THE AFFECT SYSTEM
Despite our view of ourselves as thinking beings, cognition is but a frail craft floating on a sea of emotion. Wondering how I might convey to you some sense of how thinking is influenced by affect, I found myself pausing, then distracted by something immediately past my left shoulder. What follows is an attempt to put into words my experience of the next few minutes, phrased as it felt while it was happening:
Dawn has just begun to declare the shape of this winter day. Seen from the window of my study, the pinkish ice cream cone of light glowing from the roof of my neighbor turns general blackness into the texture of earliest morning. The brief beauty of this always unexpected sky-painting is my reward for the decision to trade the comfort of sleep for the work of writing. I stop briefly as the window garners more attention than the viewscreen of my writing device. Backlit, the black walnut tree is revealed in perfect outline and I am reminded of its beauty. Delight is short-lived. Quickly I remember that in spring I must decide whether to replace the two dwarf apple trees that succumbed to last summer’s drought. Garden thoughts tumble around in my mind as I scan to see what else promises trouble. The pleasure of dawn has been replaced by a myriad of concerns. With conscious effort I pull the shade and return to writing.
I cannot tell you how long I stared at the winter sky, for until the period of discomfort for which I wrenched myself away, fascination had made me unaware of time. Yet when distressed I moved swiftly to regain control of my mood and to reorganize my thinking for the task at hand. Each scene described above came and went with its own metronomic indication, its own distinct temporality. Each scene felt different, each experienced with singular intensity.
This was an ordinary morning, and the scenes perhaps too trivial and commonplace to warrant attention in a book on shame and pride. Nevertheless, even the emotions attending an ordinary dawn deserve investigation, for until we share a common language by which all emotion can be explained, we will risk confusion where I want to bring clarity. It is the internal circuitry responsible for certain qualities of thought and feeling that will be the subject of this chapter.
It is easier to focus on scenes with heightened drama, like the humiliation of a defeated pugilist or the terror of a patient whose crushing chest pain signals the death of some portion of his heart. Yet fear can follow the ingestion of medication taken to reduce the volume of a sniffle, while guilt or shame is a common companion of medication taken to reduce high blood pressure. One can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available to the student of emotion.
Imagine, for the moment, a device operating in more than the conventional three dimensions, one that allows us to study human emotion from every conceivable vantage point at the same time. An adult in the moment of emotion will exhibit certain characteristic actions: when angry, one may yell; when embarrassed, turn away; when frightened, flee. Alterations in internal biological function accompany these outward displays of emotion—the heart, for example, beats faster during the moment of fear or anger. In order for these large-scale events to occur, a host of tiny events must take place at the microscopic and submicroscopic level; electrochemical messages must travel along pathways within the central nervous system. Yet nothing recorded so far by our hypothetical device quite resembles the experience of emotion—what this emotion feels like to the individual being observed.
Emotions, which are themselves events in the life of an individual, are triggered by events. Whatever resides in our memory is stored with its accompanying emotion; thus each of us has a highly personal “information bank” of emotion-related data. This storehouse provides the coloration of an event—that which is personal for each of us. Our hypothetical machine must be able to detect, sample, and sort each and every life experience as held in memory and to determine the influence of memory on our perception of the emotion of the moment. It must separate the biological from the biographical.
THE VOCABULARY OF EMOTION
We have no such mechanical wonder, but we can approximate it by introducing and defining a few terms that allow us to speak with greater precision. For an exact science we need an exact language. The basic words that I will be using in the remainder of this book form a new vocabulary of emotion. Most important within this new system are the concepts called affect, feeling, emotion, mood, and disorder.
Affect
From now on I will use the word affect to describe the strictly biological portion of emotion. Affect is the root of such words as affection, our warm-toned feelings for those people who are particularly special in our lives. When we have been affected by something we have experienced an emotion because of it; when disaffected we are indifferent and have little emotional involvement.
The word affect has been part of the language of emotion for a long time. Once broad and vague, its meaning has been made highly specific by the work of Silvan Tomkins, the psychologist most responsible for the revolution in our understanding of emotion. What is now called affect theory first appeared in his book Affect/Imagery/Consciousness, the first two volumes of which were published in 1962 and 1963.
When we say that an affect has been triggered, we mean expressly that some definable stimulus has activated a mechanism which then releases a known pattern of biological events. Each of the innate affects unfolds according to its own precisely written program. Each one lasts a strictly determined period of time, ranging from a few hundredths of a second to a couple of seconds. There is good evidence that these patterns, now genetically transmitted and part of the biological heritage called evolution, appeared first in life forms as primitive as the reptile. In the human, then, we say that the circuitry for the affects is stored in that primitive portion of our equipment which Paul D. MacLean (1975) has called the reptile brain. The argument of my book depends on an understanding of affect; however, before we get too involved in the nature of affect we must define the remainder of the terms listed above.
Feeling
Michael Franz Basch, the psychoanalyst who has done the most to integrate affect theory into the main body of modern psychotherapy, has suggested that we use the word feeling to indicate that the organism has become aware of an affect. Many animals will look startled when exposed to an unexpected loud noise, like a gunshot or a thunderclap. But only to the extent that a life form has the advanced brain mechanisms needed to produce the degree of consciousness we call awareness will it be able to recognize that it has been gripped by an affect. Feeling implies the presence of higher order mechanisms or components that allow knowledge and understanding. It is, of course, possible for us to be so occupied by something else going on at the moment that we may be unaware an affect has been triggered. Alternatively, people may be raised in a culture or an environment that denies the existence of certain feelings; even when an affect is triggered they may not feel it because the ability to perceive it has been extinguished. From now on, wherever we use the word feeling, it will imply that a person has some level of awareness that an affect has been triggered.
Emotion
The move from affect to feeling involves a leap from biology to psychology. How much more difficult, then, is our concept of emotion, for it requires still another level of complexity! Each affect has been triggered time and time again over the life span of every individual, and on every occasion this has happened in the context of some situation, interaction, or scene. As an adult, for instance, I am not merely embarrassed. I am embarrassed in a situation that resembles one in which I was embarrassed last month, or last year, or frequently in a way I cannot alter, or in a relationship that resembles the one in which I find myself today. Very quickly, as the growing child accumulates experience, affects become intertwined with memory. To the extent that an organism has an intact system for the storage and retrieval of information, it will be able to call upon this storehouse for memories of previous experiences of an affect. An emotion, suggests Basch, is the complex combination of an affect with these memories and with the affects they also trigger. Whereas affect is biology, emotion is biography.
Affect is about unvarying physiological mechanisms. To fit our definition of emotion an affect must be placed within a script or a story. Prior to the work of Tomkins, most people neglected the biology of affect in favor of the historical path along which that affect had traveled. We have spent too much time studying biography and far too little on the biology that makes it possible!
Everybody has pretty much the same built-in affect mechanisms; the affect anger, when triggered, is identical in both you and me. Where we differ as individuals, how we diverge in the process of development to achieve different personalities, is in the unique way each of us understands or “remembers” our experiences of innate affect. If you are to understand how I experience the emotion I call anger, you must know something about how we got angry in my family when I was a boy, how anger was socialized in the culture of my peers, and what particular incidents trigger anger in my personal world. For me to understand your anger you must tell me something about the history of your affective experiences.
An affect lasts but a few seconds, a feeling only long enough for us to make the flash of recognition, and an emotion as long as we keep finding memories that continue to trigger that affect. Often an emotion lasts quite a while. When something triggers the particular combination of feelings we call nostalgia, our ability to retrieve memory and to form associative linkages between memories has produced an emotion that will continue as long as new memories enter awareness. But when our storehouse of such memories is exhausted, the emotion wanes and our attention shifts to whatever next triggers an affect.
Mood
What happens if some of these memories bring to current attention an unsolved problem from the past or the emotions hovering around a relationship we never managed to resolve? What if the now-triggered combination of thoughts and feelings places us squarely in the middle of some part of our emotional life we had hoped to escape by the magic of ignoring? What if the sheer weight of current sadness compounded by sadness past is more than can be dissipated? Emotion then gives way to mood, a persistent state of emotion in which we can remain stuck for hours or days.
Not long ago I experienced profound distress at the untimely and unexpected death of a colleague, my discomfort all the more intense because of the number of levels at which we were connected. Over the next few days this mood of grief waned and I was able to concentrate on a number of other matters. It happened that about this time one of my cherished Renaissance clocks, long resting on the workbench of a London clockmaker, was finally ready to be picked up. Too delicate for conventional shipping, it had to be carried by hand on the airplane. Unable to find a friend or colleague who might add this chore to an already scheduled vacation, I hired the 25-year-old son of a friend.
The deal was simple—I traded airfare for his agreement to convince the airline personnel that this strange parcel should travel upright and on his lap. Suddenly, however, the deal became less simple, for not a day after my purchase of these tickets came word that an airplane bound here from London had been destroyed in flight by a terrorist’s bomb. Again I began to think about and mourn my late colleague, while also I grieved for the 260 strangers who had died in flight. Worst of all was a persistent anticipatory grief as I fantasized what might happen if my suddenly frivolous desire to get back this old clock should result in the death of another friend. This mood lasted until a conversation with both father and son convinced me that neither shared my terrible concern for the safety of the latter. After all, they had not just lost a colleague. Affect acts to magnify the scenes with which it is linked. Directly proportional to the number of layers included in my musing was the severity of my mood.
There are times when a mood simply won’t go away, when nothing we can do will disperse it. In times like these one tries everything, from the distraction or diversion offered by an entertainment or a vacation to a major reorganization of life like a shift in career. Often such a mood will precipitate a person into psychotherapy, for each therapeutic system offers its own method for the alteration of mood. The uncovering therapies work by demonstrating the links between current mood and previous life experience. Had not the death of my colleague occurred so close in time to the purchase of those airline tickets, I might have been unable to recognize the influence of one set of scenes on another. Therapy might have assisted my recall and helped me deal with what had been placed in some hidden compartment of my memory. When the door to that compartment has long been bricked over and access permanently denied, the techniques of cognitive therapy can work to alter the conscious experience of emotion by changing the thoughts that accompany affect and so relieving one’s mood.
Disorders of Mood
But even the most persistent psychoanalytic sleuth can sometimes fail to find any information secretly responsible for mood, and the best-designed exercises set up by the most doggedly determined cognitive therapist and practiced by the most devoted patient can fail to decrease the morbidity of mood. Even when the patient learns to visualize the scenes suggested by the hypnotist, or act out what is suggested in psychodrama, or work through what can be encountered in Gestalt therapy, sometimes all methods of therapy fail to alter the ongoing, day-to-day emotional experience for which one sought assistance.
I treasure a New Yorker cartoon showing a village scene with an African tribal dance in the background, the magnificently costumed sorcerer and his apprentice walking through a clearing in the midground. “I danced the best I could,” says the sorcerer, “but what that guy has is an iron-deficiency anemia.” Sometimes the problem isn’t where you are trained to treat. These are the disorders of mood caused by interference with the biology of the person.
Medical biology is not biology. In biology, said the great French scientist Claude Bernard, we ask the cell a question. We alter the conditions in which a cell, or an organism, or a cluster of organisms, lives, and observe what changes. The charm of medical biology is that everything we know was learned because something “went wrong” with someone. It is the study of the abnormal that came to our attention only because some person, or some system within an individual person, failed to operate as we have come to expect. Biology is the study of life for its own sake. Medicine is the art of returning people to their expected norm.
Much of what we know about the biology of emotion has been learned from the study of people whose uncomfortable moods were incapable of alteration by the techniques described above. We know that lithium salts normalize the emotional world of someone with manic-depressive illness, and that people who do not manufacture enough thyroid hormone tend to be depressed. I have been fortunate to grow up in psychiatry during the era when the tools and techniques of biochemistry and neurophysiology have been informed by data from computer-assisted radiologic probes that allow us to peep within the brain with enormous sophistication and perfect safety. Great scientists have discovered one neurotransmitter after another, deducing the sequence of their action and their role in normal as well as abnormal mood. For each of these messenger molecules we can find some chemical capable of altering its manufacture or utilization, some method of making better or worse the mood of an afflicted person. Charles Whitman’s tumor produced a disorder of mood, just as did the pseudoephedrine taken by my otherwise self-controlled patient. Perhaps the most dramatic and exciting field of study within contemporary psychiatry is this search for biological circuit diagrams.
Will the magic of pharmacology replace the hard work of psychotherapy? Are we entering an era when any bad feeling can be dispelled by medication which produces permanent and positive change in one’s life? Hardly. To take this position is as silly as to claim that the repair of a computer is the same as its intelligent use, or that the repair of an automobile is the same as the use to which that car is put by its driver, or that the music emanating from the loudspeakers is the same as the tubes or transistors that turn electrical impulses into sound. Intuitively we know that some people will be returned to normal on relief of their disorders of mood, while others will need a considerable amount of psychotherapy to permit integration into their personality of their new range of possible emotions.
Why this should be will become evident as we learn more about the relation between affect and emotion. It is time to study affect itself, to learn the components of the affect system.
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Table 2 |
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COMPONENTS OF THE AFFECT SYSTEM |
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SITES OF ACTION |
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STRUCTURAL EFFECTORS |
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MEDIATORS |
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RECEPTORS |
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ORGANIZERS |
COMPONENTS OF THE AFFECT SYSTEM
Sites of Action
One of the reasons each affect feels different from the others is that it triggers a separate group of bodily reactions. I use the term site of action to describe the places in the body where an affect can become a feeling. In fear, individual hairs stand on end because some mechanism has stimulated the erector pili muscles attached to the hair root. In distress, we cry—the lacrimal apparatus is another target or end organ of the affect system. Affect can alter patterns of secretion and movement in the gut, for in fear some are cotton-mouthed while others have diarrhea or nausea. Affect can make us sweat just as it can make us shake and shiver.
Clearly, the primary function of tearing is protection of the eyes from dryness or noxious chemical stimuli, just as the evaporation of sweat from the skin cools the body, and secretion within the gut varies normally in response to the needs of digestion under the control of the autonomic nervous system. Nonetheless, we can cry because such preexisting mechanisms are available to be triggered during affect; we can sweat or experience diarrhea when frightened because the mechanisms for sweating and gut function can also be taken over temporarily by affect.
Crying is more than tearing, for sobbing involves a vocal expression of distress. The voice, independent of its use in the production of words, is a major instrument of the affect system. Whereas the baby can utter communications only in the language of affect (by using such wordless expressions as cooing, laughing, screaming, or grunting), the adult can use the same affect-based expressions to produce the emotional tonality that adds delicate shades of meaning to words. Perhaps the voice evolved because the additional power it gave to the expression of affect increased the organism’s ability to survive.
The circulatory system is intimately involved in the experience of affect. Just as the heart speeds in fear and in excitement, blood vessels in the hands and feet may constrict to give the cold feeling associated with fear. The anger of the “redneck,” the flush of sexual excitement, the blush of shame, and the blanched face of terror are other examples of the changes in circulation triggered during affect. Similarly, the respiratory apparatus may be a target of affect, when we breathe faster during excitement, suspend our breathing in fear, or make the sudden intake of breath associated with surprise. Affect is posture also—we may stand erect when proud, droop in shame, adopt a “fighting stance,” jut the head forward in anger or disgust, and cringe in fear.
But by far the most important site of action for affect display is the face. Nowhere else in the body can the anatomist demonstrate so many perfectly developed muscle groups packed together so well, each group served by its own specific nerve trunk. As Darwin pointed out, human facial expression remains the same from cradle to grave, and the closer a life form to us in looks, the more the range and type of its facial expression resembles ours. Many of the muscles of expression seem to have no function other than their relation to affect. There is a great deal more to say about the face, which Tomkins considers the display board for the affect system, but for the moment I wish only to include it among the bodily sites capable of displaying affect. The face alone can provide enough information to determine the nature of a feeling.
Effectors and Mediators
In order for an end organ of affect expression to be triggered, it must either be served by nerve trunks carrying a message acceptable to that organ or be stimulated directly by chemicals brought through circulation. I call the anatomical structures that carry such messages the effectors and the stimulating chemicals the mediators of affect. An example of the structural effectors would be the primitive section of the brain called the reticular activating system, which seems to be responsible for varying levels of arousal. Also, we know that certain regions in the hypothalamus are involved in the production of anger, “sexual aggression,” fear, and pleasure. If the tips of the temporal lobes of the brain are removed on both sides, an organism (person or experimental animal) develops the Kluver-Bucy syndrome, with blunted affect and inappropriate responses to stimulation. I can list literally hundreds of similar brain structures with the clinical disorder known to be related to each; my only point here is to fix in your mind the idea that a great many pieces of equipment must be choreographed in some very precise manner for us to get the specific patterns of action we call innate affect.
The brain is more than a large instrument built to handle electrical impulses like á telephone switching office. It is also an endocrine organ—a hormone factory—and some investigators believe that fully a third of its bulk serves this function. It is known to manufacture the major neurotransmitters norepinephrine and serotonin, messenger substances which are necessary for the maintenance of normal mood and to provide the chemistry for a wide variety of secondary messenger systems. Compounds taken into the body for other reasons can become mediators of affect, as when depression is caused by drugs given for high blood pressure or to prevent pregnancy, or when medication used for the control of asthma causes anxiety.
Receptors
A moment ago I mentioned that hair, made to stand on end by the erector pili muscles, is a site of action for affect. Calm, limp hair, tousled by a passing breeze, sends one kind of message to the brain; stiffly erect hair transmits something different when disturbed. In this sense, structures all over the body are capable of conveying information about the presence or absence of affect. Affect, which causes all sorts of things to happen at its various sites of action, also turns those sites of action into secondary sources of data capable of analysis by central brain structures and capable of triggering more affect.
Tomkins and the Organizers of Affect
Here, then, are all the basic ingredients needed to produce an affect—the structural effectors and chemical mediators that will carry messages to specific sites of action where receptors allow recognition of the patterns of activity we call affect. All we need is some system to organize them. The final portion of the affect system is the group of internal scripts that we may call the organizers of affect. These are the innate affects first described by Silvan Tomkins.
How Tomkins first came to recognize the nature of innate affect, of a group of “hard-wired” commands operating much as today we would describe a computer program, is one of the most charming stories in the history of science. As a boy I used to read books about the lives of the great scientists who were my heroes. Every bacteriologist, for instance, had been forced to throw away culture plates contaminated with mold. The green and crusted mold so often found on stale bread would get into bacterial cultures and eat up all the food left for the bacteria, ruining whatever experiment had been in progress. But Andrew Fleming noticed a halo, a ring of clear, bacteria-free culture medium around each little island of bread mold, and guessed that the mold Penicillium manufactured some substance that prevented the growth of bacteria. He was able to extract that substance, the first antibiotic, and named it penicillin for the mold from which it had been derived. From Fleming’s “chance observation” came the beginning of the antibiotic era.
There are dozens, hundreds, of such stories in the history of science, all characterized by certain unchanging features. In general, an event available to many was witnessed by someone with a mind prepared to see it differently and the skill and training to evaluate that observation in some novel and useful way. What is not recorded in the novelistic treatments of great scientific discovery are the tens of thousands of similar observations made by excellent scientists with superb training and equipment that produced nothing but reams of useless data and unproductive speculation. Either much in history depends on luck or luck is a label used by those who have not discovered anything significant. Little has been written about what I would consider one of the attributes of genius—the specific quality of mind that allows some to assess, comprehend, and ignore the trivial but concentrate on what is truly significant.
Prior to his discovery in the mid-1940s of the affect system, Silvan Tomkins was a successful experimental psychologist who had developed (with his colleague, the statistician Daniel Horn) the Tomkins-Horn Picture Arrangement Test, still used to evaluate certain parts of the thinking apparatus. His great friend and mentor was the psychiatrist Henry Murray, who developed the Thematic Apperception Test, known as the TAT, in which subjects are asked to make up a story that explains the drawing being shown them by the testing psychologist. (The TAT is a good tool by which to learn about the emotional life of an individual without seeming to ask personal questions.) The early papers of Norbert Weiner, the mathematician whose theoretical work made modern computer science possible, had entranced Tomkins. It was a time of ferment, of novelty, of excitement. Something new was in every wind.
Tomkins and his wife, having decided it was time to raise a family, took advantage of a scheduled sabbatical year to plan for their first child. So a great and prepared mind witnessed the birth of a baby in a period when little else but the magic of a new life needed to occupy attention. The baby, of course, cried at birth. To Tomkins, this was a miracle. In a flash he saw a critical similarity between the cry of an adult and the wail of a newborn. Clearly, he thought, the infant does not appraise the world as a vale of tears (1982). Notwithstanding the “reasons” that an adult might cry, the newborn baby does not know why it cries—it merely cries.
Crying is a very complex series of behaviors. The eyes pour forth tears. The laryngeal apparatus must sound the cry. The face gets red and the mouth takes on the peculiar shape called “the omega of melancholy.” No newborn infant is capable of deciding to organize all these activities in order to cry. Most likely there was a script for crying, a program that could be set off (unleashed, released, triggered) by some “button.” Adult and infant alike merely pushed the button for the cry. There was no reason to suspect the existence of more than one button! Tomkins had seen the halo around the island of bread mold.
This was the burst of insight that ushered in a new science of emotion. Tomkins knew, just as well as you and I, that both the infant and the adult cry. He recognized that the cry is an organized behavior with a precise form—every cry resembles every other cry. But the cry itself, this very complex series of behaviors, produced so much information that it seemed unlikely to him that the infant could remain “unaware” of it, that the organism “wasted” this information, allowed it to unfold without making further use of it. Just as whatever allows an infant to cry must somehow trigger something that allows this organized behavior to start and then to unfold in its own particular way, and just as whatever allows an adult to cry must somehow involve the same switch and the same script, despite whatever else is going on in the far more educated mind of the adult, the cry itself must become a source of information. Now Tomkins began to extract penicillin from the halo.
Anybody who cries, whether an organism as naive and untrained as the infant or a personage as sophisticated and learned as the professor, must engage this switch and then permit the expression of the program we call the cry. The secret to the nature of emotion was suddenly available. Tomkins had discovered the affects, the group of “hard-wired,” preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms that exist in each of us and are responsible for the earliest form of emotional life. What remained for him was to see how many affect programs could be found in the newborn and to discover the connections between these innate affects and the highly complex mental formations we call adult emotion.
How many affects are there, how many of these prewritten scripts that appear equally available to newborn and adult? Perhaps a better question would be how few—we want to find the smallest number of building blocks necessary to make our structure. Remember the problem we studied in school: what is the smallest number of colors needed to draw a map on which no two countries would share both a boundary and a color? (That answer, according to the mathematical discipline called topology, is four.) How sparse an alphabet of affects is needed from which to assemble every possible emotion? At the moment, it seems as if the magic number is nine. To the best of our knowledge, every known emotion and emotion-laden situation can be explained on the basis of the nine innate affects described by Tomkins. They come in three types or categories—two affects that are basically pleasant or positive, one that is neutral, and six others that are basically unpleasant or negative.
With only a couple of exceptions, each innate affect is given a two-word group name, the first indicating the mildest form in which it may be seen, the second representing its most intense presentation. The positive affects are interest–excitement and enjoyment–joy; the neutral affect is called surprise–startle; and the negative affects are fear–terror, distress–anguish, anger–rage, dissmell, disgust, and shame–humiliation. Each may be regarded as a pattern of expression, a specific package of information triggered in response to a particular type of stimulus. Much of the information in this package involves the skin and muscles of the face, just as Darwin had observed a century earlier, but affect does vastly more than operate as display at its various visible sites of action.
By far the most important idea for me to convey—indeed, the concept that is so central to the argument of my book that one might say the book pivots around it—is Tomkins’s idea that the function of any affect is to amplify the highly specific stimulus that set it in motion. A stimulus involving an increase in brain activity will trigger an affect that increases brain activity, while a stimulus that involves a decrease in brain activity will trigger an affect that further decreases brain activity. No matter whether that stimulus has come from what the infant has just seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or remembered, if the stimulus triggers an affect, the stimulus will now become important in the way typical of that affect. Affect, says Tomkins, makes good things better and bad things worse. Affect makes us care about different things in different ways. The reason that emotion is so important to a thinking being is that affect controls or acts upon the way we use thought, just as it takes over or influences bodily actions at the sites specific for it. Whenever we are said to be motivated, it is because an affect has made us so, and we are motivated in the direction and form characteristic of that affect. Whatever is important to us is made so by affect. Affect is the engine that drives us.
Is there anything really revolutionary in this definition of affect? We have always known that an excited person thinks and talks excitedly, that a startled person is jumpy and unlikely to think calmly until the moment of surprise has passed, that anxious people are skittish in everything they do, and that someone suffused with contentment is likely to be calm and complacent. The problem is that we were brought up to understand emotion as some sort of climate that interfered with or only hindered intellectual function. We have been so charmed by our own ability to store and retrieve memory or to handle numbers that we have overlooked the fact that our affects were what gave these attributes importance.
Before this contribution of Tomkins we said that affect, behavior, and cognition represented three separate functions of the human brain. Such distinctions are not only arbitrary but incorrect. Affect causes behaviors all over the body. Not only does affect influence and often control the thinking made possible by the most advanced structures of the new brain (what we call the neocortex), but it is a form of thinking—the action thinking of the old brain.
Take, for instance, the affect Tomkins calls interest–excitement. In the presence of any novel stimulus, a baby will furrow its brow and begin to track with eyes and ears the source of information that attracted its attention. Instantly alert and attentive, it is in the grip of the affect interest; the more interested the baby gets, more will its affective response resemble what we call excitement. Yet it is clear that the baby does not “understand” why it is excited or even know that it is excited, let alone know who it is that has become excited.
Consider, then, the nature of novelty, of a stimulus capable of triggering interest. Tomkins suggests that interest is a patterned response to an optimal increase in the rate and intensity of whatever is going on within the brain. Thus, an optimal increase in brain activity triggers an affect program that causes an amplification of this optimal state of brain function. The triggering of affect takes what might be interesting and now makes it very interesting. As E. Virginia Demos has pointed out on the basis of her meticulous observations of infants studied with the aid of videotape, an affect converts what is essentially a quantitative occurrence (these meaning-free shifts in brain physiology) into the kind of qualitative experience we can call a feeling.
In the case of the affect interest, a meaning-free increase in the activity of the brain has occurred, enough of an increase to trigger the affect program. The affect program now makes things happen all over the body, the effect of which is to add urgency to this increase. No matter when an affect is triggered, it is neither a trivial nor a casual event. The triggering of an affect program initiates a mechanism that is urgent as soon as it begins.
Lots more is happening to the excited infant than this optimal increase in brain function, for among the functions amplified are the bodily motions available at the sites of action of this particular affect script. Again, observe the infant, who is not merely “somewhat” stirred by affect. The entire infant, suddenly alert and visibly more alive, is taken over by affect. Affective responses are immensely important events in the life of an infant, whose entire being is now under the control of the affect.
Swiftly the growing organism learns to associate the experience of affect with what triggered it, to form the linkages that, as its powers of memory and higher cognition improve with age, will become adult emotion. And, since it is on the display board formed by the skin and muscles of the face that affect is primarily expressed, it is awareness of its own facial display that tells the infant what affect has been triggered. Do not for a moment think that we are talking about the relatively mild facial displays of affect seen in the adult, who has learned to modulate or mute what he or she shows the outside world. When an affect hits an infant, that affect is the only game in town!
So the infant grows up with its affects, learning to identify each affect by its mode of facial display, learning to handle and live with the alterations in function caused by affect. The affects are perhaps the most frequently recurring experiences in the life of the baby because they are responses to physiological conditions (variations in the level of internal activity) that must occur merely in the process of living. Since the facial expression of affect involves voluntary muscles momentarily taken over by an involuntary mechanism, the infant gets used to feeling these muscles being captured by the affect programs and sooner or later begins to play with these muscles of expression.
By this normal activity of imitation the baby now learns how to perform all the displays associated with emotion, whether or not an innate affect mechanism has been triggered. Affect display, initially an involuntary mechanism representing the quality of a physiological experience, begins to operate also as voluntary activity. For the rest of its life, the growing organism will know how to mimic intentionally the expressions that originally occurred involuntarily as the result of innate affect. Tomkins describes this form of self-mimicry as autosimulation—the intentional simulation of one’s own unintentional movements.
Still more is happening. The fact that each of these powerful physiological experiences is displayed on the face and also in a definable group of distinctive bodily motions makes them quite visible to anybody who spends much time taking care of an infant. Naturally we are talking about the baby’s mother, but nowadays this mothering job is more and more a shared effort, so we therapists and theoreticians have begun to substitute the term caregiver to indicate that we know fathers, siblings, other family members, nurses, and a host of other people may take over some or most of this job. Although I will follow conventional usage and refer to the mothering person as the caregiver in most of this section, please understand that this is pretty much a code word for mother. A big part of taking care of a baby involves watching and responding to its affect display. Although we call this interplay “babytalk” because it is accompanied by a great deal of vocalization, most of what the caregiver really seems to be doing is mirroring or imitating the facial display of the infant.
A moment ago I mentioned that the baby is learning to recognize its own affective states by connecting the inner changes caused by affect to the bodily feelings generated when the face is rearranged in the patterns specific for each affect. The sensory equipment involved here is the kinesthetic apparatus, the same system of nerves that tells us the location of our arms and legs no matter where they are moved. Recently, a group of psychologists led by Paul Ekman asked actors to arrange their facial muscles in certain patterns (1983). The instructions were given in a way that the subjects of this experiment could not have known that they were being asked to mimic the display of innate affect—yet to these actors it felt as if they were experiencing affects, even to the point that other sites of action (like pulse and respiration) were affected. It seems that simulated affect expressions are themselves a real (even if somewhat weak) stimulus for affect.
If mere simulated affect can produce real affect, then we must look a bit more carefully at what is going on between caregiver and infant. Affect is extremely contagious. Something about it—one of its inherent qualities—makes affect infectious. That, of course, is one of the main reasons all societies teach their children to mute or dam up the expression of innate affect. It just won’t do to have people walking around infecting each other with laughter, anger, excitement, sobbing, or surprise.
But our current definition of normal parenting not only accepts but more or less requires that mothers remain available to the contagious quality of their babies’ affect. Not that this is an entirely onerous task—another quality of affect is that by and large it feels good to resonate with another person’s affect. Whether a mother, intensely focused on her child’s smile or frown, is unintentionally swept up into its contagious quality or purposefully imitates a facial expression, instantly she begins to experience the same affect as the child. Suddenly they are in communication, for by either the simple process of imitation or the acceptance of contagion, the caregiver has entered the internal system of the baby.
Basch, whose definition of affect, feeling, and emotion we discussed earlier, indicates that this is the beginning of empathy, the highly sophisticated system through which adults learn to share and perhaps understand each other’s feelings (1983a). What we do during empathy, Basch explains, is try out each other’s affect display, which triggers a weak experience of innate affect, following which we bring to this affect our own lifetime of remembered emotional experience in an attempt to appreciate the world of the other person. Although the affect system of the baby is far more primitive than the sophisticated language of specific words that will be available to the three-year-old, affect provides the infant with a powerful link to the outside world, one that remains part of our equipment throughout life.
THE AFFECT SYSTEM
We need to discuss a few more of Tomkins’s ideas about the nature of affect and the affect system itself before going on to present the alphabet of nine specific affect programs he describes. Let’s tackle the idea of an affect system first.
Although, as a biology major, I took courses in college that were not specifically designed as preparation for the study of medicine, they provided a pretty good link to it. As has been known for centuries, the best way to learn how the human body is put together is to take one apart. In an atmosphere of reverence, awe, fear, disgust, and curiosity, medical students dissect human corpses. This experience is made less gruesome for us by virtue of the fact that we all dissected frogs in high school biology, guinea pigs in college biology, and cats in college comparative anatomy courses. Each of these four life forms differs from the others in many ways, but they are alike in many others. Each experience of dissection—of disassembly—prepares one for the next.
The four animals we dissected had many organs in common. Each had a circulatory system which took blood through the lungs to cleanse it of carbon dioxide and replenish its store of oxygen, following which this blood was pumped all over the body. The student of biology begins each dissection with the sure and certain knowledge that the circulatory system exists, and that it conforms to charts long ago established for each life form. Similarly, dissection confirms what may be learned from the study of texts and drawings in other areas. We humans also have a central nervous system (a brain, housed in the head, linked to nerve trunks coursing all over the body) and a skeletal system (bones which are linked by joints and moved by muscles connected to tendons and ligaments).
I suspect that our species has “always” known about the skeletal system, at least from prehistoric times. After all, we have always eaten meat, which comes from bones (archaeological sites often contain piles of animal bones as evidence of this), so primitive man must have studied the skeletal system to some extent. And, through injury, early humans must have occasionally lost limbs and come to understand the relation between normal function and normal anatomy.
We did not so easily understand the circulatory system. In fact, the relation between the heart, the great vessels, the lungs, and the blood that travels along these conduits was not discovered until the pioneering work of William Harvey, physician to Kings James I and Charles I of England. The results of his meticulous studies of circulation were published in 1628. What most of us do not know is that his work was neither accepted nor fully substantiated for 200 years! Similarly, the idea of a central nervous system, and its importance as the seat of consciousness and the source of the personality, has come to our culture only within the past century or so.
Someone pointed out to me that science involves pattern-finding, while art involves pattern-making. I think the border between great science and great art is perhaps a bit more blurred than that simple dichotomy might indicate, but for our purposes it will do to suggest that the scientist is one who attempts to find linkages between seemingly unrelated bits of information in order to form useful patterns from which we can make accurate predictions. Recent science has demonstrated the existence of systems undreamed of in older times. Today we take for granted the existence of an immune system that guards the boundary of what is us and what is alien to our very cells. We accept the idea of biochemical systems working at the submicroscopic level within our cells and of complex systems of interconnected hormonal processes that allow the reproductive system to function. Every few years another system is discovered.
So it should surprise us neither that Silvan Tomkins should have discovered the affect system nor that it has taken a generation or so for the scientists who study human emotion to take it seriously. The volume of data Tomkins assembled is literally staggering, and the breadth of the conclusions he drew from those data is astonishing. Furthermore, as I have indicated elsewhere, he presented these ideas in books so densely packed with ideas, observations, and theories that they are extraordinarily difficult to read. Worse still, especially for those who might try to study his work, Tomkins, for a host of personal reasons, delayed for a generation the publication of the last section of what was planned as a three-volume work. And this was the section with both the index and the bibliography! So the developer of the system did not make it easy for us to understand.
Luckily, others took up small, selected sections of the work he started. Ekman, in California, has devoted his extremely productive career to the study of facial affect display, writing a number of books that have influenced many. With his colleague Wallace Friesen he has produced The Facial Affect Coding System, used by psychologists all over the world to provide an easily replicated method of assessment. Others, like Carroll Izard, have more or less taken Tomkins’s system, renamed it according to their own preference, and allowed it to be taken as their own. Scientists like Demos have devoted years to the observation of infants in an attempt to demonstrate how the innate affect displays of newborns come to evolve into the sophisticated emotions of adults. Psychoanalysts, like Basch, have brought Tomkins’s ideas into the mainstream of modern psychotherapy. In addition to my work on shame, I have attempted to sketch a few of the links between affect theory and the world of psychopharmacology, as well as some of the methods by which adults manage to become somewhat immune to the emotions of others. But the concept of affect as part of a system is rarely discussed.
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Table 3 |
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QUALITIES OF THE AFFECT SYSTEM |
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The innate affects are: |
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URGENT |
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ABSTRACT |
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ANALOGIC |
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INTERACTIVE WITH THEIR RECEPTORS |
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MATCHING IN PROFILE TO THEIR STIMULUS |
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CORRELATING OF STIMULUS AND RESPONSE |
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GENERAL |
THE QUALITIES OF AFFECT
Urgency
The full dimensions of the affect system will become more apparent as we discuss the individual affects, but perhaps a presentation of some characteristics of affect itself will assist our study. I mentioned above that the affects are always urgent, that wherever in human experience we see any sort of urgency, it has been provided by an affect. It must also be mentioned that the kind of urgency they provide is quite nonspecific.
Are you interested in coins, in cars, in carpets, in costumes; are you fascinated by corruption, by cats, by callousness? In each case something has triggered the affect program for interest: That which a moment ago excited neural firing at a rate capable of triggering the quite abstract affect called interest has now become urgently much more interesting. Are you afraid of snakes, of rapists, of thugs, of the Internal Revenue Service, of lady wrestlers, of computers, of hats? In each case something has triggered the affect program for fear. What we understand, what we experience as fear of some entity or fear during some event, is only the linkage we ourselves have formed between this particular entity or event and the quite abstract innate affect called fear. No matter what has frightened us, no matter what has triggered fear, the affect fear is identical in each situation. That which is too much is now urgently too much.
Abstractness
Note that the affect bears no intrinsic relation to any particular triggering source. The presence of the affect fear–terror can never by itself offer a clue to its source. If we are frightened, some other mechanism will have to tell us what has become not just too much but more too much. Tomkins describes this characteristic of the affect system by noting that the affects are completely abstract, completely free of inherent meaning or association to their triggering source. There is nothing about sobbing that tells us anything about the steady-state stimulus that has triggered it; sobbing itself has nothing to do with hunger or cold or loneliness. Only the fact that we grow up with an increasing experience of sobbing lets us form some ideas about its meaning.
It appears that animals lower in the evolutionary tree do have affects that are linked to specific sources. Mice, squirrels, and other ground-dwelling animals are inherently afraid of shapes flying above them. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of innate fears in the human.
Analogues
Now we come to the most difficult concept in the bunch. Each affect is analogic. It resembles what triggered it. An affect is in some way similar to what triggered it.
There are other psychobiological systems in which the triggered program resembles in some way the stimulus that acted as a switch for it. Take, for instance, the resemblance between sexual arousal and the orgasm. Sexual arousal, whether we administer it to ourselves or experience it in the company of another person, has a definite quality. Part of an optimal sexual experience is conferred by the affect Tomkins calls interest–excitement, but the specifically sexual quality is brought by the sexual drive system. And the orgasm, the specific form of release triggered when the requirements for it have been met, is itself a highly amplified form of arousal. In this special connotation, says Tomkins, orgasm is an analogue of sexual arousal.
Take the relation between pain and injury. In a way I find difficult to express, but which I think you can grasp intuitively, pain itself has some of the qualities of injury. Pain feels like ripping, or tearing, or breaking—but more so. We do not experience anything as thrilling as an orgasm when we break a leg. I doubt that a life form with such circuitry could survive very long or continue to evolve, for it might seek constantly to crash into walls, jump over cliffs, and fight desperately in order to break limbs and be rewarded by the equivalent of an orgasm. Pain is a useful mechanism in that it amplifies our awareness of an injury and focuses our attention on the location of that injury. Thus it appears that pain is an analogue of injury.
So the body is wired to respond to a number of situations with genetically programmed mechanisms that act as analogues of their triggering stimulus. Thus it is for affect. Each affect is an analogue of its triggering stimulus in that it more or less feels like the situation that incited it. Equally important, each affect feels different from the others. The felt quality of each is unique, recurrent, reproducible, and consistent. A rush of ideas triggers an affect that makes the mind rush more; the analogy is the feeling of “rush.” Affects that are responses to increases in the rate of neural firing will themselves feel like an increased activity. Affects that respond to intense, constant levels of neural firing will themselves feel like an intense, constant but highly amplified level of activity. We will discuss the nature of the individual affect programs later, but for now it is important to understand that in addition to their urgency and their neutrality or abstractness, affects are analogues of their stimuli.
Receptors
Recall what I said about the original flash of insight that allowed Tomkins to deduce the existence of the affect system. He had observed the crying of his newborn son and realized that this complex group of behaviors activated so many parts of the body that crying itself must provide a great deal of information to the organism. In a very special sense, then, each time an affect is triggered, it creates information. How this information is picked up, where it is received, and the nature of the sensory receptors for that information are matters of great interest.
The affect program for fear does something to the hairs that changes them from their quiescent state to an erect state; “relaxed” hair feels quite different from erect hair. As I mentioned earlier, a breath of air wafting over the erect hair of a frightened animal will call further attention to the fact that it is frightened. The hair follicles, just a moment ago the target of the affect program, now act as a sensory device transmitting to the brain the information that the organism is frightened. Hair becomes both the site of action of an affect program and a receptor site for information about the affect.
The affect system seems to have receptor sites all over the body. I suggested that some chemicals act as messenger molecules for the affect system, as chemical mediators of affect. Recently discovered compounds, like the body’s own morphinelike endorphins, are now known to influence receptors located throughout the body. It seems likely that the affect Tomkins calls enjoyment–joy can release endorphins, which then go into the circulation and cause some reaction at their receptor sites. This reaction itself feeds more information back to the brain and acts as a further trigger to the initiating affect.
Just as we keep on discovering new mediator substances, Tomkins suspects that there are more receptors to discover, especially receptors for the affect system. Some of these will turn out to be very tiny, like the sites on cell membranes where specific molecules like peptides will localize. (Much of the research being done today in the field of biological psychiatry involves the search for receptors and mediators, although their relevance to the affect system has not been suggested before.) Others will be found in the skin and subcutaneous structures of the face, where alterations in the microcirculation of blood seem to be such an important part of the affect mechanisms.
The face blanches in fear; the neck reddens in anger; the face, neck, and entire upper body can blush in shame; there is a recognizable flush of excitement. What if there were a series of receptors activated by the circulatory effects of these affect programs, each receptor capable of transmitting back to the brain further information about the affect program currently in progress? There is evidence that an analogous type of receptor exists in a region of the body where you might most expect it—the genital apparatus.
In 1950, Frank A. Beach and Gilbert Levinson published a study of the sexual mechanism in rats. Using a microscope, they found that the skin of the flaccid, unengorged penis folded into tiny creases which, in cross section, resembled a cog wheel. Within the creases were even smaller hairlike papillae surrounded at the base by touch corpuscules. Thus, the unit made up of “hair” and neurofibrils could function as a receptor for touch. When the penis was limp and flaccid, these sensitive receptors were completely encased—protected from contact. But when the skin of the rat penis was fully stretched by the engorgement normally accompanying mild, early sexual arousal, the creases were smoothed and these hair receptors rose to the surface, where even the lightest of touches might produce maximal stimulation.
Here was a situation in which a minor alteration in blood flow altered the effective sensitivity of a receptor mechanism. The limp penis is only slightly affected by stroking, while the erect penis is in a state of exquisite sensitivity. The change in blood flow readied a receptor that was otherwise quiescent. Might not we find, asked Tomkins, other such receptors—most likely in the face, but also all over the body—brought into similar states of readiness or availability by the circulatory changes known to accompany innate affect? When fatigued we can get a moment of relief by splashing the face with cold water; inappropriate or unwanted sexual arousal can be quenched by a cold shower. These truisms depend on poorly understood interactions between temperature-sensitive receptors and bodily systems quite remote from them.
Here, I believe, is a clue to the extraordinary contagious quality of affect—which, incidentally, is the characteristic that so fascinated me that it drew me into a lifetime of study. I don’t think there is any difference between the internal contagion that makes each affect trigger more of the same affect within us and contagion from the outside, from other people. Likely it is the receptors for internally derived affect that “pick up” the “music” of affect from other people. Alternatively (as my colleague Francis J. Broucek has suggested), the mechanisms for the appreciation of “broadcast” affect may have evolved as receptors separate and quite distinct from those sensitive to one’s own innate affect. I think it is unnecessary to postulate the existence of two types of receptors for the same information, but Broucek’s idea is as valid as mine until someone does the necessary research.
Profile
We have discussed four facets of affect—its inherent urgency, its abstract quality, its operation as an analogue of whatever triggered it, and how it interacts with its receptors both to stimulate more affect and to provide the information from which we come to know that an affect has been triggered. Yet each stimulus for affect has a particular shape in time, a profile. The affect Tomkins calls surprise–startle is triggered by a hand clap or a pistol shot. In either case, a very brief event is followed by a very brief affect. Distress, the crying affect, is triggered by a steady-state type of stimulus, and sobbing is a steady-state affect. Each affect matches the “temporal profile” of its triggering stimulus. This concept is similar to the idea that affect is an analogue of its trigger, but differs in that it carries implications in terms of the quality of time.
Correlation
Two more qualities remain to be discussed before we can get to the affects themselves. Tomkins points out that the affect programs stamp their effects on body systems other than the normal sites of action we have been discussing. If I am angry, my voice will be angry, my fist will move angrily, my walk and my posture will be stamped or imprinted by my anger, no matter what made me angry. When I am in the calm state of contentment, the affect Tomkins calls enjoyment–joy, my voice will be mellow, my hand move gracefully, my walk and my posture relaxed, and ideas will float in and out of my mind easily, no matter what made me happy. Affect imprints itself on all bodily function in such a way as to make the stimulus for that affect into something that correlates the stimulus with its eventual response. Whatever triggered the affect now becomes linked in memory with whatever followed it. In other words, we have a correlation of stimulus and response that is forged by the interposition of an affect program.
Generality
The last feature of the affect system is one that may by now seem obvious to most readers, but for historical reasons it is important to mention it here. The system is inherently general. It has no built-in links to any other system of the body or mind. Affect can amplify cognitive activity like the storage and retrieval of memory; it can alter body mobility, as when we fight angrily or romp gaily; it can be linked with sexuality, or with pain, or with hunger, or with thirst. Like a wonderful kind of building block, affect can be assembled with any drive, with any voluntary action, with any function of the mind, even with other affects. It is entirely and perfectly general. Using the language of this era, we might say that affect is modular, capable of infinite assembly. There is no inherent limitation on the ways affect can be used by the human.
Limitations appear soon enough in development—much of the process of socialization involves affect control, and much of the process of fitting into a culture involves learned displays of affect and styles of affective expression. But Freud was wrong when he thought that all excitement derived from sexual excitement and that all curiosity was “desexualized libido”
Each of the nine affect programs contains instructions for a wide range of activity. Mild interest, which calls into play only a few muscles, differs greatly from passionate excitement—even though both are expressions of the same innate mechanism. No one has attempted to figure out the specific triggers for what Tomkins calls the range of affective expression, even though it is obvious that such a range exists.
WORKING WITH THE AFFECT SYSTEM
Look, for a moment, at the various ways we can study individual people—alone or in an interaction: Think what happens when we try to watch someone while we are with that person. Next, consider how much easier it is to stand aside and watch his or her interaction with somebody else. Now imagine that you are watching such an interchange using binoculars and hidden microphones, or through a one-way mirror. Next, think what might be different when you saw the same scene on the screen of a color television set. What if the videotape had been made in black and white? What if you merely heard the interaction on audiotape? Suppose someone translated the spoken word to typescript which was then read aloud by a computer-driven voice simulator? And what if you were given the typescript and could read it to yourself, silently? How about a summary, or an abstract of the conversation in question? And, finally, what if you were given a description of the people involved, one written by somebody else?
Each of these ways of studying the human involves a different stance in relation to affect. Personal involvement brings the greatest immersion in affect—our own, and that of others. Each of the other modes I have outlined filters out one or another moiety of innate affect. Our empathic involvement (affective resonance) is diminished by standing aside and reduced further by physical distance or the relative “safety” of the mirror room. Color television removes the sense of immediacy brought by smell and reduces the quality, the fidelity of affect-related information transmitted. When color is removed we filter out most of the facial data produced by circulatory change. When we filter out all visual stimuli our awareness of affect is limited to cues from tone of voice and the words themselves. And the remaining filters remove more and more of the affect that was so much a part of the original scene. We really do own and operate a lot of systems that help us avoid affect.
Now that I have given you some idea of the general theory of affect, let’s go back to the innate affects themselves and discuss all of them in terms of the structure I introduced in the previous chapter. I will describe each affect and the related feelings, emotions, moods, and disorders known to be associated with it. Difficult as it may seem, we will try to keep in mind all the features of the affect system discussed above. Surprisingly enough, in order to understand the astonishingly broad and far-reaching impact of shame, the importance of pride as a force in human life, and the emotional system I have called the shame/pride axis, all of this information is necessary.
Think of it as a figure-ground problem. Any attempt to understand shame that ignores the entire affect system must provide a limited and flawed explanation.
We’ve just gone over the structure of the affect system. Now it is time to present the actors themselves, the cast of nine that make up the repertory theater of the emotional world.