Affective means having to do with emotion it is most commonly used in psychology and psychiatry to describe emotions. The word affective is something of an opposite to cognitive. Psychological theory is that one half of the brain is affective or emotional. The other half of the brain is cognitive, logical, and language-oriented.

For example, a symptom of an affective disorder could be schizoaffective disorder. This means that the emotions are split -- schizo means "split". For example, the person suffering from the disorder may be very afraid, yet feel spiritual at the same time as he or she tries to cope with the feelings of fear by becoming spiritual. This may not be a bad way to cope with extreme feelings of fear, but that is an example of schizo-affective. The person has extreme feelings of fear, yet has extreme feelings of spirituality at the same time.

In contrast, being schizophrenic means that the cognitive aspects of ones mental ability are impaired because cognition is split and the person cannot understand the whole, but only split parts of their own thoughts. This causes confusion, and a thought disorder that is debilitating.

It is a common misconception that schizophrenia means multiple personalities. This is not true. A person with schizophrenia, has a hard time understanding logic, and other left brain tasks.

A person with split personality, in contrast, assumes different distinct personalities, conditional upon an internal condition or an external stimulus. Emotion