Affective science is the scientific study of emotion

Emotion

Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...

 or affect

Affect (psychology)

Affect refers to the experience of feeling or emotion. Affect is a key part of the process of an organism's interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect" .The affective domain...

. This includes the study of emotion elicitation, emotional experience and the recognition of emotions in others. In particular the nature of feeling, mood

Mood (psychology)

A mood is a relatively long lasting emotional state. Moods differ from emotions in that they are less specific, less intense, and less likely to be triggered by a particular stimulus or event....

, emotionally driven behaviour, decision making, attention and self-regulation, as well as the underlying physiology

Physiology

Physiology is the science of the function of living systems. This includes how organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and bio-molecules carry out the chemical or physical functions that exist in a living system. The highest honor awarded in physiology is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or...

 and neuroscience

Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...

 of the emotions.

Discussion

An increasing interest in emotion can be seen in the behavioral, biological and social sciences. Research over the last two decades suggests that many phenomena, ranging from individual cognitive processing to social and collective behavior, cannot be understood without taking into account affective determinants (i.e. motives, attitudes, moods, and emotions). Just as the "cognitive revolution" of the 60s spawned the "cognitive science

Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

s" and linked the disciplines studying cognitive functioning from different vantage points, the emerging field of affective science seeks to bring together the disciplines which study the biological, psychological, and social dimensions of affect. In particular affective science includes psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

, neuroscience

Affective neuroscience

Affective neuroscience is the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion. This interdisciplinary field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood.-Brain areas related to emotion:...

, sociology

Sociology

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

, psychiatry

Psychiatry

Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

, anthropology

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

, ethology

Ethology

Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology....

, archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

, economics

Economics

Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...

, criminology

Criminology

Criminology is the scientific study of the nature, extent, causes, and control of criminal behavior in both the individual and in society...

, law

Law

Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...

, political science

Political science

Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...

, history

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

, geography

Geography

Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...

, education

Education

Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...

 and linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

. Research is also informed by contemporary philosophical analysis and artistic explorations of emotions.

The major challenge for this interdisciplinary domain is to integrate research focusing on the same phenomenon, emotion and similar affective processes, starting from different perspectives, theoretical backgrounds, and levels of analysis. As a result one of the first challenges of affective science is to reach consensus on the definition of emotions. Discussion is still ongoing as to whether emotions are primarily bodily responses or whether cognitive processing should be placed central. Controversy also concerns the most effective ways to measure emotions and conceptualise how one emotion can differ from another. Examples of this include the dimensional models of Russell and others, the emotion wheel of Plutchik, and the general distinction between basic and complex emotions.

Measuring Emotions

Whether scientific method is at all suited for the study of the subjective aspect of emotion, feeling

Feeling

Feeling is the nominalization of the verb to feel. The word was first used in the English language to describe the physical sensation of touch through either experience or perception. The word is also used to describe experiences, other than the physical sensation of touch, such as "a feeling of...

s, is a question for philosophy of science

Philosophy of science

The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...

 and epistemology. In practise, the use of self report (i.e. questionnaires) has been widely adopted by researchers. Additionally, web-based research is being used to conduct large-scale studies on the components of happiness for example. Alongside this researchers also use fMRI

Functional magnetic resonance imaging

Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI is a type of specialized MRI scan used to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging...

, EEG

Electroencephalography

Electroencephalography is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp. EEG measures voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current flows within the neurons of the brain...

 and physiological measures of skin conductance, muscle tension and hormone secretion. This hybrid approach should allow researchers to gradually pinpoint the affective phenomenon.

Affective display

A common way to measure the emotions of others is via their emotional expressions. These include facial expression

Facial expression

A facial expression one or more motions or positions of the muscles in the skin. These movements convey the emotional state of the individual to observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying social information among humans, but also occur...

, vocal expression and bodily posture. Much work has also gone into coding expressive behaviour computer programmes can be used to read the subject's emotion more reliably. The model used for facial expression is the Facial Action Coding System

Facial Action Coding System

Facial Action Coding System is a system to taxonomize human facial expressions, originally developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen in 1978...

 or 'FACS'. An influential figure in the development of this system was Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman

Paul Ekman is a psychologist who has been a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He has been considered one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century...

. For criticism, see the conceptual-act model of emotion

Conceptual-act model of emotion

The conceptual-act model of emotion is a recent psychological constructivist view on the experience of emotion. This model was proposed by Lisa Feldman Barrett to rectify the "emotion paradox," which has perplexed emotion researchers for decades....

.

These behavioural sources can be contrasted with language descriptive of emotions. In both respects one may observe the way that affective display differs from culture to culture.

Commerical systems

There are few commercial systems available to accurately measure emotions, more recently several start-ups have emerged to address the problem. These include :

• nViso - Provides a cost-effective and highly scalable emotion measurement technology based on automated video analysis and artificial intelligence compatible with simple webcams. A spin-off from the EPFL, Switzerland.
• Affectiva - Provides a wearable, wireless biosensor that measures emotional arousal via skin conductance. A spin-off from MIT, USA.

At Stanford

There is a department of Affective Science at Stanford University. It emphasizes basic research on emotion, culture, and psychopathology using a broad range of experimental, psychophysiological, neural, and genetic methods to test theory about psychological mechanisms underlying human behavior. Topics include longevity, culture and emotion, reward processing, depression, social anxiety, risk for psychopathology, and emotion expression, suppression, and (dys)regulation.

Further reading

• Oxford University Press: Series in Affective Science
• Dana Sugu & Amita Chaterjee ‘Flashback: Reshuffling Emotions’, International Journal on Humanistic Ideology, Vol. 3 No. 1, Spring-Summer 2010 https://sites.google.com/site/sugudana/articles-1