Defining Affect in Relation to Cognition: A Response to Susan McLeod.

Abstract

In Affective Domain and the Writing Process: Working Defini tions, Susan McLeod undertakes the difficult task of defining affect. McLeod offers definitions for various facets of affective experience and suggests classifying these facets on the of their intensity and stability. While a continuum founded on intensity-stability renders affective experiences manageable, like any taxonomy it conceals and highlights simultaneously. For instance, although McLeod acknowledges the interpenetration of cog nition and affect, her taxonomy tends to obscure this fundamental character istic of all thought. I would like to suggest an alternate way to define affect, one based on the interweaving of affect and cognition. Defining affect in this fashion highlights the crucial role affect plays in all thought and stresses the need to expand our research agenda to embrace affect. Affect is not an adjunct to thought or a supernumerary in meaning making. It is an integral, if not the initiating, part of all knowledge construc tion. As Vygotsky points out, A true and full understanding of another's thought is possible only when we understand its affective-volitional basis (150). Nor is Vygotsky the only researcher to cite the primacy of affect. For instance, two years before the first appearance of Vygotsky's Thought and Language, Frederic Bartlett, the father of schema theory, noted the essential role affect plays in cognition. Bartlett claims that affect serves as the for thinking and remembering. It is also the major way we have of turning around on our schemata and obtaining conscious understanding. More recently, Susan Fiske, with her concept of schema-triggered affect, builds on Bartlett's work. According to Fiske, affect is inextricably woven into our knowledge domains as we construct them. The intensity of any affective reaction is an outgrowth of the degree to which a particular schema, and its attendant affective elements, is instantiated. Finally, Robert Plutchik em phasizes the fundamental role of affect in the evolution of the species and in the development of the individual. Plutchik asserts that affect phylogeneti cally and ontogenetically precedes cognition. What this research serves to highlight is that cognition does not occur bereft of affect. Nor is affect, contrary to the claims of Rom Harr6 and