Affect theory aims to categorize affects – often used interchangeably with emotions or subjectively felt feelings – into distinct groups and describe their physical, social, relational, and internal expressions.
The discussion on affect theory is present in various fields such as psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, medicine, interpersonal communication, literary theory, critical theory, media studies, and gender studies. The definition of affect theory varies therefore, depending on the specific discipline.
The psychologist Silvan Tomkins is credited with developing affect theory, which was first introduced in the first two volumes of his 1962 book Affect Imagery Consciousness. Tomkins defines affect as the “hard-wired, preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms that exist in each of us,” which, when activated, induce a “known pattern of biological events.
“However, it is also recognized that, in adulthood, affective experience is the product of interactions between the intrinsic mechanism and a “complex matrix of nested and interacting ideo-affective formations.”
Primary Affects
Affect encompasses a broad spectrum of feelings and emotions that are seen as the foundational components in affect theory. Silvan Tomkins identified nine major effects, which he classified effects as low/high intensity and by their physiological expression.
The manifestation of joy, for example, is discernible through the action of smiling. These affects can be discerned by observing individuals’ immediate facial reactions to a stimulus, often occurring well in advance of their cognitive ability to formulate a conscious response to the stimulus.
- Joy/Enjoyment: This positive affect is characterized by a sense of pleasure and contentment. Physiological expression includes smiling, lips wide and out
- Interest/Excitement: positive reactions to a new situation or an impulse to attend. Eyebrows down, eyes tracking, eyes looking, closer listening
- Surprise/Startle: A neutral affective reaction to an unexpected event. Eyebrows up, eyes blinking
- Anger/Rage: a negative reaction to threat or an impulse to attack. a red face, frowning, clenched jaw
- Disgust: negative reaction to bad taste, impulse to discard. Head forward and down, lower lip raised and protruded
- Dissmell: a negative reaction to bad smell, impulse to avoid. Upper lip raised, head pulled back
- Distress/Anguish: negative reaction to loss, impulse to mourn. Rhythmic sobbing, arched eyebrows, crying mouth lowered
- Fear/Terror: negative reaction to danger, with impulse to run or hide. Erect hair, pale face, frozen stare, coldness, sweat
- Shame/Humiliation: negative reaction to failure, impulse to review behaviour. Blushing, eyes lowered, the head down and averted
Although they are not affects in and of themselves, disgust and dissodor, which are “auxiliary drive mechanisms” derived from the gustatory and olfactory systems, “also function as signals and motives to others as well as to the self of feelings of rejection,” thus they have an affect-like status.
Humor is a contentious issue in affect theory. According to some research, humor may be a response to a conflict between negative positive affect, such as fear and delight, which causes spasmodic contractions of portions of the body, mostly in the stomach and diaphragm area, as well as contractions in the upper cheek muscles.
Affect, Feeling, and Emotion
Nine ‘affects’ are identified by Tomkins; they are neurophysiological, universal, biochemical, and physiological processes and mechanisms that amplify triggering information. The affects of Tomkins do not constitute “emotions.”
Emotions in this theory are a multifaceted progression of inherent sentiment, subjective encounters, and societal maturation that occurs throughout an individual’s lifespan. Michael Franz Basch and Donald Nathanson helped clarify Tomkins’ concepts of affect, feeling, and emotion as follows:
Affect is the evolutionary inheritance of universal, biochemical, neurophysiological mechanisms and processes in the body that amplify or highlight triggering information.
Similar to the James-Lange theory, emotion is defined as “a degree of consciousness that an affect has been elicited.” Anger may elicit a clenched fist or jaw, while dread may cause the fine hairs on the back of the neck to stand on end. Similarly, humiliation can be perceived as a “flush” of embarrassment.
Emotions are the complex combinations of affects with personal memories and with the affects they also trigger. Nathanson wrote that if affect is biology, emotion is biography. Emotion, Basch stated, is a “further step in affective maturation” resulting from joining feeling states “with experience to give personal meaning to complex concepts such as love, hate, and happiness”
Though affect and feeling are assumed to be universal (high similarity despite individual nuance and idiosyncrasy), each person’s emotional experience is as unique as their experience. Of these working definitions, Duncan Lucas succinctly writes, the “steps affect-feeling-emotion, then, correspond to biology-psychology-biography, which in turn corresponds to a movement from the general to the particular to the specific. This is the biopsychosocial matrix in which every person exists.”
Communication
Intimate relationships are perceived to be predominately governed by the nonverbal means of communicating emotions and exerting influence. In couples therapy, the Emotional Safety model aims to discern the affective messages that transpire within the emotional bond of the couple (i.e., the partners’ sentiments concerning themselves, one another, and their partnership). These messages primarily concern two things: (a) the safety of the attachment; and (b) the recognition of the worth of each individual.
Two traits of affects have powerful implications in couples therapy for intimate relationships. First, as per Tomkins, an essential attribute of emotions is affective resonance.
This pertains to an individual’s inclination to resonate and undergo an identical affect when observing an exhibition of that emotion from another individual; this phenomenon is occasionally regarded as “contagion.” It is believed that affective resonance served as the foundation for all human communication (smiles and nods existed before language).
Second, affects, according to Tomkins, also impart a sense of urgency to weaker impulses. Affects are therefore potent sources of motivation. Good things are improved by effects, while negative things are worsened by them, Tomkins said.
Applications
Optimal mental health, according to Tomkins, is achieved by maximizing positive emotions and minimizing negative ones. Affect should also be expressed appropriately so that others are capable of discerning its nature.
Additionally, affect theory is applied prescriptively to studies of intimacy and intimate relationships. Kelly defines relationships as accords to maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect through collaborative effort. This blueprint, similar to the “optimal mental health” blueprint, necessitates that individuals in the relationship communicate their emotions to one another so that progress can be discerned.
Affect theory is investigated in the fields of art theory, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and gender studies. It has been said that Eve Sedgwick and Lauren Berlant are “affect theorists” due to the critical theory perspectives in their writing. Many other critical theorists, including Elizabeth Povinelli, have significantly relied on affect theory.
References:
- Basch, Michael Franz (1988). Understanding Psychotherapy: The Science Behind the Art. New York: Basic Books Inc. ISBN 0465088635
- Catherall, Don R. (2007). Emotional Safety: Viewing Couples Through the Lens of Affect. New York: Routledge ISBN 0-415-95451-7
- Demos, Virginia (1995) Exploring affect: the selected writings of Silvan S. Tomkins ISBN 0-521-44832-8
- Kelly, VC (1996), Affect and the redefinition of intimacy, in Nathanson, DL (ed.), Knowing feeling: Affect, script, and psychotherapy, New York: W.W. Norton
- Lucas, Duncan A. (2018). Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783030069285
- McGraw, A. P.; et al. (2012) Too close for comfort, or too far to care? Finding humor in distant tragedies and close mishaps. Psychological Science, 23 (10): 1215–1223, doi: 10.1177/0956797612443831
- Nathanson, Donald L. (1992), Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self, New York: W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-03097-0
- Tomkins, Silvan S. (1962). Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Positive Affects (Vol. 1). New York: Springer
- Tomkins, Silvan S. (1991), Affect Imagery Consciousness: Anger and Fear (Vol. 3), New York: Springer, ISBN 0-8261-0543-2