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I take affect theory to mean primarily a functional construct (with a small aside for structural variables) which deals with the way in which human emotion operates; its relation to sensing, motor activity and especially to attitudes or assumptive systems. Further, I take affect theory to also mean the inclusion of meaningful statements about man's emotional disturbances and how they can be changed.
The use of the term eclectic to encompass the conglomerate which has been culled from varied sources is perhaps unfortunate. Unfortunate, that is, in the sense that the term may well connote a hodgepodge of borrowed pieces which do not hang together. In any event, I believe it is an honestly descriptive term since the results come from a process whereby my own clinical experience served as the instrument used to determine the relevancy of the conceptual schemes which are given in the literature.
It might be best to start with a model of the sequence of which emotion is an integral part. I have in mind a patient, who among other presenting problems, states that she experiences difficulty whenever she plays Bridge. Schematically her difficulty can be specified as (1) “I may make a mistake during the game and my hands may shake. It has happened before.” This is the evaluation process, a combination of expectation and other cognitive factors. (2) “I am in danger of being exposed as a weak, defective person who will surely be despised.” This step might be called the attitudinal complex, usually linked to a network of conscious and/or unconscious assumptive system. (3) Physiological