Affective Neuroscience: A branch of psychology that holds that no psychological processes can be understood without first rooting them to an organic brain and the bio-chemical or 'affective' processes that initiate and sustain behavior. In other words, 'it's the brain, stupid!'
Affective neuroscience contrasts with other more popular and brain-less psychological perspectives such as humanistic, behavioristic, and evolutionary psychology, which attribute behavior to the power of metaphor (e.g. will power, stimulus-response, mental modules). However, since affective neuroscience requires real laboratories and detailed and testable analyses, it is much less influential than the far easier and and untestable arm chair theorizing (see Steven Pinker, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) which has driven the 'exceptional' progress of psychology to this date (and all that without mentioning pesky brains!)
