Affect - what is it, what is this state? This term came from psychiatric and criminal practice into everyday everyday life. How does it differ from ordinary emotions when it becomes a dangerous pathology?
Emotions are different
Emotion is a mental and physiological process that reflects a personal unconscious assessment of a situation or phenomenon. Positive changes cause joy, while unpleasant ones cause irritation, sadness, fear or anger. Of the latter, the affect consists. What is a state? This is an intense state that lasts a relatively short time, but has vivid psychosomatic manifestations - a change in breathing and pulse, spasms of peripheral blood vessels, increased sweating, impaired movement.
What are the types of affect?
What is affect, we found out. Now let's analyze its classification. The main types of affect are divided depending on their impact on asthenic (horror, melancholy - everything that paralyzes activity) and sthenic (delight, anger - mobilization and motivation for action). If the situations that caused itstate, repeated frequently, then tension accumulates. This is a cumulative view. The most dangerous is pathological, which is caused by a violation of the adequate functioning of the psychophysiological system of a person. This is a state that lasts from thirty minutes to an hour, during which a person behaves "on autopilot" and is not aware of his actions. After the termination of the state, the individual usually does not remember his actions, feels exhaustion and prostration. That is why, if a person committed a murder in a state of passion, this is extenuating circumstances, since the accused did not control his actions and did not realize them.
Legal
It is necessary to make certain clarifications regarding the legal justification of this kind of altered states. In legal practice, only a pathological proven affect is a mitigating circumstance. If a person committed a murder in a state of passion pathological, then he will receive a maximum of three years in prison. All other species are taken into account only mediocre.
Study history
"Affect" - what does this word mean? It comes from Latin. Affectus means "passion", "excitement". Even the Greeks knew this state. Plato called it as an innate spiritual principle. If a person showed a tendency to affect, then he should have taken up military affairs. The Christian view considered these states as manifestations of the influence of dark forces, obsession. Only in the time of Descartes andSpinoza began to understand the role of the relationship of emotions, mind and body. Emotional affect came to the attention of scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Researchers such as Moss and Durkheim found that society influences the individual through affectation. Psychological affect was also of interest to Freud, who concluded that the suppression of such states leads to serious mental disorders and diseases, pathologies. They can then be expressed in physical symptoms such as pain, paralysis, and so on.
Example of action
Let's take an example of how affect works. All people have anxious moods that are replaced by fear. This feeling is already more definite, and it usually has a known cause. When fear reaches its climax, terror sets in. And this is such a psycho-emotional state, which is characterized by unusual strength and violent expression in external actions, physiological internal processes, often uncontrolled. If a person is annoyed, then this feeling can develop into anger, and then into rage. It is violent feelings, unconscious and uncontrollable, that are called affects in psychological and criminal practice.
Characterization from the point of view of the central nervous system
The central nervous system in a state of passion experiences violent irritation due to strong emotional experiences. The concept of affect is characterized by the maximum strength of inhibitory and excitatory processes in the cerebral cortex, increasedactivity of subcortical centers. Excitation in the centers of the brain, which are associated with emotions, is accompanied by inhibition of the areas of the cortex, which are responsible for analyzing what is happening and reporting on their actions. Subcortical centers, released during the action of affect from the control of the cerebral cortex, are responsible for the external vivid manifestation of this state. Affect has its own peculiarities. The course of this emotional experience is limited in time, as this process is excessively intense. That is why he quickly becomes obsolete. There are three main stages.
Stage One: Initial
In some cases, the state of affect comes suddenly, like a kind of flash or explosion, and then instantly reaches its maximum intensity. In other cases, the intensity of the experience increases gradually. Excitation and inhibition in different centers of the cerebral cortex and subcortical centers become more and more active. Due to this, a person loses his self-control more and more.
Stage Two: Central
During this stage, there are drastic changes and disturbances in the adequate functioning of the body. Excitation in the subcortical centers reaches its highest strength, inhibition covers all the most important centers of the cortex and depresses their functions. Due to this, many nervous processes that are associated with social attitudes, upbringing, and morality disintegrate. Speech and thinking are disturbed, attention is reduced, control over actions is lost. There is a disorder of fine motor skills. Strengthening the functions of the glands of the internalsecretion, autonomic nervous system. Breathing and blood circulation are disturbed. In this stage, the affect has not one climax, but several: the period of active flow changes with a period of decay, and then the cycle repeats several times.
Stage three: final
During this stage, the inner and outer manifestations of the altered state subside. The vital activity of the whole organism falls sharply: the enormous waste of nerve forces exhausts it. A person has apathy, drowsiness, fatigue.
Characteristic of emotional experiences
Affect is an unconscious state to a lesser or greater extent, depending on its intensity. This is expressed in reduced control over actions. During an affect, a person is not able to control his actions, he is engulfed in emotions that he is almost unaware of. However, absolute lack of accountability is observed only during especially strong states, when the most important parts of the brain are completely inhibited. It is this condition that is a mitigating circumstance in criminal practice. In most cases, especially in the initial, growing stage, control is maintained, but in a truncated and partial form. A strong affect captures the whole personality. Sharp and strong changes are observed in the course of activity of consciousness. The volume of processed information is significantly reduced to a small number of perceptions and ideas. Many facts and phenomena are perceived in a completely different way, there is a change in personal attitudes. Changes itselfhuman personality, moral and ethical ideas are discarded. In these situations, they say that a person has changed before our eyes.
