Consider an example. The typical experience of negative affect involves feeling anxiety, worry, sadness, fear, vulnerability, and/or anger. When there are important, perhaps in the extreme even survival-threatening problems, the capacity to experience these feelings, and the accompanying focus on the problem at hand (Depue, 1996; Hajcak et al., 2007), is adaptive. It leads to problem-solving action. When the threat is removed or minimized, the negative affect recedes. Although the experience of emotional states likely plays a number of roles, our focus here is on their adaptive role in signaling the need for action.
