Emotions are an inseparable part of human life – people experience them both in their private lives and in their professional endeavours. They experience emotions being in solitude as well as in other people’s company. Although some people try very hard not to be at the mercy of their emotions, they now and then fail to do so since emotions have the potential of influencing people’s thoughts and behaviours. The evaluation of emotions as positive, neutral or negative depends largely on an individual person and that is why it is true that different people respond to emotions differently. Furthermore, the perception of emotions is linked to what is sometimes known as “psycho-affective factors” which may be generally defined as people’s individual psychological properties manifesting themselves in a variety of emotional reactions and influencing very many aspects of life. Those individual psycho-affective factors have also been found to condition people’s work-related performance. Interpreters are therefore no exception in this regard for they also experience a variety of such psycho-affective factors. This book is an outcome of the author’s interest in the consecutive interpreter’s psycho-affectivity, i.e. in the influence the psycho-affective factors have on the interpreter himself/herself as well as on the consecutive interpreting process and its product – the output. What served as a motivating force for investigating such issues is the author’s own experience of working as a professional (certi fied) interpreter who found that some of his psycho-affective variables helped him perform consecutive interpreting better whereas others – impeded it. Moreover, the author’s observations of a variety of linguistic and extra-linguistic behaviours which trainee interpreters exhibited during consecutive interpreting training, in particular, during the in-class consecutive interpreting tests, which could have stemmed from the subjective experience of the psycho-affective factors provided another incentive to investigate this intriguing issue.
