Metaaffects

Metaaffect is a term used in psychology and media studies to describe higher-order affective states that concern the processing, regulation, or evaluation of emotions. In this sense metaaffect is affect about affect: an emotion or mood that arises in response to one's own or others' emotional states or to the experience of one's emotional responses themselves.

Scholarly usage varies: some treat metaaffect as a subset of meta-emotions—emotions about emotions—while others describe a broader category of reflective affect that modulates how emotions are experienced, understood, or expressed. The concept is often linked to metacognition, emotional regulation, and affective forecasting. It can be studied as a conscious awareness of emotional processes or as an implicit, socially situated phenomenon in interaction.

Contexts and research: In psychology, metaaffect can influence attention, coping strategies, and regulation. In media and communication studies, it helps explain why audiences reflect on their feelings toward content and how such reflection shapes engagement. In human–computer interaction and artificial intelligence, systems that detect and respond to users’ metaaffective states aim to align feedback with users’ emotional processing.

Measurement and challenges: There is no universally accepted definition or instrument. Researchers typically rely on qualitative interviews, diary methods, or self-report scales that assess awareness of, and evaluative judgments about, one’s own emotions, sometimes under the label of reflective affect or emotional meta-cognition.

Examples: A viewer notices they enjoy sadness in a melodramatic film and analyzes why that emotion arises; a person feels anxious about their own anxiety during therapy and reflects on its origins. See also meta-emotion, affect theory, and metacognition. The term remains variably defined and is the subject of ongoing theoretical discussion.