CTNotes

An interesting piece of footage

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notes on: Feelings, Emotion, Affect by Eric Shouse

In this article Shouse differentiates feelings, emotion and affect, not as a psychologist but as a scholar of media culture. The vocabularies and theories hinge on psychology, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as Shouse states that feelings develop through language and personal biography, while emotions are projections of them. In his words, affect is "the most abstract because affect cannot be fully realised in language, and because affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness." I don't fully agree with this definition. Having read about and experienced accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) or the similar, affect is what some therapists might call "core emotions", i.e. fundamental complex physiological mechanisms that have been named grief, joy, fear, anger, disgust, excitement, etc, more or less products of evolution for survival. (Hilary Jacobs Hendel LCSW) My comparison may put affect in a different body of knowledge and would require more thorough research if I were to write a paper about it, but equating affect to core emotions suffice the current stage of articulation in my opinion.

What enlightens me from this article is not the technicality of terms, but the connections between feelings/emotions and their respective developmental and social context. The theories around affect can be useful when articulating emotional content in a piece of work and, hence allows room for elaboration when the terms emotion/feelings are misused.

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