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SURPRISE–STARTLE: THE NEUTRAL AFFECT

Any loud noise can startle a baby, and in the moment of surprise that child will always blink and raise its eyebrows. The general characteristic of a stimulus capable of triggering surprise–startle is what the mathematician calls a “square wave,” something that rises and falls very suddenly. The affect thus triggered lasts only a few hundredths of a second, again quite analogous to its triggering stimulus and conforming to Tomkins’s rule that an affect not only amplifies its triggering stimulus but is an analogue of it. Startle and surprise are brief because they amplify a fleeting experience. The affect is so brief that it cannot be said to have either a pleasant or an unpleasant quality, for which reason I have called it a neutral affect, even though Tomkins originally considered it a positive affect.

I might point out that the guffaw—the sudden burst of laughter accompanying a sudden and unexpected decrease in stimulus density—resembles surprise–startle in some respects. The guffaw is a short-lived affective reaction, not unlike a pleasant form of startle. My own guess is that surprise–startle appeared earlier in the evolution of the affects; after the organism was able to respond to the combination of sudden rise and sudden fall in stimulus density, it developed the ability to respond to sudden fall alone. The ability to respond to more gentle rates of decrease would be an even later acquisition. It seems reasonable to suggest that the mild, polite laughter we consider more urbane than raucous hilarity is the result of systems of modulation not possible for the first life forms that learned how to laugh. (The flow of evolution seems to foster an increasing range of expression.) This would correspond with Darwin’s observation that monkeys are better at laughing than at smiling and expand Tomkins’s surmise that the capacity to smile evolved later than the ability to laugh.

Fig. 5.1. Eyebrows up, eyes wide open, mouth open. Surprise–startle stops everything and allows us to reset, to prepare for new sources of information.

The real function of the innate affect surprise–startle is to clear the mental apparatus so that the organism can remove attention from whatever else might have been occupying it and focus on whatever startled it. Usually we forget to think about the moment of surprise and remember only what caused it (the thunderclap or the scream or the explosion), so that the affect is usually confused with its trigger. We said earlier that any bodily function, whether memory, perception, cognition, the need created by a drive, or anything else, can be assembled with an affect to make that function more urgent and give it motivation. Similarly, we believe that the affect surprise–startle clears or empties out whatever was previously assembled, leaving the central assembly system available to take on new data—which of course will then trigger whatever affect is appropriate to it. Surprise–startle is the affect of instant readiness.

Surprise–startle is the affect involved when we stop someone’s world, when we create a situation that requires an immediate fresh start. It is all the forms of information that have “shock value,” moments in which we are prodded or precipitated into sudden awareness.

In the Japanese language, the word hai is usually translated as our word yes, but if you listen to its use in ordinary Japanese conversation you will appreciate a level of meaning quite unrelated to our simple term of affirmation. It is pronounced not as a long syllable, like our friendly greeting “Hi,” but barked ”Hai!” as a sudden burst of sound. It indicates not only the speaker’s affirmation but his instant availability to the command of the person to whom it is addressed. The initial sound of a ceremonial gong produces a similar effect, drawing our attention to the long tone that follows. Americans new to Italy are often confused when Italians answer the telephone by barking “Pronto!” “It has the effect,” said one friend, “of clearing my mind of carefully phrased questions.”

You might think that an affect which operates so rapidly offers little opportunity for the range of expression Tomkins implies by calling it surprise–startle. Something that operates so swiftly must be studied by techniques of even greater temporal sensitivity. During one era of his research, Tomkins observed this affect using a motion picture camera capable of taking 5,000 photographs each second!* It turns out that as the sudden, brief stimulus is increased in intensity, more and more minute facial muscle movements may be identified. But such a direct correlation between stimulus and response cannot go on indefinitely, especially when the reaction itself is an analogue of brevity. When the pistol shot was repeated more frequently, and/or the intervals between stimuli reduced, fewer and fewer structures were triggered during the affective expression. So even in this most brief of affects, the concept of range may be understood clearly as long as it is studied properly.

It is easy to see that one can recognize the affect and know that one feels surprised, and, further, that we can form an emotion by recalling previous experiences of surprise. An adult who remembers with great displeasure a parent who was forever saying “Boo!” or disturbing his or her peace of mind with unexpected bursts of anger is unlikely to treat any surprise with pleasure or look forward to surprise parties. If our life expectation of surprise is of specific affect-loaded situations to follow, then we have an emotional attitude toward surprise that colors our experience of all surprise.

Surprise–startle does create a mood when we have experienced enough unpleasant surprises that our memory of them begins to trigger further unpleasant surprises beyond our capacity to reset or calm ourselves. Such, I believe, is the case in the post-traumatic stress disorder (years ago called shell shock), in which war veterans are incapacitated for years by their experiences of battle. The conditions for the establishment of this illness are relatively simple to understand: A person is exposed to repeated sequences of a stimulus capable of producing surprise–startle, such as bursts of gunfire, the noise of bombs, or attacks by snipers; each time (or most of the time), this is followed by a group of events triggering terror and helplessness. Recurrent episodes of the sequence startle–terror–helplessness produce a family of memories that recur in toto whenever the affected individual is startled, even when this new experience of surprise occurs in a benign situation. It is now more than a generation since the end of the Viet Nam War, and the psychotherapy profession is still dealing with the enormous number of former servicemen seriously afflicted by it. The condition can be treated by a number of methods, all of which change the patient’s attitude toward, or experience of, startle. I am, of course, aware that the label of post-traumatic stress disorder is now applied to symptom complexes unrelated to startle; my comments apply only to this older use of the term.

Although I have, on rare occasion, seen hospitalized schizophrenic patients who seem regularly to be startled by hallucinated voices or other inner events, I do not know of any proven biological disorder characterized by an excessive amount of surprise–startle. Severely depressed patients and some epileptics do seem to have a decreased ability to be startled, and this would fit in my flow chart as a biological disorder of this affect.

*”It went off like a cannon,” he told me ruefully. “You had to isolate the subject from the camera completely or else it could be a source of affect. Sometimes the camera itself would sort of explode. Very dangerous. But lots of good pictures.”