Afektiivinen

Afektiivinen is a Finnish adjective meaning affective or relating to affect. In Finnish academic usage it is most often employed in discussions within linguistics, psychology and related fields to describe phenomena connected to emotions, feelings, attitudes or evaluative stance.

In linguistics, afektiivinen refers to linguistic expressions that convey the speaker’s affective attitude toward a proposition, referent, or addressee. Affective meaning can be expressed through lexical items (evaluative adjectives and adverbs), interjections, prosody, and other morpho-syntactic or discourse-pragmatic devices that signal emotion or attitude rather than merely propositional content. Afektiiviset ilmaustavat voivat voimakkaasti vaikuttaa viestin vastaanottamiseen ja tulkintaan.

In discourse analysis and pragmatics, afektiivinen language helps indicate the speaker’s stance, evaluation, or social relationship with the audience. It is distinguished from purely cognitive or descriptive content by its evaluative and emotional dimension, which can color interpretation and interaction.

In psychology and medical contexts, afektiivinen relates to affect—emotions and mood. It is used to describe processes, states or disorders where emotional experience is central, and it often appears in discussions of affective versus cognitive functioning.

See also: affect, affectivity, affective disorder, emotive language, sentiment analysis.