Moving On from Emotion and Affect: Conceptual Flaws and the Clinical and Social Costs of Affective Frameworks

Even as concepts like emotion and emotion regulation are emphasized as central to psychological health and functioning, the affective field remains rife with debates on how to conceptualize emotion and related constructs like affect or mood. In this paper, I identify two key features that pervade and characterize affective frameworks despite diversity in theories and disparate usage of terms: (a) the theoretical assumption of innate valence, i.e., an innate and universal neurophysiological capacity to distinguish good from bad that underlies hedonic tone and (b) a conceptual approach that involves grouping sets of multimodal responses into unitary emotion states, often believed to be hereditary patterns with aims corresponding to the situation or its appraisal. I interrogate the assumption of valence as an innate process and expose the pitfalls of grouping seemingly correlated responses into higher level emotion constructs. I suggest that affective concepts can obscure critical and more meaningful treatment targets in clinical settings. This can lead to neglect of physical health and poor treatment efficacy, overinterpretation of physiological changes, misdirection in decision making, and issues of social control and justice, with ultimately adverse social and clinical implications. Keywords: affect, emotion, valence, emotion regulation, intervention science