2 | COGNITION, AFFECTIVITY AND BEHAVIOR
These phenomena are not classically psychodynamic but psychological in general, but they will help understand the psychodynamic phenomena proper. Therefore, they are presented first.
All psychological phenomena can be classified into two categories: mental and behavioral phenomena. Mental phenomena are subjective, they can only be known by those who experience them because they are confined into the psych of each individual and are not found in the observable physical world. Behavioral phenomena can be recognized by another individual in addition to the person who carries them out because they are expressed in the observable physical world.5 The thought “I’m reading this article” is a mental phenomenon, since only the individual who thinks it can know it exists. The act of moving the arms to turn the page in a book is a behavioral phenomenon because the person who turns the page as well as any other person who observes this with attention knows that this behavior, the movement of the arms, exists in the physical world. Also, mental phenomena can be classified into two subcategories, cognitive phenomena and phenomena related to affectivity. In this text, behavioral phenomena will not be subclassified, although they could be.
The term cognition can be defined as the group of mental phenomena that correspond to thought and perception6: “I’m hungry” is a thought, seeing a red colored glass in front of us is a perception.
It is not possible to define the term affectivity in a sufficiently exact manner. However, I will try to define it, for the purpose of this text, as the mental phenomenon that accompanies every human experience and defines it as agreeable or disagreeable.5,7 Love, hate, and anxiety, for example, are affective phenomena.
Behavior is every body movement.5 Walking, a frown, and speaking are all behaviors. Behavior, in contrast with cognition and affectivity, is an objective phenomenon.