Affect has been broadly described as a valenced (positive-to-negative) experience in consciousness that changes each moment and guides what people do. The concept has roots in the origins of modern psychology, as it was coined by Wilhelm Wundt in the 19th century after the German word for feeling (Barrett, 2017).

The term affect has been used in countless different ways since then, and given the considerable advancements in neuroscience and psychology over the past two centuries, it is notable that it has still eluded a consensus definition.

In August 2025, I published my own attempt at characterizing affect, which I call the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025). The conceptualization is grounded in the contemporary neuroscience perspectives of Predictive Processing (Clark, 2023) and Active Inference (Parr, Pezzulo, & Friston, 2022). It also draws inspiration from Ecological Psychology (Gibson, 1979; Withagen, 2022) and my own clinical experiences.

Below I provide a high-level overview of the AMF, with the intention to explore each of these areas in more detail across other posts.

If affect is a positive-to-negative feeling in consciousness, where exactly does it come from? Which processes of the brain produce it and which do not? While we still don’t have completely clear answers to these questions, a lot can be understood by synthesizing the evidence that’s currently available, which indicates that a wide range of processes seem to sway affect.

In order to better understand affect, it is first helpful to understand an evolutionary argument for the purpose of animal brains in the first place. In their article, Why an Animal Needs a Brain, Sterling and Laughlin (2023) discuss the nematode worm, stating:

C. elegans’ brain is small compared to the brains of arthropods and vertebrates, but it supports a rich variety of behaviors. C. elegans’ brain finds the optimal locations for temperature, acidity, food, and mates – and stores the locations for subsequent visits. Moreover, the worm manages to choose optimally among them […] obey[ing] a utility function widely used to model human consumers, and as in many other animals, its subjective values are learned, a process that requires dopamine signaling (Katzen et al., 2023). (p. 9)

They go on to suggest that the purpose of brains is to create a behavioral repertoire that can adapt to changing contexts that become worth remembering as organisms........

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