The concepts of affect and emotion have been used in information behaviour and practice research to highlight that humans do not only act based on cognitive reasoning, but emotions and feelings are also part of information-related processes (Hartel, 2019). The roots for studying affect in library and information science (LIS) has its basis in education and cognitive sciences and it emerged in the 1990s when information seekers’ emotions became the object of interest for many LIS scholars (Hartel, 2019; Nahl, 2007a). Although studying affect has been seen as an ongoing research trend in information behaviour and practice literature since the turn of the millennium (Huvila and Gorichanaz, 2025; Julien, Pecoskie and Reed, 2011), it has been stated that affects have largely been missing in LIS research (Fourie and Julien, 2014a; Keilty and Leazer, 2018; Krakowska, 2020; Worrall et al., 2021).

In LIS, the affective turn has been discussed as being separate from the embodied turn, which highlights the role of the human body in information activities (Hartel, 2019; Krakowska, 2020). However, in the humanities and social sciences, the affective turn is commonly understood as a turn to embodied, located and relational subjectivity (Koivunen, 2010; Liljeström and Paasonen, 2010). In other words, the affective and embodied are interlinked and affects are understood as both embodied and social.

The terms affect and emotion are often used interchangeably and typically remain undefined in LIS research (Fourie and Julien 2014a). In this paper, I use affect as an umbrella term that includes emotions and feelings, and I follow the affective turn of humanities and social sciences which understands affect as a ‘force that creates a relationship (conscious or otherwise) between a body (individual or collective) and the world’ (Cifor, 2016). As such, the goal of this paper is not to try to separate affect and emotion, but instead to discuss how these concepts are understood and used on theoretical and empirical levels.

There have been previous literature reviews that aimed to understand affects in information behaviour and practice (see Fourie and Julien, 2014a; 2014b; Julien, McKehnie and Hart, 2005; Julien, Pecoskie and Reed, 2011 and Krakowska, 2020). Julien, McKehnie and Hart (2005) examined the article types, affiliations, indexing, and treatment of affect in articles in selected journals and found that affects have received minimal attention from authors in system-related research in LIS. In contrast, Krakowska (2020) examined how affect and emotions are defined, theorised and studied empirically in LIS. Based on her review Krakowska (2029) argues that LIS research too often follow the tradition of examining emotions through Kuhlthau’s model (1991) instead of referring to the concepts, research, tools and methods of psychology.

This paper highlights the need for conceptual and theoretical clarity about the concept of affect (see Fourie and Julien, 2014a; Krakowska, 2020) and aims to make visible the theoretical roots of the concept. Moreover, how affect is connected to embodiment has been understudied. The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, it introduces how affect and embodiment have been defined and studied in the field of LIS and gives some examples of studies where these two concepts are combined. Second, this paper extends the notions and subsequent use of affect and embodiment in a broader sense to find nuances in how the concepts can be used to make sense of feelings and emotions in empirical research on information behaviour and practices. This paper contributes to the field of LIS by examining how affect and embodiment are connected theoretically and empirically, and it gives suggestions on how adapting affect theories (such as Ahmed 2004; 2010; Brennan 2015) could benefit empirical research by giving tools with which to understand how affect is tied to power structures. This paper offers a selective literature review of the concept of affect in the field of LIS.

Broadly speaking, the affective turn (Hartel, 2019) or paradigm (Albright, 2010; Nahl, 2007a) in LIS has been described as a turn towards research to information seekers’ subjective emotional experiences (Hartel, 2019; Krakowska, 2020). However, the notion of there being an affective paradigm has been questioned by Fourie and Julien (2014b) who discussed if there is enough of a body of literature for an affective paradigm beside the systems paradigm in LIS, and see it very much as ‘an emerging paradigm.’

There is no single definition of the term affect in LIS. Rather, the term has been defined in a myriad of ways, including motivation or interest (Nahl, 2007b), feelings and emotions (Dervin, 1998; Kuhlthau, 2004; Savolainen, 2014; 2015a; 2016; Wilson, 1981), emotion, mood, preference and evaluation (Julien, McKechnie and Hart, 2005), emotion, feeling and mood (Savolainen, 2015c), attitudinal and emotional responses and behavioural intention (Fourie and Julien, 2014), and emotion and mood (Hartel, 2019). Fourie and Julien (2015) have used affect as a synonymous term with emotion. However, there is no commonly agreed-upon definition of the terms of affect or emotion in the field (Dervin and Reinhard, 2007), and these terms are occasionally mixed up and described as being indistinct from feelings or moods (Krakowska, 2020).

As Fourie and Julien (2014) note, the terms affect and emotion are often used interchangeably and typically remain undefined. Whereas the prior examples describe affects mainly as emotions and feelings, Fourie and Julien (2014) distinguish between emotions and affects. Fourie and Julien (2014) argue that affects are attitudinal and emotional responses and behavioural intentions, whereas emotions are something that can be displayed, expressed or remain hidden and can be reflected in terms such as boredom, enjoyment, love and fear. Savolainen (2014, 2015b) refers to Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith (2003, p. xiii) and defines emotion as ‘a relatively brief episode of coordinated brain, autonomic and behavioural changes that facilitate a response to an external or internal event of significance for the organism’. Affect is not defined, though affective styles are described as ‘relatively stable dispositions that bias an individual toward perceiving and responding to people and objects with a particular emotional quality, emotional dimension, or mood’ (Davidson et al., 2003, p. xiii; Savolainen, 2014, p. 60; 2015b, p. 177). According to Dervin and Reinhard (2007, p. 53), within LIS, emotion is generally defined as ‘a state of being that occurs inside individuals and is associated in some way with those host states of being that laypeople call feelings’. They point out that within LIS, emotions are understood to be ‘caused by the individuals because of personality, demographic, genetic, physiological or experiential attributes, which are ascribed to them as traits being brought into situation, task, searching process etc.’ (Dervin and Reinhard, 2007, p. 54). It is noteworthy that the authors state that emotions are ‘caused by the individuals’. This approach has been criticised in empirical research in LIS by Olsson (2010) and Floegel (2021) as it does not consider that emotions can be born in social encounter and can also be seen as responses to something.

Affects are usually conceptually separated from cognitive and situational (Dervin, 1983), conative (Kuhlthau, 1991) or physiological (Wilson, 1981) realms. Even though cognitive and affective elements are separated in theories, researchers highlight that, in real-life information seeking, cognitive and affective elements are seen to be intertwined (Chen, 2021; Savolainen, 2015b; Wilson, 1981). Uncertainty has been understood both as a cognitive state and as a negative feeling influencing information seeking (Kuhlthau, 2004; Savolainen, 2015a). However, as Keilty and Leazer (2018) have pointed out, cognition and information are commonly seen as tightly connected to each other, as, according to the cognitive model, information is understood to be a thing that changes a cognitive state and the subjective knowledge we carry around in our heads. In this narrow understanding of cognition, affect and embodied aspects as part of information processing are largely missing (Keilty and Leazer, 2018).

In this section, I briefly introduce the research concerning embodiment in the field of LIS. The emerging ‘bodily turn’ has highlighted the importance of the body, especially within research on information behaviour and practices and information literacy (Hartel, 2019). According to an annual literature review by Huvila and Gorichanaz (2025), during the past two decades there has been steadily growing interest in embodiment in the field of LIS. In his review on body and embodiment in LIS, Cox (2018) found that most of the studies focusing on the body in the field of LIS have been influenced by Merleau-Ponty (2012), whose phenomenological understanding of the body argues that human consciousness cannot be abstracted from the body. Other strands include practice theory, embodied cognition and sensory studies and, less often, feminism or critical theories (Cox, 2018). Cox (2018) mentioned that Merleau-Ponty influentially noticed that affect is connected to perception as our senses are not separated from our emotions. However, Cox (2018) did not examine the connections between affect and embodiment in LIS research.

One of the first empirical studies in which information emerging through embodied practices was acknowledged was Lloyd’s (2007) study on firefighters, in which the experiences of the body during the execution of the work were legitimised as a source of valued information. For Lloyd (2007), the body is a source of sensory information and is inseparable from the social realm. Sensory activities, such as touching and smelling, represent embodied information practices (Bonner and Lloyd, 2011), and these practices are products of social construction (Olsson and Lloyd, 2017). Senses can be important for gaining information in different settings (Gorichanaz, 2015; Olsson and Hansson, 2019). Besides the senses, embodied information practices may include body listening, self-monitoring and measuring and observational learning (Godbold, 2013b; Lloyd, 2009; St. Jean et al., 2018).

While studying theatre professionals, Olsson (2010) found that the ability to embody their knowledge is vital to manifest their understanding of the physical world as physical actions in physical space. With our bodies, we create and produce embodied knowledge (Olsson and Lloyd, 2017; Prigoda and McKenzie, 2007) and share this embodied knowledge through our bodies with others (Guzik, 2018; Huttunen, 2022; Lloyd, 2014; Multas and Hirvonen, 2022). In complex work settings, information creation may include flexible transitions from words to gestures and then to using tools and back again (Suorsa et al., 2019).

Although interest towards embodiment has been rising in the field of LIS, its connection to affect has not been much discussed. It is interesting that studies focusing on embodiment rarely mention affect or emotions (see Guzik, 2018; Harviainen, 2015; Lloyd, 2007; Kitzie, et al. 2022). This is surprising, considering that our affects and emotions are highly embodied.

In this section, I will introduce a total of nine studies that have approached affect and emotion from different perspectives in LIS. The studies that consider affect as something personal are selected because several previous studies have noted those being important for understanding affect in LIS (Fisher & Landry, 2007; Hartel, 2019; Krakowska, 2020; Savolainen, 2014, 2015). In contrast, the studies that consider affect as something social were selected as those that are based on different theoretical frameworks for and discussions on embodiment.

Well-known models and theories by Wilson (1981), Dervin (1983), Kuhlthau (1991) and Nahl (2007b) approach affect from a psychological perspective (see Table 1). This perspective approaches affect as something that is born inside the individual. Nevertheless, there is a growing interest in the social aspects of affects and emotions, which can be seen in studies by Pettigrew (1999), Olsson (2010), Godbold (2013a), Gorichanaz (2015) and Keilty and Leazer (2018). These studies have a theoretical background in sociology, ethnomethodology and existential phenomenology (see Table 1). These approaches highlight affect as something born in social relations. However, it is important to note that among these studies, there are differences in what concepts are used and, in how they are defined, if they are defined. In Table 1, the theoretical roots and separation into the approaches to affect of these nine studies are listed.

In addition to analysing how affect is understood in these models, I examined whether embodiment was part of these models. From models that approach affect from a psychological perspective, Nahl’s (2007b) model includes embodiment. Focusing on human–computer interaction, embodiment is seen through ‘biological activity, such as the user’s sensorimotor, cognitive and affective procedures’. In other words, affective procedures are seen as something biological that Nahl (2007b, p. 8) describes as ‘an emotional reaction or value judgements that have intensity and bipolar directionality’. Sensorimotor procedures, on the other hand, are biological and socially constructed practices, such as noticing expected features or affordances.

Four studies representing the social approach to affect (Gorichanaz, 2015; Keilty and Leazer, 2018; Olsson, 2010; Pettigrew, 1999) take embodiment into account. However, the relationship between affect and embodiment in these models differs and the connection of the concepts of embodiment and affect is not discussed. Pettigrew (1999) focused on touch as part of creating a certain kind of atmosphere that is important for information sharing. This is like the concept of affective atmosphere described by Brennan (2015). In her research, affect and embodiment create a certain social context. Likewise, Keilty and Leazer (2018, p. 477) approached embodiment through touch, saying, ‘As touching in pornography becomes actualized as the touch of oneself, one becomes conscious of his or her desire. The actualization and the consciousness are both embodied’. Touch does not happen without affective experience, which is carnally and consciously meaningful.

In contrast, Olsson (2010) approached embodiment through understanding that theatre professionals must embody a certain knowledge of a character, even become a character, by learning to speak, move and act like the person they are playing. Creating a character involves not only physical movements but also finding the affective factors and what the character is feeling in a certain situation. However, in his analysis he keeps affect and embodiment separate from each other.

Gorichanaz (2015) analyses the connection between the body and affect during run stating that corporeal information affects to mental state, leading to different affective outcomes such as positivity or worry. In his model of the on-the-run information experience the body and affect are directly linked to each other. This model does not include the social aspect of the run, and Gorichanaz (2015) analyses that ‘though ultrarunning can be seen as social, much of the information exchange during an ultrarunning event occurs inside the heads of individual athletes.’ However, the social world of ultrarunning is analysed through Chatman’s (1999) live in the round in which much of the information is taken for granted.

With some exceptions (see Gorichanaz, 2015; Keilty and Leazer 2018; Olsson, 2010) studies focusing on embodiment rarely mention affects or emotions. Considering that affects and our emotions are highly embodied, this seems surprising. However, the reason for this may lie in the theoretical background of the studies in LIS. While examining the theoretical frameworks (see Table 1) it is notably surprising that affect theories have not been widely presented in information behaviour and practice research although it is often seen as a multidisciplinary field (see Albright, 2010). A couple of exceptions to that are found in the work of Cifor (2016), who suggested that affect theories could be applied in the archival field and Graminius (2022), who applied affect theories in science communication. However, those contexts are beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, affect theories can be seen as prominent for research on information behaviour and practice as well.

As an alternate approach, I next introduce the affective turn and affect theories in the social sciences and humanities. This turn has been highly influential in several fields, including political theory, cultural geography, environmental studies, literary studies, art history, architecture, media studies, and cultural studies (Salmela, 2017). For many of these fields the affective turn is a reaction towards the limitations of post-structuralist theorisations (Liljestöm & Paasonen, 2010). I will specifically focus on the feminist understanding of affect, as it is an important strand in theorising affect (Jokinen et al. 2015) and it has been extensively researched in gender studies and feminist research throughout the years. I will first introduce the roots of the affective turn to make the theoretical scope and diversity visible. After that, I will discuss more about the feminist strand and discuss how feminist affect theories in particular could be beneficial to LIS research.

The affective turn in the social sciences and humanities is based on two separate roots that introduce the concept of affect, including Sedgwick’s and Frank’s study relying on Tomkins’s psychobiology and Massumi’s ontological reading of Deleuze (Jokinen et al., 2015; Salmela, 2017; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). For Sedgwick and Frank, affect is understood as a prime interest motivator that helps us understand bodily drives, and for Massumi, affect is an entire, vital and modulating field of a myriad of becoming across human and nonhuman (Keilty and Leazer, 2018; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). These two roots of the affective turn in the social sciences and humanities represent different ways to theorise the concept of affect (Koivunen, 2010). The strand following Tomkins’s (1995) psychobiological aims to find the language of private emotions and broaden the epistemological and methodological focus (Koivunen, 2010). For Tomkins, affect is a psychobiological notion, and based on his empirical studies, his model (1995) includes nine discrete human affects, including fear, interest, joy and anger, that have distinct neurological profiles and measurable physiological responses (Adam and Wilson, 2020; Koivunen, 2010). Following this strand, the concepts of affect and emotion are sometimes understood as two aspects of the same phenomenon (Koivunen, 2010). In this strand, emotion is understood as social expression affect, while affect is the biological and psychological experience of it (Probyn, 2005; Koivunen, 2010).

Massumi’s understanding of affect is based on new materialism and philosophers such as Spinoza and Deleuze (Koivunen, 2010; Massumi, 1995). The strand following Massumi views affects as pre-personal and non-intentional, having a logic different from that of emotion (Massumi, 1995). This strand views affects to transcend the individual and aims to theorise on the boundaries between reality, language, discourse and representation as well body and material, culture and nature, and psychic and social (Koivunen, 2010). Rather than focusing on single emotions, the aim is to explore the ability to affect and to be affected (Åhäll, 2018). The difference between affects and emotions is vital in this strand (Ahmed, 2004; Salmela, 2017), as Massumi understands affect as intensity and finds it central to the ‘understanding of our information- and image-based late-capitalist culture, in which so-called master narratives are perceived to have founder’ (Massumi, 1995, p. 88). However, the strand following Massumi has been criticised for excluding the social aspects of affect (Hemmings, 2005). Moreover, it has been stated that the separation between affects and emotions undermarks the work of emotions (Ahmed, 2010).

It is important to note that there is no straightforward separation between embodied and affective turns in the social sciences and humanities (see Ignatow, 2007; Koivunen, 2010). An important field for theorising affect is feminism, which Jokinen et al. (2015) view as the third main strand of theorising affect. Feminist theorisation breaks down the dualism between mind and body, cognition and emotion, and man and woman (Jokinen et al., 2015, 2021), pointing to how gender and other identity markers, such as race, class, age and (dis)ability, function as a politics of bodies is personal, meaning that the political logic of gender is personally felt (Åhäll, 2018). Overall, according to Pedwell and Whitehead (2012), feminist theorists have long been concerned with the relationships between affect, knowledge and power.

For the feminist strand, the concept of affect is tightly connected to the body. The bodily or embodied turn in social sciences as well as in other disciplines, such as geography, history and anthropology, emerged in the 1980s and 1990s (Cox, 2018; Ignatow, 2007; O’Connor, 2017) to challenge the longstanding Cartesian mind–body dualism in Western culture that privileges thought over the supposedly separate and lower functions of the body (Cox, 2018). The bodily turn in social sciences is based on several roots, including phenomenology of the body (Merleu-Ponty, 1964), working body (Marx, 1957), feminist theorisations on second sex (de Beauvoir, 1949) and postmodern theorisations such as body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972).

Feminist philosophers such as Brennan (2015) and Ahmed (2004, 2010) have been highly influential on the fusion of embodiment and affect. In this strand of thought what is placed at the centre is not what the affects are, but what the affects do (Åhäll, 2018; Ahmed, 2004; Jokinen et al., 2015). For example, racist hate is born and lives as an emotion; thus, it is the emotion that causes racism (Ahmed, 2004; Jokinen et al., 2015). Moreover, many feminist scholars connect embodiment and affects with knowledge, highlighting the idea that knowledge is not only cognitive and emotion-free but also thoroughly embodied (Parviainen and Aromaa, 2017). Several concepts, such as embodied knowledge, bodily knowledge, body knowledge, corporeal knowledge and somatic knowledge, have been used by scholars with different research aims when approaching the embodied, and affective, aspects of knowledge (see Parviainen and Aromaa, 2017). The detailed examination of this area of research is beyond the scope of this paper, but interested readers may familiarise themselves with the work of Parviainen and Aromaa (2017), Evans et al. (2004), Ignatow (2007) or Samudra (2008).

What then could affect theories offer to information behaviour and practice research? The most important aspect is that the feminist approach to affect that enables us to understand how affective experiences are social and have bodily responses as affects are felt and shared through our bodies and can form bodily information. The theoretical emphasis on affective experience can serve to help us understand power relationships and social roles in social encounters that otherwise remain concealed or even invisible. Understanding affect as something both social and embodied makes such power relationships visible and can inform information behaviour and practice empirical research in three contexts. First, affect theories could enable a more nuanced understanding of information sharing taking into account that we are embodied beings in a socially constructed world. Understanding affect in information sharing for example, in situations with clear power-imbalances (see Huttunen 2023), as well as those in social media information sharing, should be considered. Second, affect theories are particularly suitable for understanding marginalised communities. Some empirical studies focusing on marginalised communities’ information practices have highlighted the interconnectedness of affects and embodiment (see Floegel, 2021; Huttunen, 2022; Kitzie, 2017), but there is a need for theoretical development in this matter. Third, affect theories would be fruitful to apply when building a more nuanced understanding of affect in the context of health information behaviour and practices. Although there is a growing body of literature on embodiment and affect in this context as separate phenomena (see Gotbold 2013a, 2013b; St. Jean et al., 2018), I believe affect theories could offer a more nuanced understanding in this context.

This critical review has outlined previous accounts of affect in LIS and shown the white spots on the theoretical map that a feminist studies-based notion of the conglomeration of affect and embodiment offers to fill. It seems in LIS the concept of affect has been used as a label to name a particular area of interest (see the affective turn by Hartel, 2019 or affective paradigm from Albright, 2010 and Nahl, 2007a) or as an empirical concept, but there is a lack of theorising based on the concept (see Pilerot & Ekström, 2025). As Cooke and Kitzie (2021) noted, much powerful and significant work ‘which features issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability and does not centre white Western norms […] has not been widely accepted or appreciated’ in the field of LIS. I would argue that this has also been case while adapting theories from different fields, at least when considering affect theory.

As Cifor (2016) argued, ‘affect is a crucial dimension of envisioning and enacting social justice across archival contexts, and affect theory is key to identifying and examining the conditions, personal and societal, which have created injustice and oppression in the past.’ I claim that this also applies to information behaviour and practice research: We cannot keep our eyes closed to social structures and injustices but need to challenge normative structures. Understanding affect from a feminist perspective gives us tools with which to analyse and understand affect not just as something personal or social, but also as an inevitably embodied phenomenon tied to societal power relations.

The emerging affective turn in LIS is somewhat different compared with many other fields of the humanities and social sciences. When compared with other fields, the division of affect and embodiment is rather unique in LIS. This is probably because the major theories used in LIS come from psychology and its tradition for excluding embodiment. Moreover, while affect theories in other fields are reactions towards post-structuralist theorisations this is not the case in LIS as there has not been a paradigm shift to post-structuralism. However, it is notably surprising that although interest towards embodiment in LIS has increased to the extent that it is seen as a turn (Hartel, 2019), the intersection of affect and embodiment has not been much discussed in research. Instead, affect and embodiment are commonly understood as separate concepts and handled separately in empirical research. However, this paper suggests that the affective turn and embodied turn within LIS (Hartel, 2019) do not have to be seen as separate from each other but can be seen as interconnected in the lived experiences of people. Although the concepts of affect and emotion are defined in several ways in LIS, most of the models selected for this research did not define these concepts. However, it is important to note how the concept of affect is understood in theory has implications for empirical research.

The author would like to thank Professor Noora Hirvonen and Dr. Björn Ekström for valuable comments and discussions concerning the topic of the paper. Moreover, the author would like to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers of this paper.