Affectivity is the emotional, sentimental, and passionate compound originated in our mind and expressed through our behavior. Both our aspirations and motivations and the external phenomena that reward or repress our needs are manifested in our affective states.
The importance and significance of the situations generated by the way we ski are reflected in our affectivity since all our behaviors are developed on the basis of emotions and feelings. The more a skiing situation is linked to our psychic life, the more our emotional resonance will be.
Even today there is a lack of conceptual distinction and interchangeable terms such as emotion, affective state, mood, or feeling are used to mean the same thing. Emotion is considered distinctive while mood, affect, and feeling are more general in nature. Most psychologists agree that the central components of all of them are physiological changes, tendencies to act, behavioral expression, and the subjective experience.
Affective processes are characterized by the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of our motives and/or needs, provoking pleasurable or unpleasurable states that can be externalized through behavior. These processes describe a certain variability according to the origin, duration, and intensity that include affective tendencies; the state of mind or mood; emotions and feelings; predilections and repulsions; physiological states of well-being or discomfort as well as sensory states caused by pleasant or unpleasant sensations provoked during our skiing actions.
It is recognized that the mental representation or perception of a situation or object is the necessary condition that provokes an affective reaction, that is to say, a determined affective state. The repeated emotion in the face of, for example, sliding tends to shape the perceptual structure becoming the meaning of that condition, i.e., while sliding on snow we incorporate our emotional state in the appreciation of the situation.
Affectivity is closely linked to motivation in that the search for pleasure would be our sole motivation and all other motives would be derived from that single motivating force. Experience allow us to anticipate the pleasure produced by a situation, even more so when the satisfaction exceeds our expectations, but we should be careful to follow those situations that invite intense pleasures as they very often diminish the perception of risk.
We tend to react affectively in different ways to the skiing situations we experience and even to our own actions. Although affectivity influences motives, the object of our actions is not always to obtain rewards but also to make skiing more fascinating.
A modification in our intellectual and volitional processes always takes place on an affective background. Thus, an intellectual phenomenon such as receiving bad news, or a volitional one such as a failed desire originates an affective state of disconsolation or grief.
The characteristics of affectivity
Affectivity is characterized by being strictly personal (intimacy) and can therefore vary according to the subjectivity of each one of us. The first day on skis provokes a different affective reaction in each one. This reaction varies in its strength (intensity) according to the subjectivity and self-control we exhibit and to the influence of external factors. The affective reaction experienced when descending for the first time a demanding and unknown slope is not the same as the one generated when descending a familiar intermediate slope.
Affectivity encompasses the whole personality (amplitude), as an athlete is distressed by the fall suffered in an event that is significant for his sporting career. Affective reactions can acquire opposite directions (polarity) in terms of like/dislike, positive/negative, attraction/repulsion, as for the passion and exaltation for skiing or its total aversion or disappointment.
Certain affective processes are situated in our Self in terms of the value of importance assigned (depth), while others are considered more trivial, as the affection for an instructor or a coach. Sociocultural consideration (social valuation) versus higher affective processes such as tolerance and respect, and lower ones such as resentment or envy are also characteristics of affectivity.
We can conclude that affectivity is the totality of our feelings and emotions, positive or negative, momentary or permanent that we experience in the skiing environment, which benefits or harms our performance. These affective processes are determined by psychological reactions to the circumstances of our own skiing, generating affective manifestations such as emotions, feelings, passions, and moods.
The influence of affective states while skiing
We develop our skiing activity by interacting with the mountain environment and with the other people in it. In this interaction, affective tensions are generated in the form of mild or accentuated anxiety and, in order to reach a certain affective balance, we should achieve control of these emotional tendencies.
As affectivity is linked to our cognitive processes such as thought, perception, and memory, it intervenes by influencing in a pleasant or unpleasant way the mode in which we think, perceive, or memorize the circumstances of skiing. Similarly, affectivity influences our learning in which each experience contains an affective charge that shapes our behavior, evaluating it emotionally as positive or negative. Thus, affective processes influence interaction with the environment, cognitive processes, and learning.
The composition of affectivity
There are concepts that are taken as part of emotions because of their similarity and that lend themselves to confusion.
Affect refers to the generic affective phenomenon of pleasant or unpleasant tone and high or low intensity presented by a given situation.
Mood is a condition of global character of a certain duration in time and low intensity. It is a more or less stable affective process, which may vary in relation to the situations we experience according to our own personality. For some reason this state fluctuates throughout the day and sometimes for no particular reason. We may start our skiing day in a good mood, and then a frustrating situation occurs that puts us in a bad mood. When we reach this point, the events may provoke restlessness, which generates more discomfort, then we begin to feel disillusioned with our own skiing. According to Albino Ronco, professor of general and dynamic psychology, moods are considered to be diffuse feelings, not very conscious, and without a precise object. We may experience different moods according to different factors such as personal (level of well-being or discomfort); the pessimistic-optimistic tendency; physiological maladjustments, the environmental situation (weather, slope, snow conditions, visibility, traffic); and the social situation (integration into the group in terms of accepting and being accepted). The state of mood affects our performance since its effects consist in the fact that we are unable to evaluate the object of our state in a specific way, thus diminishing our ability to face the situation.
Passion is presented as an intense affective state that comes to dominate who experiences it. It differs from emotion because of its longer duration and the relationship with the essence of the skiing that drives it. It is deep and persistent, being able to impose itself in the activities. It is classified as superior (positive value represented in the passion for technique or off-piste) oriented to personal progress and social recognition; and inferior (negative value reflected in the excessive passion to excel or the excessive speed that endangers others). Inferior passions impede our personal development while superior passions promote it.
Feeling is a long-lasting affective process related to recreational or competitive practice. It is characterized by being subjective and by a certain stability related to the creation of a bond that emerges progressively which promotes particular behaviors towards that activity. Unlike emotion, it does not revolutionize our physiology, at least not with such intensity. It promotes the gradual approach and enjoyment of the activities, contrary to the unpleasant feeling that generates the tendency to move away. It is often confused with emotion which, although closely related, differs from it in the time frame: a feeling is built up over time while an emotion is experienced in a timely manner. According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, feeling is private while emotion is observable by others. Feeling can be classified as ethical: compliance with the legal and moral guidelines of the mountain’s rules of conduct; aesthetic: generates pleasure, awe, and a positive impression before the scenic landscape of the mountain or the descent of a virtuoso skier; and transcendental: aspects that bond skiers such as passion for technique.
