The theme of the 2013 Physics Education Research (PER) Conference was "From Fearing Physics to Having Fun with Physics: Exploring the Affective Domain of Physics Learning from Multiple Perspectives."

Responses to learning physics are strongly emotional, for better or worse. While many students fear physics, an implicit goal that drives many PER researchers is the desire to cultivate in our students a love of the discipline. Nonetheless, affective issues are rarely explicitly addressed in our research or curricula. This may reveal a tacit assumption within our community that such "hot cognition" has little bearing on the "cold cognition" conceptual goals of physics. Recent research calls such assumptions into question, and the goal of this PERC is to highlight research across many disciplines that demonstrate the role of affect in science education.

While affect was once seen as a hindrance to cognition, this wide array of research seems to be converging towards a common theme: affect is fundamental to cognition. As a community, attending to affective issues in the teaching and learning of physics is pivotal to our understanding of students' engagement, achievement, and retention in the discipline.

The central goal of PERC 2013 was to consider affect in physics education from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The sessions were designed to explicitly attend to affect in the teaching and learning of physics, in part by incorporating active engagement and experiential learning techniques.