Valence

From How Emotions Are Made
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Chapter 4 endnote 36, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:

Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence.

The word “valence” can have meanings other than pleasant/unpleasant, which is more specifically called hedonic valence. In other fields such as philosophy, valence can also mean morally desirable/undesirable. This is distinguished from socially desirable / undesirable, which refers to whether something is viewed favorably by others. In this book, “valence” always refers to hedonic valence.

See also