Integral affect
Also known as: Integral emotion
The feeling that comes directly from the thing you're deciding about.
What it means
Integral affect is the emotional response generated by the object of a judgment or decision itself, such as the fear felt when contemplating a genuinely dangerous activity. Unlike incidental affect, integral affect is informative and often adaptive, because it reflects real features of the choice and can guide attention toward important consequences that cold analysis would miss. The affect heuristic and somatic marker hypothesis describe how this kind of feeling becomes a useful shortcut for valuation. Integral affect can nonetheless mislead when it is miscalibrated to the true stakes, as when vivid but improbable dangers evoke disproportionate dread. Separating integral from incidental affect is what allows researchers to say when emotion helps versus hurts a decision.
Examples
The unease you feel when reading the side-effect list of a medication is integral affect, arising from the very option you are weighing.
The queasiness you feel watching a volatile share price is integral affect: it comes from the investment itself, and flags a risk the spreadsheet has smoothed away.
The flat, sinking feeling you get imagining your first day at a well-paid job is about the job — not about the weather or your mood that morning.
First described in Distinction articulated by Loewenstein, Lerner and colleagues (2000s).