Affect, Rationalization, and Motivation

No Pain, No Gain (in Darwinian Fitness): A Representational Account of Affective Experience

“…20,21 Some remarks and clarifications: First, affect is not only able to create motivation to avoid or pursue the event that caused affect, but in some cases might motivate one to act to add or remove the affect itself; a situation like this might be when one takes aspirin for a headache. Second, the scenario that I am describing here is not one in which affect is constituted by motivation (the view held by Bain 2013;Cohen and Fulkerson 2014;Aydede and Fulkerson 1962), but rather is what frequently causes motivation (Berridge 2004;Corns 2014). While the constitutive view is thus far more popular, affect and motivation dissociate often enough to justify thinking that they are distinct (Corns 2014).…”

“…I lack space for entering the debate here, but it is worth pointing out that the bipolar model fails to capture cases like the one just discussed (the downhill skier), suggesting that the bipolar model is-at best-only able to accurately describe affective states like moods.16 Indeed, sometimes the same event might cause both positive and negative affect, such as when muscle soreness brought on by strenuous exercise feels good or satisfying in some way. 17 Philosophers holding this view include(Helm 2002;O'Sullivan and Robert 2012;Bain 2013;Cohen and Fulkerson 2014;Corns 2014;Aydede and Fulkerson 1962). Psychologists holding this view include(Melzack and Casey 1968;Leventhal 1993;Berridge 2004;Leknes and Tracey 2008).18 Note that I am not claiming that affective experience is the only source of motivation; the sprinter, for instance, might have a standing urge to follow in his Olympian father's footsteps.19 Corns distinguishes between ''motivation'' and ''motivational oomph'', where they are both constituted by a drive toward or away from some object, but only the former is a ''cognized, intentional state'' that requires ''goal-directedness and flexible, means-end reasoning'' (2014: 245).…”

Reasons and theories of sensory affect

“…For the moment, we simply note that evaluativism seems to require the truth of this controversial thesis (cf. Cohen & Fulkerson, 2014).…”

Enhancing Student Cognition and Affect through the Creative Art of Structural and Civil Engineering

“…Affect can be described as tags in people's mind that correspond to a positive or negative event or object. We "consult or refer to an 'affect pool' containing all the positive and negative tags consciously or unconsciously associated with the representations… 8 " These positive or negative tags may influence an individual's judgment and decision-making 9,10 . For example, students may decide to continue pursuing STEM studies if they had prior positive experiences in or successes with a STEM course.…”