Valence is a basic building block of emotional life

The goal of psychology is to discover the scientifically viable constructs or categories that will characterize what is variant and invariant in the working of the human mind. In this paper, I outline the idea for one such construct valenced core affect. I first introduce the idea that valence is a basic, invariant building block of emotional life that derives from the human mind's capacity to engage in the process of valuation (or judging whether something is helpful or harmful). I then review evidence to show that valence is a variant property of emotional responding, in that people differ from one another in the degree to which they focus on valence. Finally, I discuss the possibility that valence focus is not a property of the person that can be meaningfully separated from the psychological situation. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.