these phenomenons in a religious context. Since the highest antiquity, the importance of these affective states is recognized in the comprehension of what means to be for a human being.
This is why these commonly acknowledged and widespread concepts are taken back thereafter first by philosophers. From a paradigm that considers the visible exterior nature (figurative) with the invisible presence of God (operative), we pass to a paradigm that considers the interior of man, and takes into account his visible exterior being (figurative) and the presence of God in him or his soul (operative). The next paradigm considers the interior of his living soul, where the mortal "being" is the changing part and the eternal "to be" the stable part. Then they become form (figurative) and matter (operative), and finally the complementary processes of actuality (figurative) and potentiality
ambivalent relation with rationality and morality. They observe that by the true nature of humanity, there is neither reason without passion, nor thought without feeling. The relatively static concepts of
"to be" and "being" are synthesized in the dynamic concept of "to become". It highlights the tension between the two states and accounts for the subjacent dynamics of the series in progress. The concept of entelechy summarizes it. With the difference of the popular language, the intuitive knowledge in philosophy, far from being vague, acquires a character of absolute certainty. It applies to the first elements in each field of knowledge those that cannot be built from the reasoning.
Later those concepts are also quite naturally taken back by the first researchers in the new science of psychology to state their initial questions and theories with the strength and weakness of applying such concepts in empirical research. After being confused for two millennia with philosophy, the study of psychic phenomenons follows the path of natural sciences. Helmholtz (1821-1894) shows that contrary to a naïve comprehension feelings relate to modifications of the organism and not to specific qualities of the world. Although we don’t generally pay attention to those feelings except if they concern external objects that have any significance for us. Indeed he states that we always unconsciously call upon our former experience to interpret what we perceive, and that our "personal equation" leads us to notice certain phenomenons rather than others. Those
"unconscious inferences" make what seems to be a simple feeling to be in fact a complex and largely unconscious judgment. Wundt (1832-1920) discriminates feelings and affects as bodily sensations and their psychic qualities. With directed introspection, in which participants placed in standardized situations give quantifiable responses, he highlights that the great variability of affects is function of three subjacent dimensions. While our consciousness consists of a continuous flow of spontaneous affects, they are the simpler elements of which we can be aware with an effort of attention to what we feel. Nevertheless, cognitive and affective domains become soon two different fields of interrogation. Then a progressive design of evolution and a pragmatic and productive orientation of teaching result in privileging for more than a century the cognitive field whereas the affective remains an object of mystery. Its study is especially undertaken under the angle of
pathology, when the individual is no more able to function cognitively and in his everyday life satisfactorily.
Thus the concept of affect takes a great importance in the first book of Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1895a), because the origin of the hysterical symptom is to be sought in an affect related to a traumatic event, which cannot properly discharge. They speculate that affects are "phylogenetic fantasies", which originate long ago as adaptative responses of human species to environmental change or to traumatic events in the prehistory of mankind. The phylogenetic mnemic-traces are common to all human beings and consist of normal prototypes of behavior, which sometimes evolve individually into pathological behaviors. Thus Freud considers that the hysterical crisis is a
"reminiscence" of a past traumatic experience in the life of the person. As a scratched record, the hysterical patient keeps living the affect that he had felt at the moment of the traumatic event without being conscious of it. Through repetition, he restores the affect related to the traumatic event: unrest, rumination of ideas, while his behavior expresses it and eventually allows his entourage to take knowledge of it. His behavior is involuntary and without intentionality from his part because some psychic force prevents this affect from reaching consciousness. While no reflexive process works on this affect, it stays under the form of excitation and libidinal energy charge in the nervous system. The first gives way to a repetitive behavior while the second becomes a body symptom. Whereas the normal way of symbolization should have allowed a representation, possibly a thought expressed in words
Accordingly, Freud proposes two concepts relating to representation: the instinctual representative (Triebrepräsentant, thing presentation) that indicates an element or a process in which the drive finds its psychic expression, and the ideational representative (Vorstellungsrepräsentant, word presentation) that indicates a representation or a set of representations, at which the drive fixes itself
an act of conception (word and thing in our phenomenological example below "chocolate" and
"something to eat"). The made up word, which literally means "representing of the representation"
relates to the discrimination of the two conscious and unconscious levels. Thus, from the descriptive meaning of involuntary and non intentional the term unconscious takes with psychoanalysis the signification of a knowledge to which we do not have access in relation with affect.
Freud also speaks of "wedged affect" and writes "I know three mechanisms: transformation of affect, displacement of affect, and exchange of affect" (Freud 1894a, p. 188-189). Thus, according to the various possibilities of transformation of affect that are observable through subjects’
behaviors, he classifies the different neuroses. In the conversion hysteria, the detached libido of the repressed representation is transformed into energy of innervation and the resulting body symptoms have a related symbolic significance. In obsession, affect is moved on more or less distant representations of the original controversial representation. Finally in anxiety neurosis or in melancholy, affect is transformed into distress without determined object, accompanied or replaced by various somatic symptoms because of the insufficiency or the absence of psychical working-over of the somatic excitation due to the fact that it is related to prohibited sexual representations for example. By mean of abreaction, i.e. the return into consciousness of the repressed mnemic-traces of too violent and condemnable memories and affects, we obtain the lifting of the hysterical symptom. It is only if the recall in memory involves the reviviscence of the related affect that the recollection finds its therapeutic effectiveness. Thus, the magnifying mirror of pathology shows the affective nature of the human mind. While brain and mind interrelations are conceived as fundamental homeostatic processes (Freud 1895b, Cannon 1932).
After Zajonc (1980) claimed that "preferences need no inferences" and demonstrated that feeling can exist before and without thinking, cognitive sciences recognize that most human affective functioning is rooted in unconscious processes. Behavioral studies showed that people routinely evaluate elements of their environment as good or bad at the unconscious level. In the same way,
they pick up the affective meaning of facial expressions of their entourage that influence their perception and knowledge of these people and the manner in which they behave towards them (Russell & Fernández-Dols 1997, Kaiser 2002). Most researchers don't like the idea that unconscious affective information processing plays an important role in human beings. Without doubt it is the reason why the cognitive theories, which have recently more widely recognized the primordial role of affect, were gathered under the label of emotional intelligence (Salovey & Mayer 1990, Salovey, Hsee & Mayer 1993, Goleman 1995, 2003, Bar-On 2001, Feldman Barrett &
Salovey 2002, Grewal & Salovey 2005). Thanks to them, affective phenomenons regain the interest of the researchers in almost all areas of psychology: development, personality, social, etc. They also become objects of interest for neurosciences (Gray 2002, 2004), which have achieved great success in deciphering affective brain mechanisms from research on animals, patients treated with drugs or hormones or with cerebral lesions, and more recently from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain (Damasio 1994b, 1999, 2000, 2003, Ledoux 1996, 2000, Edelman 1990, 1992, 2004, 2006).
AFFECTIVITY & AFFECT CONCEPTS
Conceptualized by philosophy, the verb "to affect" means to exert an action on something or somebody, while the affection is the modification inside the subject that results from this action.
The concept of affectivity is charged with an ambiguity that persists through times as it more or less implies passivity in escaping our conscious and active control. Initially, affectivity is the whole of the sentiments and must be distinguished from the sensitivity, the whole of the sensations. However the sentiments and the sensations are affections resulting from what affects us, literally the affects which in turn summarize what we feel at the actual present moment. An affective disturbance resounds on the entire subject, his attitudes, his intellectual efficiency and his activity (Damasio
affect is the primary and fundamental element of affectivity, which also comprises other phenomenons. Affects allow organisms to cope successfully with various situations and objects that are potentially dangerous or advantageous. Besides the characterized affective episodes such as joy or anger, the affects are those other transitory feelings which are renewed at any moment, without defined names. These elementary and paramount psychic states, variable in their valence, intensity and tonality, not easily analyzable, can be observed and studied by the intermediary of conscious introspections and verbal reports from subjects. That is what is actually done in the present research.
AFFECT'S PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPREHENSION
Indeed if for convenience, we generally discriminate three areas in the human activity at the conscious level, i.e. cognition, conation and behavior, in the present actual time, which is at the unconscious level, they are necessary inseparable from one another. No need to specify that when we speak here about behavior we do not speak about a movement which requires the time of its unfolding, but about the instantaneous design of action which is related to Piaget’s scheme of action. In the same way, we do not speak of representation, but of concept not yet fixed on an object that could answer desire (proto-representation). The desire is in itself the unconscious motivation.
Let's imagine an everyday life situation to illustrate what we mean: a person is a little bit hungry and feels peckish. It is an unpleasant feeling and an imbalance compared to her former state where she was quietly occupied with anything she was doing. Instantaneously she is feeling like eating something, like going to the refrigerator without knowing yet what she will find there, without knowing yet what she will choose there. She is looking for something to eat. Obviously with time she had garnered memories, representations of "passed actual experiences", lived and felt, that constitute her preferences. She could anticipate what she feels like eating, what she is looking for.
She is no more looking for something to eat, but she is now looking for chocolate for example.
Other cognitive considerations could participate in her decision of what she is looking to eat that
could divert her from her first choice. Lets say, she is now looking for an apple that will also answer her desire to eat something, her same desire of something to eat, even if she would have liked more a piece of chocolate. All those computations take place at once, most of the time without them reaching her consciousness. The person is still seating at her desk, feeling peckish, unaware of those fleeting computations. We can apprehend in this example how in the same drive of the actual present feeling, motivation, behavior and cognition are intermingled.
Similarly when a very young baby lives this unpleasant feeling, he complains, cries, shouts as the unpleasant feeling increases in intensity. These reflex behaviors try in a way to throw out the malaise, to instinctively make him feel good again. At that early age he doesn’t know what to do to make pass this painful feeling. Then with the intervention of his caretaker, he will discover that feeding makes him feel good again. He also discovers that he could suck his thumb, and for a while he is deluding himself since this sucking behavior is associated by former experience with a pleasant feeling. The pleasure drawn from the sucking behavior lasts obviously only a time before the impression of hunger increases further. This pleasure is then associated with the object of the bottle for example. Baby’s representation drawn from pleasant "passed actual experiences" consist of "good" objects of which thereafter the sight only would put an end to the tears related to hunger discomfort when waiting is not prolonged too much. Here again, we can apprehend how in the same drive of the actual present feeling, motivation, behavior and cognition are intermingled, except that, the subject being not yet individualized, it is easier to conceive how to feel and to be merge together before the emergent faculty of thinking. Then and now, to be is an affect. What "I am" is what "I feel" at any actual present moment, and vice versa. However, later when the faculty of thinking is developed, this is lost in the unconscious beyond our thoughts, at least any consciousness that we can have of it, and to access it again requires an introspective effort.
conceptualization of affect. In History, the distinction of the two conscious and unconscious levels doesn’t appear immediately in the philosophical writings as the modern psychological perspective is shaped. Nevertheless, each author develops a singular manner to apprehend affect through his particular usage of words and his own definitions. The subtlety of each thought has to be explored to apprehend the author’s perspective and to corner what he has to say regarding what we call affect today. In addition, the ambiguity of words is even complicated by the evolution of their usage in time. That is the reason why the vertical definition of affect that consists of the philosophical tradition cannot do without the horizontal definition of affect in comparison with other affective phenomenons that we give now. Especially, as their different durations are of particular importance regarding the experimental plan.
GENERAL PERSPECTIVE ON AFFECT
AFFECTIVE PHENOMENON TYPES OF INTEREST FOR OUR STUDY
Many authors view the distinction pleasant-unpleasant as the primary valence dimension that discriminates self-reported affective states (Wundt 1896, 1906, Shaver & al. 1987, Ortony & al.
1988, Schimmack & Reizenzein 1997). When people have to answer questions about their mood or more globally about how they feel over a relatively long period of time, they aggregate momentary feelings in their minds (Thomas & Diener 1990, Parkinson, Briner, Reynolds & Totterdell 1995, Schimmack & Reisenzein 1997, Reisenzein & Schimmack 1999). As valence is the salient criterion of discrimination, they differentiate the global amount of "pleasant state" from the global amount of
"unpleasant state", and so they evaluate simultaneously how good they felt as well as how bad they felt before at the precise moment when they are asked. If time is given to recall information from the episodic memory, participants are surely able to remember a bad or good feeling at a "special moment" in which they were globally in a good or bad mood. The contrast with their background mood is precisely why those moments are specially remembered. This pattern of outcome has led to
the view that affective states are supported by two orthogonal unipolar dimensions, namely positive affect and negative affect (Watson, Clark & Tellegen 1988). However a participant will deny being able to be at the same time cheerful and sad, because in that case, no confusion is made about the moment at which the feeling occurs, i.e. at exactly the same point in time (Diener & Emmons 1984, Zautra, Potter & Reich 1997, Russell 2003). Thus for the valence dimension in affect structure, we must first address the questions of duration and definition of the different affective states. Since by definition affective experiences are temporary states that change from moment to moment, the main problem in determining these states resides in the definition of "moment". There is an agreement to differentiate trait affect and state affect, in that a distinction is made between mood and emotion as in common language (Diener & Iran-Nejad 1986, Reisenzein & Schönpflug 1992, Fridja 1993, Clore & al. 1994). Many authors notice the lack of a broad agreement on definitions of emotion, mood and affect in regard of the years of research in affective sciences (Frijda 1986, Fiedler &
Forgas 1988, Forgas 1991). Affect has to be distinguished from mood and emotion which are affective phenomenons of another nature, however not even a consensual taxonomy has been reached until now, and a good share of the debate is due to the difficulty in distinguishing clearly between various types of affective phenomenons. We propose here to consider three of them, namely emotion, mood and affect. The definitions that we offer do not intend to be new or to differ from those already given by other authors but on the contrary to settle an agreement on what is affect, the identified object of the present research.
AFFECT
Affect is the transitory feeling induced at any moment by the whole on-going situation, including internal and external stimuli. It consists of an elementary process accessible to conscience in terms of valence, activation and tension (Wundt 1896, Thayer 1978). It corresponds for a part to the
always aware of, like weather, circadian cycle, etc (Thayer 1989, Watson, Wiese, Vaidya &
Tellegen 1999). Affect varies in intensity throughout the day. It is particularly salient when its degree of activation is rather low or high into positive or negative, but with an average degree of activation it has tendency to disappear in the back of our consciousness. For example, it is this affective phenomenon that is in question when with the ring of alarm clock one feels depressed, tired, or merry. Affect is also called activation by Thayer (1986), and what is felt, feeling, sentiment or emotion by other authors. In popular terms it is also labeled "gut feeling" to highlight the visceral affective reaction regarded as unmodulated by conscious thought. It supports individual's perception of what is right according to "common sense" or more personal moral values. It is difficult to be consistent in the denomination because the various authors use the same terms to indicate affective phenomenons of different natures. Sometimes nuances or facets of affect, as considered in affective sciences, are also proposed with the same denomination of affect. Various authors give much evidence for affect influencing attention, memory, thinking associations and judgments (Berkowitz
& al., Eich & MacAulay, Fiedler, Forgas, Greenwald & al., Niedenthal & Halberstadt, & Showers, all 2000).
EMOTION
Emotion consists of a relatively short episode of synchronized responses by several or all subsystems of the organism at a time of evaluation of an external or internal event of major importance for the person. The basic emotions are anger, sadness, joy, fear, shame, pride, exaltation, despair. Regarding emotion, the principal discussion among researchers is about the changes in different modalities that are necessary and sufficient components of an emotional episode. There is a consensus on the "reactional triad" of emotion that is composed at least of physiological activation, motor expression (vocal, facial and body) and participative feeling (cognitive or qualitative tonality). It also refers to the ABC model that defines emotion in terms of three fundamental components: A for physiological Arousal, B for Behavioral expression and C for
Conscious experience. Some authors also include motivation and cognitive evaluation (Buck 1985, 1993, Frijda 1986, 1987). Although we still often speak about "emotional state" suggesting a relative stability in time, the authors consider emotion as a process implying fast changes in the duration of an episode.
MOOD
Mood, although sometimes mistaken for affect, is distinguished by its duration and the fact that it can be without apparent cause (Russell & Feldman Barrett 1999). It consists of a diffuse affective state of relatively low intensity that acts as a background against which are played the fluctuations of affect. Thus, for example, a person can be basically happy but feels temporarily sad while listening to a melancholic melody. It is this affective phenomenon that is in question in mood disorder, like dysthymia, characterized by a lack of enjoyment or pleasure in life that continues for at least six months (APA, DSM-IV 1994).
OTHER INTERESTING CONSIDERATIONS FOR OUR STUDY
PHENOMENOLOGICAL RELATION BETWEEN AFFECT & EMOTION
Damasio (2000) defines the "feelings of emotion" as the a posteriori "mental representation of the physiological changes that occur during an emotion". Without doubt that could be understood as affects in the perspective of an on-going monitoring judgment process. Moreover other authors consider affect as a component of the subjective experience of emotion as already mentioned (Russell 2003). As our situation is made salient thanks to the violence of emotion, we are first specifically attentive to our affective states. Then we cognitively rationalize what we feel by what just happened to us whereas what justifies it is what is presently happening to us. In addition, as
affects that we are going through, which resemble each other precisely because they belong to the same emotional episode.
AFFECT & EMOTION IN AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
Emotion is an emergency mechanism that recruits all the resources of the person for a relatively long but limited period of time. It is the most visible part of the complex edifice of biological regulation, including basic homeostatic reactions that maintain one's metabolism (basic reflexes, pain and pleasure reactions, appetitive drives and motivations). It is why emotion is distinguished by a high degree of coordination and synchronization of its components. Even if each emotion has unique features: signal, physiology, and antecedent events, it also has characteristics in common with other emotions: rapid onset, short duration, unbidden occurrence, automatic appraisal, and coherence among responses. These shared and unique characteristics are the product of our evolution, and distinguish emotions from other affective phenomenons. Ekman (1992) proposes that emotions have evolved through their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life-tasks. There are strong similarities in physiological responses among reptiles, birds, and mammals when showing what we interpret as humans as parental love, fear or anger in face of adversity. However in an evolutionary perspective, emotion is an acquisition of mammals and primates by natural selection which increase their fitness to survive (Darwin 1872). The adaptive value of emotion consists first of accelerating and increasing the ability of the subject to cope adequately with the situation, then of increasing his capacity to memorize this situation in order to be able to anticipate and plan for it in the future so as to take advantage of opportunities and avert risks. Darwin observes that the expression of basic emotions is similar across all primates, and also remarkably similar across human cultures. The adaptive value of emotion also consists of amplifying the impact of a given situation for a subject, the visibility of what he feels for the benefice of his entourage.
Thus they understand what is lived by the subject in the interest of a mutual comprehension, a harmonious social group, and in last resort in the mutual interest of cooperation for their survival.
The social constructivism considers emotion as a social and cultural phenomenon mainly because of its value of communication (Vygotsky 1978, 1987). The fact that certain aspects in the expression of emotion are voluntarily modifiable attests of its value as a tool of communication. However it also attests that emotion is not the primary original data. Evolution has already showed that it could amplify a physical or physiological trait encouraging social communication with the purpose to increase survival fitness. We may then hypothesize that emotion is an adaptive evolution of affect, the fundamental and primary affective phenomenon, a way to show outside the affective movement inside as implied by the etymology of emotion [ex motio]. In the same way that we regard the pathological as a magnification of the normal, we could consider emotion as a magnification of affect. Thus the consensual "reactional triad" with its three dimensions would be the heir of the three-dimensional structure of affect. The physiological arousal, the behavioral expression and the conscious experience would be linked in some way to the activation, tension and valence dimensions, without exact correspondence one by one because of conceptual distinction of language considering the different levels of phenomenological experience. It is as if we speak with different points of view, from different levels of phenomenological experience, but the phenomenons that we consider are the same or closely related in a spatio-temporal funnel. Thus we may note that these basic homeostatic reactions included in the biological regulation of which emotion is the most visible part as mentioned earlier, already result from the three dimensions of behavior (basic reflexes), valence for cognition (pain and pleasure reactions) and conation (appetitive drives and motivations). Indeed, when we consider the three areas discriminated for convenience in the human activity, we could place both the tension dimension of affect (idea to tend to, of conatus, of eros or Freudian libido, desire to live) and the physiological arousal of emotion under the label of conation, the activation dimension of affect (Piaget's scheme of action) and the behavioral expression of emotion under the label of behavior, and finally the valence dimension of affect (idea that to know
PASSION
Passion is the antique and medieval term for affect or emotion. As for the word affectivity previously mentioned, history explains the ambiguity of the word passion. It takes its origin from Greek pathos which means "what one undergoes", the path that we follow when we go through changes. When Stoicism is founded by Zeno of Citium (333-264 BC) in Athens, the word highlights affective detachment and reason. It becomes popular not only throughout Greece but also in the Roman Empire, pathos is then translated into passio which now means "what one is subjected to", " what one suffers", the experience of bad treatments, pressures or violence. Passion is now opposed to action, as to be subjected is opposed to act, as passive to active. An emotion is produced by the person while a passion is suffered by the person. This significant difference between the passive passion and the active emotion is mainly responsible for the ambiguity of affectivity. The Greek word apatheia appeared in Plato and Aristotle without the notion of suffering, which gave the Latin word impassibilitas. While impassibility and apathy both evoke the fact to feel nothing, the positive version states that one is master of oneself and the negative version that one lost any desire to live. An impassive being cannot be subjected to anything. His state cannot be modified by any extern force, except his own voluntary action. God only answers this definition, and in Christianity "The Passion" refers to the fact that Christ in his human incarnation was subjected to suffering and death in the Crucifixion. This perspective of passivity goes through all the Middle Ages. Even in 1649, it is still from this point of view that Descartes writes his famous Passions of the Soul.
[A]ll which is done, or happens anew, is by the philosophers called generally a passion in relation to the subject on whom it befalls, and an action in respect of that which causes it. So that although the agent and patient be things often differing, action and passion are one and the same thing, which has two several names, because of the two several subjects whereunto they may relate. (art.1)
Since the 17th century, the word passion is confined to the psychological field and is synonymous with a passive phenomenon of the soul like the affective states of desire, anger, fear, pity, etc. Thus Passions of the Soul concerns what is felt by the soul, to what the soul is subjected. In the Treatise on Man (1637), Descartes chooses the pineal gland, called epiphysis today, to be the seat of the soul because it is the center of the brain part that supports what we feel, imagine and the common sense.
Passion is a sentiment to which a judgment of value is attached. As it becomes a too "strong sentiment", it is judged negatively as a moral weakness. Thus passion is no more opposed to action but to reason. It is an invasion by an external force, a loss of self-control. In the 18th century, passion becomes positive again with Diderot. Romantism doesn't oppose passion to action anymore;
on the contrary it triumphs as the motor of action. In the first case passion cancels reason and will;
in the second case passion reinforces reason and will. Today the word passion is synonymous with obsession; it is the emotion of feeling very strongly about a subject or person.
QUALIA
Quale is the term often used in philosophy of the mind to refer to affect; it is defined as the affective tonality [from Latin what sort, what kind]. As often in philosophy the definition of quale changed over time. Basically it is the "what is like" character of the feeling (Nagel 1974). It is "the recognizable qualitative characters of the given" in "the way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc." coming from "certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes" (Jackson 1982, p. 127). Here it is necessary to distinguish on one hand between part of the information given to us by a sense like the sight of a red flower and the feeling of redness, and on the other hand the sum of the information reaching a subject at a given moment.
This information may be external through perception, internal through bodily proprioception or
have them all occurring simultaneously as part of one unified conscious experience". He also mentions that "Kant called this feature `the transcendental unity of apperception'" and that "in neurobiology it has been called 'the binding problem'". Dennett (1988) lists four properties given to quale by the philosophical tradition: ineffable as we can not communicate about it; intrinsic as to experience it, is to know all there is to know about it; private as we can only apprehend it by direct experience of which we cannot express the qualitative aspect to others for comparison, and lastly directly and immediately apprehensible in consciousness. Qualia are accessible to introspection as they are "the very properties the appreciation of which permits us to identify our conscious states"
(Dennett 1988, p. 523). However Dennett argues against quale that he considers only as a philosophical concept unrelated to the physical reality of experiencing, which is "private only in the sense of idiosyncratic". Quale is unquantifiable in oneself and unobservable in others. It is sometimes called "raw feel" (Chalmers 1995), an impression in and of itself, considered without any effect it might have on behavioral disposition and behavior. When it is not related to action, it may be more related to representation. Qualia are the "phenomenons information properties" of psychological events (Bieri 1992), the various properties of conscious experience. John Searle (1992) writes that "conscious states have a certain qualitative character; the states in question are sometimes described as 'qualia'". More globally, he postulates that qualia and consciousness are one and the same emergent phenomenon of the organism that is an entirely physical property (Searle 1997). Anyhow the nature of qualia is defined by the present physical state of the brain, and even if various aspects of conscious experience have not been completely correlated with physical activities in the brain, the present state without doubt affects the next. Quale should then be considered as
"photography" at a given moment, the representative part of the affect, which in addition comprehends the dynamic part allowing us to follow the moving course of life.
The distinction of the concepts about which we are more particularly interested within the framework of this research, between affect, quale and emotion can be summarized as follow. Affect is an innately structured fleeting feeling that possesses a primary evaluative capacity, that is
physiologically based, relationally and psychologically oriented, and that guides and mediates the primary instinctive reflex response. Quale could be considered as an affect or more precisely as the affect component of the qualitative tonality that is preconscious, i.e. it may or may not register in consciousness. Searle (1992) proposes that the on-going flow of qualia merge with consciousness.
Emotion could be hold as a dramatized affect, in part psychosocially constructed. Often the brain is seen as an information-processing system, we propose that affect is a type of computation, an instantaneous automatic summary of actual present brain state that quickly assigns valence as a primary signification to the actual present situation, provides a scheme to initiate appropriate actions, and gets the necessary physiological means going in anticipation of it. We consequently consider the continuous flow of affects as an on-going monitoring process able to react in actual present time or in no time so as to increase our survival fitness.
CONTEXT OF THE RESEARCH ON AFFECT STRUCTURE
The first studies regarding the affect structure take place at the birth of the science of psychology.
They are made by Wundt (1832-1920), Stumpf (1848-1936) and Titchener (1867-1927) by means of introspections (see Reisenzein 1992, Reisenzein & Schonpflug 1992). It is interesting to note that in their works, introspective accounts in the cognitive, conative and active modalities are still considered as complementary, reflecting on a unitary underlying experience. As often in the history of psychology, the need for young psychologists to dissociate themselves from tutelary figures could then explain the issues that Stumpf and his friend James (1842-1910) had with Wundt.
Though James still conceives a close interdependence of feeling, thinking and behavior, the subsequent paradigms however increasingly focus on cognition, conation and activation as isolated faculties, largely ignoring the interdependence between them. In the process the experimental study of affect for itself was forsaken in favor of emotion.
variations in order to establish certain constants. In laboratory, experiments are devoted to all the visceral reactions in their relationship with emotional states: circulatory, digestive, respiratory, glandular, muscular, etc. There are also studies by the comparative method, inquiries and questionnaires on some simple emotions like fear or anger, even on certain more complex forms such as esthetics or religious emotions. The American physiologist Cannon (1871-1945) thus carries his interest on digestion and discovers that a phenomenon of hyperglycemia occurs at the time of the emotional episodes. This opens his interest on the effects of emotions, and in 1915 he publishes a book to describe the Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage where he postulates a diffuse discharge of the sympathetic nervous system in the organism that controls the use of energy at time of threat to "fight or flight". With Bard (1898-1977), he proposes that emotional and physiological responses to external situations arise simultaneously and that both prepare the organism to deal with the situation (Cannon 1927). In comparison of the "peripheralist"
James-Lange theory, their conception is more "centralist" as it grants a major role in the control of emotion to structures of the central nervous system like the thalamus. Cannon develops the important concept of homeostasis in his book The Wisdom of the Body (1932). This regulating system maintains the constancy of open systems like living organisms. Any tendency toward change is automatically meets with factors that resist change in order to come back to the steady- state conditions. It consists of a number of simultaneous or successive cooperating mechanisms orchestrated by the central nervous system. A modern entelechy in which the brain and body physiological unified functioning solves the problem of unity of the being. It drops the problem of the mind that soon will become a "black box" between the visible stimulus and response.
Thus Cannon and Bard tend to show that we have a mental feeling simultaneous to the related physiological and somatic effects, whereas greatly influenced by psychodynamics, Feshbach and Singer (1957) demonstrate the dynamic character of affect infusion into cognition. In their experiment they induce fear in their subjects by using electric shocks. Subjects are then either instructed to repress their fear or not before making social judgments about a target person. The
hypothesis is that strong affective states should invade unrelated cognitive judgments, and that paradoxically affect infusion should be greater for people making a conscious effort to suppress their feelings. Indeed the results show that fearful subjects are more likely to "perceive another person as fearful and anxious" and this effect is particularly marked when subjects are trying to suppress their fear (p. 286). According to the psychoanalysis homeostatic principle, this occurs because their attempts at affective repression create an increased pressure or bodily tension which leads them to find an alternative expression. It facilitates the tendency to project fear onto another social object. The authors suggest that this mechanism explains how cognition becomes "infused"
with affect, but we believe that it highlights the fact that the differents facets of affect cannot be treated separately. Together they constitute the on-going monitoring process of affect that explains similarly how Schachter and Singer (1979) later demonstrate that we interpret our visceral activation according to our present situation and mental state.
In behavioral terms Griffit (& al. 1970) also states that the unconditioned "evaluative responses are […] determined by the positive or negative properties of the total stimulus situation" (p. 240).
Whereas Schwartz and Clore (1983) speak of affect as an information model that implies a direct link between our affective state and our cognitive state. In a complementary way, Bower (1981), Isen (1984, &al. 1987), Weinstein and Mayer (1986) demonstrate that affect is not incidental but an inseparable part of how we see and represent the world around us, how we select, store and retrieve information, and how we use stored knowledge to perform reflexive cognitive tasks. Indeed the information associately linked to the current affective state or affect is more likely to be activated, preferentially recalled, and used in reflexive thinking. This leads to a potential affective congruency in attention, learning, memory, associations, evaluations and judgments. These authors conclude that the experience of an affective state is as well a cognitive experience. Affect belongs to a single, integrated cognitive representational system.
Thus, whereas Wundt (1874, 1896) and his young colleagues focus on the bipolar dimension of valence (pleasure/displeasure) that they think to be the salient quality of the introspective experience and the base of conscience, Cannon (1927) emphasizes the activation dimension (see also Lindsley 1951, Hebb 1955, Duffy 1957, Berlyne 1960, Schachter & Singer 1962, Zillman 1983, Mandler 1984, Thayer 1989, 1996). From these two first currents a third approach is born that includes two independent bipolar and of same magnitude dimensions of valence and activation (Russell 1978, 1980, Lang 1978, 1994, Larsen & Diener 1992, Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert 1992, Bradley 1994). According to Russell, the valence and activation dimensions define a circumplex on which all affects can be represented (see also Schlosberg 1952). This representation takes over the circumplex semantic representation for two of the three dimensions of connotative meaning (i.e.
evaluation and activity) found by Osgood to underlie language (Osgood & Suci 1955, Osgood, Suci
& Tannenbaum 1957, Osgood 1966, Osgood, May and Miron 1975).
Nevertheless, the hypothesis of the dimensions bipolarity is quickly disputed by the hypothesis of the unipolarity (Nowlis & Nowlis 1956, Bradburn 1969, Bradburn & Caplovitz 1965). The resulting controversy is central to psychology as it concerns the fundamental process of affect. In particular, it has tremendous repercussions in the way to understand and to treat affective disorders. Indeed, only bipolarity supposes that an increase of positive affect can counter negative affect when working with depressive patients for example. Researches on mood scales seem to confirm this unipolarity hypothesis (Borgatta 1961, McNair & Lorr 1964, Thayer 1967, Warr, Barter &
Brownridge 1983, Watson & Tellegen 1985). However, Cacioppo and Berntson (1994) pointed out that an important part of the literature regarding the unipolarity had developed because experiments were based on the PANAS (Positive And Negative Affect Schedule). This last is a questionnaire, which measures the affective experiences by means of 20 semantic items chosen to correspond to a high degree of activation and pleasure, or to a high degree of activation and displeasure (Watson &
Tellengen 1985). Actually, the resulting circumplex model based on the PANAS has the two orthogonal dimensions of Positive Affect (PA) and Negative Affect (NA). It should be specified
that for the authors "these two factors have been characterized as 'descriptively bipolar but affectively unipolar dimensions' (Zevon & Tellegen 1982, p. 112) to emphasize that only the high end of each dimension represents a state of emotional arousal (or high affect), whereas the low end of each factor is most clearly and strongly defined by terms reflecting a relative absence of affective involvement" (Watson & Tellegen 1985, p. 221). This description rather seems to take into account emotion and affect together like some multi-level approaches which are sometimes invoked to explain how conflicting affective states can occur simultaneously in affective disorders (Roseman &
Kaiser 2001).
However, while some authors accumulate evidence in favor of unipolarity (Tellengen 1985, Mayer
& Gaschke 1988, Meyer & Shack 1989, Morris 1989, Watson & Clark 1997, and also on mood scales Borgatta 1961, McNair & Lorr 1964, Thayer 1967, Warr, Barter & Brownridge 1983, Diener
& Emmons 1984, Watson & Tellegen 1985), others defend the bipolarity (Russell & Mehrabian 1977, Lorr & Wunderlich 1980, Lorr & McNair 1982, Russell & Steiger 1982, Diener & Emmons 1984, Larsen & Diener 1992, Ortony, Clore & Collins 1988, Russell 1989, Lang, Greenwald, Bradley & Hamm 1993, Reisenzein 1994, Feldman 1995). As when rotated of 45° the PA and NA factors correspond to the valence and activation dimensions of Russell’s circumplex model, Watson and Tellegen "suggest a simpler explanation, namely that the extent of their relations varies with the terms used to construct the Positive and Negative Affect measures" (1985, p. 233). If their 'parsimonious' model corresponded to the true affect structure than the choice of more indicators representing more affects facets by the use of the entire semantic circumplex should lead to the same dimensional affect structure. In the present case, it will be showed however that the too restrictive choice of semantic items consists of a methodological bias. Watson and Clark (1994) have moreover recently proposed the PANAS-X which expanded the first version of PANAS and used 60 semantic terms to assess specific emotions or enduring affective states.
On the other hand, some researchers in personality psychology propose an affect model with three slightly correlated dimensions (Sjösberg, Svensson & Persson 1979, Matthews, Jones &
Chamberlain 1990, Steyer, Schwenkmezger, Notz & Eid 1994, Schimak & Grob 2000). For example, Matthews, Jones and Chamberlain found the three dimensions as being pleasant- unpleasant (valence), energetic arousal and tense arousal. Energetic arousal contrasts feelings of vigor and energy with tiredness and fatigue and can be considered as an activation dimension, whereas tense arousal contrasts tension and nervousness with relaxation and calmness and can be associated to a tension or potency dimension. Wundt (1896) already postulated an affect model with three dimensions pleasant-unpleasant, low-high activated and tense-relaxed and Thayer (1978) showed that participants were able to subjectively discriminate energetic arousal and tense arousal.
The resulting model is different from Russell’s model, which is for us of particular interest, not only because one dimension has been added, but also because the valence is correlated with the activation dimension. It should be noted that the research on affect structure in personality psychology is relatively recent and needs to be distinguished from the numerous studies on the structure of personality, personality trait and mood which concerns the enduring dispositions of the participants. . For long the “Gigantic three” dimensions of Eysenck’s model of personality (1991, neuroticism, extraversion, psychoticism) dominated, but recently a consensus has been achieved about a five independent dimensions model of which most known is Costa and McCrae’s “Big Five” model of personality (1992, neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness). In both theoretical frameworks, the associations between neuroticism, extraversion, and bad mood, good mood are highlighted by various authors (Watson & Clark 1992, Tellegen 1985, Emmons & Diener 1986, Watson, Clark & Tellegen 1988, Thayer 1989, Williams 1989, Matthews, Jones & Chamberlain 1990, Costa & McCrae 1992) and tend to accredit that for mood the negative and positive dimensions are indeed unipolar and independent.
In another domain, the three dimensions of valence, activation and tension have been considered for a long time now. In linguistics, Osgood and colleagues (Osgood & Suci 1955, Osgood, Suci &
Tannenbaum 1957) have developed "semantic differential" bipolar scales based on semantic opposites such as good/bad, strong/week, active/passive and so on, in order to measure the attitude of participants regarding symbolic concepts represented by words. They are interested in the connotative meanings of words as apposed to their denotative meanings. The denotative usage gives to things represented by words their essential and objective meanings as in dictionaries. On the other hand, the connotative usage presents things enriched by their affective associations which, though intangible, are nonetheless real. For example, the words summer, love or melody carry various positive connotations while the words cancer, rape or homeless have negative connotations for most people. The affective connotations are felt, not thought. These authors highlight a semantic structure based on the three dimensions of Evaluation, Potency and Activity, known as EPA.
Osgood has presented convincing evidence that this simple structure is a universal characteristic of human thinking and is exhibited by all of the cultural groups and languages (Osgood 1960, Osgood, May & Miron 1975). It should be noted that semantic differential scales actually measure the connotative meaning of symbolic concepts by examining how people "feel" about, that is by measuring their induced affects.
Largely inspired by Osgood's cross-cultural research, David Heise (1979) postulates the Affect Control Theory (ACT). The ACT states that all individuals evolving in any situation evaluate the situation according to the affective meanings of all its elements, which, combined, produce a global impression that gives a meaning to the situation. This last meaning is transient since the affective meanings of the situation elements change while the situation progresses. The meaning of the situation is compared by the individuals to the expected sentiment that his social group attributes to that situation (Heise 1966). Usual situations produce transient impressions that match expected sentiments, whereas situations that generate impressions deviating widely from those sentiments seem abnormal (Heise & MacKinnon 1987). According to the ACT, people manage situations so as
