According to the dictionary, affection is a "tender feeling of affection for something or someone. Although it is not as common a word as love and affection, for example, you may have heard about it before, haven't you? Despite its more generic meaning, did you know that affection is a very important concept for the study of human psychology? We have prepared an article for you to understand the details of the study of thisCheck it out!

What is affect for psychology?

Affection is a set of subjective perceptions that mainly involve feelings and emotions and that help us understand the world, give meaning to it and to life, and establish bonds with other people. Using a very poetic metaphor, the affective life is what gives brightness, warmth, and color to human coexistence, which would be cold, dull, and tasteless without its presence.

Take an example: a wedding is just a wedding, but it ceases to be a wedding when the person you are marrying is you and the person you love, right? Grief is another good example: when we mourn the departure of someone who has died and will no longer be with us, we are expressing the affection we feel for that person who has just left.

Also, according to the most widely accepted definitions, it is a psychological dimension that encompasses, in a complex, individual and unique way, a set that involves emotion and feeling. Before we move on, it is necessary to define emotion and feeling, words that are often used synonymously, but that have different meanings in psychology.

Emotions

Emotion is a complex and episodic (that is, not permanent) reaction that involves a biophysical modification, that is, a physical change in our body. Some examples: when a movie touches us and we cry, we are manifesting emotion in a biophysical way; when we look into the eyes of someone we love and our pupils dilate or our heart beats accelerate, we aremanifesting an emotion; when thinking about something that causes us nervousness or anxiety and we break into a cold sweat or feel a discomfort in the pit of our stomach, we are being impacted by the emotion.

Feeling, on the other hand, is a psychological state of long duration, non-episodic and always accompanied by a subjective (psychological/mental) dimension. Emotion, as already explained, has a biophysical reaction as a consequence; feeling, does not, so we cannot know what a person is feeling (since it is a psychological condition) unless he tries to express his feelings in words.It is possible, for example, to stare into the eyes of someone you love very much and express absolutely no physical reaction. It is possible to feel a lot of hatred for something or someone, but nothing in your body denounces this negative feeling.

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Anyway, affection is...

This term can be defined as the relationship that is established between people based on their emotions, their feelings and a very subjective and invaluable sense, which is the value we give to the emotional experiences we go through (examples: when we feel we love someone in an intensity never felt before, when a death causes us a very deep sadness, whena frustration comes over us like never before, etc.).

Affectivity, in short, interferes in a very sensitive way with our thoughts and gives them values, form, nuance and content. It has been said that cognition (thought, the way we articulate what we think and say) and affectivity (set of emotions, feelings and value) are an indivisible whole, because we think from what we feel and feel from what we think; both areindependent, but extremely interrelated and to some extent dependent, yes.

What kinds of affection exist?

There are three possible analyses when we talk about types of affection, because the study of psychology does not follow a single line and different authors think in different ways. The simplest analysis separates the affections into positive (love, affection, fraternity, compassion, generosity, etc.) and negative (hate, disgust, displeasure, frustration, disappointment).

A second analysis "dissects" affect into four basic types of affective experiences, which include emotions and feelings:

• Emotion: originates from an object or an event, has observable bodily reactions, is episodic and short-lived, is automatic/inconscious, and is outward looking since it can be observed.
• Feeling: they are not observable, since they happen internally, they are prolonged and have a long duration, they are not of great intensity, like emotions, they are not associated with an immediate stimulus, and they usually arise when we reflect on our emotions.
• Mood: the emotional state a person is in at a given moment; it is deeply dependent on the emotions he has recently felt and the feelings that are going through him at the moment.
• Passions: a very intense affective state, which directs the individual's attention and disposition in a single direction, be it a person, an object or an activity, inhibiting other interests.

Other methodology

A third methodology separates affect into four categories, based on the people we are relating to and to whom we direct this affection, which is generated based on the emotions these people cause us and the feelings we develop for them:

• Family affection: as the name implies, this is the affection related to our family members, which can be maternal affection, paternal affection, or any other kind of affection that is linked to someone who is our relative and with whom we live together, not because of affinity, but because they are part of our family nucleus;
• Fraternal affection: this is the affection we feel for friends and people we like and who are part of our lives because we choose them, that is, people we get close to because of affinity, because of the way we feel when we are near them, because of the attention they give us, etc;
• Romantic affection: type of affection that is related to a love relationship, in which there are romantic and/or sexual feelings. It is related to fraternal affection, but with these people we have sexual and physical relations and sentimental involvement that we do not have with all the other people who are part of our lives;
• Self-love: this is the affection you feel for yourself, that is, the affection you feel for yourself and the way you care for and enjoy your own person.

What can a lack of affection cause?

Broken emotional bonds and lack of affection can cause serious consequences in a person's life. The breakdown of maternal and paternal affection bonds, for example, caused when there is parental abandonment, can deeply affect a person's development from the very first years of life.

The absence of fraternal affections, that is, of friends, can greatly affect a person's self-esteem, who may end up seeing himself as uninteresting, lonely, and abandoned. The same can happen if the person is unable to establish romantic affections, which can cause low self-esteem and shake the perception that he has of himself as someone interesting and/or physically attractive.

Many times, the shaking of affective bonds affects us in ways we can't even measure, that's why it is important to explore all your relationships in therapy, talking about the development of each of your affections and understanding where relationships have been shaken, why there is a lack of affection and how affective bonds can be reestablished or definitively discarded from yourlife.

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Affection, in short, is something we all have and that we develop with the people we like and also with the people we don't like, in the case of negative affection. If you keep an eye on the emotional ties that are part of your life, you will be able to measure their impact on your personality and you will be able to take care of the lack of affection that can eventually get in your way.