Affect theory

Affect theory organizes affects (i.e., emotions, or subjectively experienced feelings) into discrete categories and connects each one with its typical response. For example, the affect joy is observed through the display of smiling. These affects can be identified through immediate facial reactions that people have to a stimulus, typically well before they could process any real response to the stimulus.

Affect theory is attributed to psychologist Silvan Tomkins and is introduced in the first two volumes of his book Affect Imagery Consciousness. The word affect, as used in Tomkins theory, specifically refers to the "biological portion of emotion"; that is, it refers to "hard-wired, preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms that exist in each of us", which, when triggered, precipitate a "known pattern of biological events". However, it is also acknowledged that, in adults, the affective experience is a result of both the innate mechanism and a "complex matrix of nested and interacting ideo-affective formations."

These are the nine affects, listed with a low/high intensity label for each affect and accompanied by its biological expression:

Positive:

Neutral:

Negative:

The nine affects can be used as a blueprint for optimal mental health. According to Tomkins, optimal mental health requires the maximization of positive affect and the minimization of negative affect. Affect should also be properly expressed so to make the identification of affect possible.

Affect theory can also be used as a blueprint for intimate relationships. Kelly describes relationships as agreements to mutually work toward maximizing positive affect and minimizing negative affect. Like the "optimal mental health" blueprint, this blueprint requires members of the relationship to express affect to one another in order to identify progress.

These blueprints can also describe natural and implicit goals. For example, Donald Nathanson uses the "affect" to create a narrative for one of his patients:

I suspect that the reason he refuses to watch movies is the sturdy fear of enmeshment in the affect depicted on the screen; the affect mutualization for which most of us frequent the movie theater is only another source of discomfort for him. ... His refusal to risk the range of positive and negative affect associated with sexuality robs any possible relationship of one of its best opportunities to work on the first two rules of either the Kelly or the Tomkins blueprint. Thus, his problems with intimacy may be understood in one aspect as an overly substantial empathic wall, and in another aspect as a purely internal problem with the expression and management of his own affect.

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