Affect is a strong and relatively short-term emotional experience, accompanied by pronounced motor and visceral manifestations. The criterion of the affect state is our agreement that the strength or unexpectedness of the experience relieves the person of responsibility for the actions associated with it, since it leaves him no choice.
Affects develop in critical conditions when the subject is unable to find an adequate way out of dangerous, most often unexpected, situations. Possessing the properties of a dominant, affect inhibits mental processes not related to it and imposes one or another stereotypical way of “emergency” resolution of the situation (for example, flight, aggression), which has developed in biological evolution and therefore justifies itself only in typical biological conditions. Another important regulatory function of affect is the formation of a specific experience — affective traces (affective complexes), which are actualized when confronted with individual elements of the situation that gave rise to it and warn of its possible repetition.
In a person, affects can be caused not only by factors affecting his physical existence and related to his biological needs and instincts, but also by a violation of his social relations, for example, injustice, insult. Affective traces that traumatize a person under certain conditions can be completely repressed from consciousness. Sometimes affects arise as a result of repetition of situations that cause one or another negative state. In such cases, affect accumulates, as a result of which it can be discharged in violent, uncontrollable behavior (affective explosion) and in the absence of exceptional circumstances. In connection with the ability of affect to accumulate, various methods of their elimination, «sewerage» were proposed for educational and psychotherapeutic purposes.
The content and nature of a person’s affect can change under the influence of education.