The Structure of Current Affect
- 1 February 1999
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Current Directions in Psychological Science
- Vol. 8 (1) , 10-14
- https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00003
Abstract
For some years now, emotion researchers have debated a series of issues related to the structure of consciously experienced affective states. The present article reviews evidence that current affective experience can be summarized by a structure that is anchored by two bipolar but independent dimensions of experience, pleasure and activation. Four issues have presented themselves as central to the nature of this structure: the number of dimensions necessary to describe the space, the bipolarity of the dimensions, whether the structure displays a circumplex shape, and the definition of the activation dimension. Points of consensus and the remaining controversies regarding each issue are presented.Keywords
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