Affect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)

Affect is the experience of feeling or emotion.^[1] Affect is a key part of the process of an organism‘s interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is “a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect” (APA 2006).

The affective domain represents one of the three divisions described in modern psychology: the cognitive, the conative, and the affective. Classically, these divisions have also been referred to as the “ABC of psychology”,^{[citation needed]} in that case using the terms “affect”, “behavior“, and “cognition”. In certain views, the cognitive may be considered as a part of the affective,^{[citation needed]} or the affective as a part of the cognitive.^[2]

Affective states are psycho-physiological constructs.

And

The affect mechanism is like the pain mechanism in this respect. If we cut our hand, saw it bleeding, but had no innate pain receptors, we would know we had done something which needed repair, but there would be no urgency to it. Like our automobile which needs a tune-up, we might well let it go until next week when we had more time. But the pain mechanism, like the affect mechanism, so amplifies our awareness of the injury which activates it that we are forced to be concerned, and concerned immediately (Tomkins 88).

11Without affect feelings do not “feel” because they have no intensity, and without feelings rational decision-making becomes problematic (Damasio 204-22). In short, affect plays an important role in determining the relationship between our bodies, our environment, and others, and the subjective experience that we feel/think as affect dissolves into experience.