Transitional Affect: A Conceptual Framework for Affective Change

Emotion regulation is commonly defined as processes by which individuals influence the onset, intensity, duration, and trajectory of emotion. This article treats transitions between affective states as the primary object of analysis, advancing transitional affect as a temporally structured architecture through which one state loses coherence, and another emerges. Drawing on the Spatiotemporal Taxonomy of Affect (Shanahan, 2020), affective change is conceptualised as dynamic, directional, and temporally ordered. Transitional affect is positioned as complementary to appraisal theory, emotion regulation, and emotion-dynamics research. Three interrelated psychological constructs - faith, trust, and hope - are proposed as candidate facilitators of positive affective transition, aligned respectively with cognition, affect, and conation and with past, present, and future temporal orientations. Doubt, distrust, and despair inhibit or attenuate this process. Together, these processes define a threshold zone in which one affective phase resolves and another emerges. Beyond discrete emotion transitions, the framework situates affective change as a general psychological process integrating the three domains of mind with temporal orientation and goal-directed movement between states. It therefore offers a heuristic framework for theorising the architecture of affective change.