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experiencing friendship, intimacy, trust, closeness or a congenial interaction style, in
other words, ifthere is interpersonal liking, there is positive affect. However, ifthere is
distrust, acrimony, vengeance, loathing and hostility then there is negative affect. To
Barry arid Oliver (1996) these are sources ofaffect, not affect itself.
Another perspective of looking at affect is by approaching it as a stable facet of
individual personality. Barry and Oliver describe discomfort, anger, sadness and
negative mood as showing negative affectivity while positive emotional states like
pleasure or well being across situations show positive affectivity. Dispositional affect is
said to be responsible for social attitudes and to predict job attitudes over time. To
Barry and Oliver (1996:128) positive and negative affect are "orthogonal (or) discreet
dimensions of personality" and not extremes. Barry and Oliver (1996) also mention
research which indicates the effects that affective states and processes have on
creativity in problem-solving, cognitive organization and categorization, information
encoding and retrieval, cooperative and helping behaviour, problem-solving strategies,
perceptions of self-efficacy, risk-taking behaviour, utility functions and equity norms
and levels ofaggression.
Finally, Barry and Oliver (1996) mention the results of a study of affect and
cognition in the areas of consumer emotions, quality of life concerns, and workplace
environments where it became clear that affect has a strong influence on various
behaviours and helps to explain fully the thoughts and behaviours that have in the past
been linked to cognitive phenomena.
Thompson (1998: 177) mentions two common dimensions ofaffect as illustrated
ill the Two-factor Solution to the Structure of Mfect. These are pleasantness or
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