Affect Process, traversed in the depth-psychology corpus under the allied designations reward-learning-circuitry and the attention-appraisal-emotion interface, occupies a contested theoretical space at the intersection of neurobiological mechanism and phenomenological experience. The corpus reveals no single authoritative account; instead, a productive tension runs between those who locate affect process primarily in subcortical reward circuitry—Schultz’s dopaminergic prediction-error signal, Panksepp’s SEEKING system—and those who insist affect is inherently relational, developmental, and integrative, as in Schore’s orbitofrontal-limbic imprinting model and Siegel’s coalition of cognitive-emotional brain networks. A third axis, represented by Garland’s neurocognitive model of addiction, synthesises these positions by framing affect process as a trainable interface: the sequence of attention deployment, appraisal, and limbic activation that mindfulness-based interventions can deliberately recalibrate. Barrett’s constructionist account adds a further complication, dissolving discrete emotional categories into continuous valence-arousal coordinates whose affective coloring is assigned post hoc by the brain’s predictive machinery. What the corpus collectively underscores is that affect process is neither a fixed substrate nor a simple reflex but a dynamic, multi-stage sequence—orientation, appraisal, elaboration, expression—whose disruption underlies addiction, trauma, and developmental psychopathology, and whose cultivation is the core therapeutic target across multiple schools.