A flat or blunted affect is associated with schizophrenia, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder; heightened affect might suggest mania, and an overly dramatic or exaggerated affect might suggest certain personality disorders.
Or, as Dr. Dunbar and his colleagues write, "the sense of heightened affect in this context probably derives from the way laughter triggers endorphin uptake".
But the heightened affect on this occasion owes no small amount to the skill of writing that makes even the passing details count.
It could, for example, acknowledge and describe various and specific states of helplessness, heightened affect, and hyper-vigilance into which people are rendered when they are targeted for being less than manly, or less than desirable to men.
Such an interpretation, inspired by experimental work indicating that increased affective arousal amplifies the punitiveness of responses to wrongdoing (Lerner, Goldberg, and Tetlock 1998), is also available for the Woolfolk et al. study, where the graphic description of the homicide might be expected to heighten affect.
In this state, the mind has a heightened capacity to affect autonomic functions (those we have little conscious control over, such as heart rate).
This could suggest that those participants who have a general propensity for experiencing positive affect showed a heightened negative response to more unexpected loss feedback.
Based on prior research implicating heightened negative affect and amygdala hyperactivity in NSSI, we pursued a systems approach to characterize amygdala functional connectivity networks during rest (resting-state functional connectivity [RSFC ]) and a task (task functional connectivity [TFC]) in adolescents with NSSI.
MDD patients are believed to express a heightened responsiveness to negative emotional stimuli and a reduced detection of positive affect [ 66, 67], which is explained by hyperactivity of the affective neurocircuitry, including the amygdala [ 68].
At least 150,000 kids have been affected by the natural disaster, which means they're at a heightened risk for contracting a number of serious diseases and other common risks associated with such emergencies, according to UNICEF.
Intriguingly, whether talented in the sciences or in the arts, students are more likely to experience flow in the arts than in the sciences, and associated with this positive experiential state are heightened positive affect, self-esteem, and intrinsic motivation (Csikszentmihalyi and Schiefele, 1992).
