Leadership, affect and emotions: A state of the science review

At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated. These states--called core affect--influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior and are influenced by many causes internal and external, but people have no direct access to these causal connections. Core affect can therefore be experienced as free-floating (mood) or can be attributed to some cause (and thereby begin an emotional episode). These basic processes spawn a broad framework that includes perception of the core-affect-altering properties of stimuli, motives, empathy, emotional meta-experience, and affect versus emotion regulation; it accounts for prototypical emotional episodes, such as fear and anger, as core affect attributed to something plus various nonemotional processes.

Negative (adverse or threatening) events evoke strong and rapid physiological, cognitive, emotional, and social responses. This mobilization of the organism is followed by physiological, cognitive, and behavioral responses that damp down, minimize, and even erase the impact of that event. This pattern of mobilization-minimization appears to be greater for negative events than for neutral or positive events. Theoretical accounts of this response pattern are reviewed. It is concluded that no single theoretical mechanism can explain the mobilization-minimization pattern, but that a family of integrated process models, encompassing different classes of responses, may account for this pattern of parallel but disparately caused effects.