How to Use affective in a Sentence

affective

adjective
  • But there is good news from research in affective science, also known as the study of emotions.
    — Philly.com, 4 June 2018
  • In healthcare, affective computing has been applied to the field of autism.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 24 Nov. 2020
  • In goes the good desk chair from the office, and a seasonal-affective-disorder lamp.
    — Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Harper's Magazine, 15 Sep. 2020
  • Not only would the world lose out on a few great laughs, but under the right circumstances, humor can be quite affective.
    — Christian Stadler, Forbes, 29 Feb. 2024
  • The title track, which opens the album, channels that anger in a subtler, but no less affective, manner.
    — Jeff Gage, Washington Post, 9 Sep. 2023
  • As these models continue to evolve, affective computing must evolve too.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 30 Apr. 2021
  • An affective reliance on chatbots will only further erode our communal bonds.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker, 7 May 2026
  • Insisting that an affective machine should somehow work like a fact-checking machine is absurd.
    — Siva Vaidhyanathan, The New Republic, 5 Jan. 2021
  • Cognitive bias refers to one's thought processes (affective, which refers to the strength of an emotion or feeling toward something).
    — Daniel Fallmann, Forbes, 14 June 2021
  • There is substantial evidence that emotions and affective states play a key role in advertising.
    — Nazanin Andalibi, Quartz, 29 Dec. 2020
  • These attacks are part of a broader strategy known as affective nationalism.
    — Michalinos Zembylas, The Conversation, 18 July 2025
  • Throughout, the novel’s close-third snapshots of the characters’ inner lives display a moral and affective nihilism.
    — Hannah Gold, New Yorker, 17 June 2026
  • But while relationship and life satisfaction go down, something called affective well-being goes up.
    — Garth Sundem, WIRED, 15 Mar. 2012
  • My daily affective state is one of great despair about the incredible destructive forces at work in this world — not only at the level of climate.
    — David Marchese Photo Illustration By Bráulio Amado, New York Times, 14 Jan. 2024
  • This is not to downplay the significance of Harriman’s affective labors.
    — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 16 Sep. 2024
  • But affective polarization is often expressed in other ways, for example through fear.
    — Konstanze Frischen, Forbes, 4 May 2023
  • In what is called racial mirroring, people have a tendency to feel affective resonance with agents that look like them, the researchers explain in the preprint.
    — Deni Ellis Béchard, Scientific American, 8 Apr. 2026
  • But the reasons can also involve a subconscious, affective attachment to specific archetypes and myths.
    — The New Yorker, 28 June 2021
  • In these clips, actors expressed a wide range of emotions in their face, voice and body language, and participants were asked to identify the affective state of the actors.
    — Julia Lee, Scientific American, 2 Oct. 2019
  • The answer seems simple, yet a vigorous debate concerning its meaning has been playing out over the vista of affective neuroscience.
    — Dean Mobbs, Scientific American, 20 Sep. 2019
  • Here, along with cognitive and affective variables, the choice of mass medium would play the most important role, with television and press the major focus of these studies.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 May 2026
  • The causes of affective and other forms of polarization are the subject of considerable debate.
    — Daniel Kreiss, Wired, 5 Apr. 2021
  • And his compositions have an unusual knack for evoking specific affective states, which lends them a cinematic bent.
    — Mark Richardson, WSJ, 23 Jan. 2019
  • One, known as affective polarization, measures how much people of one party dislike members of the opposite party.
    — Christopher Mims, WSJ, 19 Oct. 2020
  • This affective arousal aids and abets relational conflict by accelerating it.
    — Mark Travers, Forbes.com, 22 Aug. 2025
  • Kastner and Lee were artful in their ability to highlight subtle affective details, making the most of the unique quality of each movement.
    — Luke Schulze, San Diego Union-Tribune, 29 June 2023
  • There is an ineluctable emotional stamp on the incipit of just about all of Brahms’ mature chamber works — the opening seconds set an affective tone that can last the entire piece.
    — Lukas Schulze, San Diego Union-Tribune, 26 Aug. 2022
  • These nonverbal bids for connection aligning with affective repair—not just problem-solving—can shift the emotional climate of a conflict.
    — Mark Travers, Forbes, 2 Mar. 2025
  • Such sweeping, affective observations are key to Fukuyama’s style, which spurns data-heavy economics in favor of lofty arguments on the plane of ideas.
    — Krithika Varagur, The New Yorker, 25 May 2022
  • So much lingers between these affective relationships, so many types of tensions are built in an emotional relation and to me sexuality cuts across all these levels.
    — Emiliano Granada, Variety, 6 Dec. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'affective.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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