AFFECT THEORY (ver en espanol)

SUMMARY by Brian F. Lynch,M.D.

This is my personal understanding of this theory, in brief, to date. I emphasize the "in brief". I have found it to be useful and effective in creating Interest.

Comments positive and constructive are welcomed as is discussion. I may be contacted at DrBPLynch@aol.com

Silvin S. Tomkins posited ,from work with children, that our emotional lives can be traced back to 9 organ like structures in our brain. He called these structures "affects." It is nevertheless useful for many, at the outset, to simply use the common terms of "feelings" or "emotions." So feel free for now to substitute "feeling" or "emotion" for "affect" and shortly you will see how all three come to be different but related. So these "affects" or "feelings" or "emotions" are the following(please click on each):

Joy

Interest

--------------

Surprise

---------------

Fear

Disgust

Dissmell

Anger

Distress

Shame

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These centers in our brain , then, are biological. That is they are not "thoughts." "Feelings," according to this theory, start in the body and specifically in what I want you to think of, for now, as 9 discreet areas of the brain.

ALL experience is FILTERED through these 9 AFFECTS, or physical areas of the brain. There are no other options. If we are aware of something we are aware of it in relation to one of these areas. A feeling is what we only become conscious of AFTER AN AFFECT(that biological part of our brain) HAS BEEN TRIGGERED.

No one has more and no one has less options(For those literate in computers you may think of the AFFECTS as "FIRMWARE" or "DOS" or now "Windows" or THE OPERATING SYSTEM of the body. It is what connects the body to the "software" of the brain).

The affects can be expanded in terms of a range as such:

STIMULUS - RESPONSE PATTERNS

Stimulus-------> Response --------->

At this point we are at the mercy of the world. Then:

-----------> AWARENESS.

Only when we become aware of the affect can we take action.

Stimulus --------->

Awareness of affect (feeling)------------- ACTION

This action is something we learn. If we feel ‘good’ we do this, if we feel "bad" we do that. We really want to maximize "interest" and "joy," however, we often go on detours. We have to experience negative feelings such as ANGER, FEAR, DISTRESS, DISGUST, DISSMELL AND SHAME. We LEARN how to respond to these feelings in "bad" or "good" ways. At our best we try and pump up "interest" and "joy" and minimize the others.
Affect can be amplified to achieve intense positive affect(great joy or interest)or intense negative affect.

We are always experiencing some affect:

Being affected by the environment,

Responding physically to it,

Processing the feeling and ,

Acting on the feeling.

There is first a purely biological response of affect followed by what we cognitively do in terms of acting on that affect.(thinking is an action).

Our wish is to "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative"

Maximize positive affect

Negative affect is, however, very powerful.

We have no choice but to experience negative affect so despite the song lyrics we must experience negative affect, we really cannot eliminate it.

At this point my purpose is not to "define" the "self" but to, in the most simple way, to get one to think of "themselves" as different from any feeling so: What we are feeling is not "me." "Me" or "I" becomes aware of the affect. The self can be thought of as "me" minus affect, but I can only experience the world through affect. In any Martial art or meditation what we are after is a state of readiness to respond. It seems to me that these Eastern systems intuitively understood the biology of emotion. We can rarely be at zero in all emotions but we can become hyper-aware of our emotions.

We do not all experience emotion in the same way. For example, anger. If we put all the 9 affects on a scale of 0-10 then each person will have their personal understanding of this. Only YOU know what a "10" is for YOU. Only you know what a "5" is for YOU.

Full length videos at home page. This video is a short review of some of the material you just read.

Stimulus ------ >>>Response

Scripts.

If nine people see a rat , we might think, from a cultural point of view, that the "affect" we would feel would be "fear" but one look at the list of affects makes it apparent that all nine people might have nine different reactions. Yes , including joy! I have had one person tell me they would be happy to see a rat.

We build a "library" of scripts (responses) and of memories that are attached to specific feelings that are needed so that we may function moment to moment in space and time. ONLY animals have a developed consciousness. As we move around we need a resource library (automatic responses) in order to deal with continually new stimuli. Libraries or responses or "scripts" allow us to categorizes all stimuli. As we will see sometimes this can be good and sometimes not so good. If our responses where determined by "bad" experiences the response may be generalized in unhealthy ways and new non-toxic(of course non toxic in some "objective" sense) stimuli may be interpreted as toxic and a negative response put into play.

Memory is our history and "scripts" are our instruction manual. They tell us what to do, our way to walk around and respond instantaneously to the environment. So "scripts" too are then "memory." Stimuli: WALL, WALL, WALL : Response: don't walk into wall. This is very basic but say I see a the rat in my office, how will I respond? Off hand we would probably say with "startle" or "fear." But as noted if we had the right 9 people in the room we could have all nine emotional responses. Someone might be joyful to see a rat as once they where drowning in a cave and a rat showed them the way out. A scientist might be interested.... and on and on. Since it is my office I might go through several emotions: startle, disgust and then shame. These responses are just as automatic, although we do not like to think it, as our turning away from a wall.

Now suppose my father beat me every time I said "can I....?" what then would be my memory? What would be your response or script at a later time??? What would it be if each time he said sure "sweetie" lets go do it together!

One of the nine affects is SHAME. This very powerful and emotionally ladened word may now be thought of as something very BIOLOGICAL. A response to stimuli(whether internal or external). There can be useful or not so useful responses to shame. Shame is triggered when we are going about our own business, interested in something, and something interrupts that interests or when something interupts us when we are experiencing joy. These responses are nicely summarized in the COMPASS OF SHAME:

A study was done on babies in which a light was put to one side, it was colorful and went on and off. The babies where taught to turn their heads three times for the lights to go on. Then the light did not go on and the babies had a biological response of shame----- head down and to the side, eyes averted (the expected response would be that the babies head would just go back to "nuetral" but here the head went beyond neutral turning away form the lights.) I experienced this acutely the other day when talking to someone that means a great deal to me and I had to tell him I could not tell him something due to confidentiality. My head very forcibly turned down and away and I had to consciously force myself to look at him again. It is not bad or good it just is. It resolves in one of two ways:

1) We stay with the pain AND figure out what is causing it. That is we have learned to become interested in finding out what is bothering us.

2) Or we respond with not so useful behaviors.

Shame HURTS, we do not want to suffer it so we will do most anything to avoid it. Usually we do not recognize it. Shame has never quite been described as such a lynch-pin. If you accept it as central to affective life it explains in great detail of human behavior whether it be positive or negative.

SHAME is only elicited when there is an impediment to sustained interest or joy.

1) Involved in a good conversation and the phone rings. This could also simply be a direct stimulation of the affect surprise, but it could also cause a shame response. Surprse wipes out interest in what came before while shame is exprerienced when the interest or joy is being maintained. I am still interested in my conversation so do I: Pick up the phone and yell? Not answer it? Berate myself for trying to have this conversation when I am in a position to answer a phone? Or do I take a shot of whiskey? Or do I solve the problem! Do I get interested temporarily in the problem and answer the phone? Take care of it so I can get back to where I was?

2) A toddler with his mother: He sees you, you say "hi" he goes behind his mothers leg and peeks at you: sustained interest while receiving a negative stimuli: your strangeness

3) The guy you are doing business with is not responding.

4) Your partner behaves continually in ways you do not understand: You are giving them "bad" vibes or they are carrying bad scripts that don't fit yours.

SHAME is only elicited when there is an impediment to sustained interest or joy.

Shame and guilt are often not well defined. Guilt here is after the fact. Shame is before the fact, the progenitor of a great deal of our action. It can be easily seen that what we call guilt is a type of SHAME. It is a script, a higher order shame if you will, that is processed in terms of "good" or "bad" but still starts in a physiological shame response. It is suggested that guilt is a learned code that is "shame" conjoined with "fear."

Yes we can act badly due to shame but that only begets more shame. SHAME is neither bad nor good. It is biological. That is why we took so much time to define it as such. I generally prefer to use the word "crisis" or "pain" or "hurt" instead of shame, at least to begin with, in order to get past the moral sense of shame. As used here it is neither "good" nor "bad." It is not simply a separate emotion it can be thought of as background, much of the time, to the other emotions . That is we usually get anger, feel fear, distress and other negative affect only after we have been interrupted or "shamed."

SHAME is triggered by many things: due to any negative script or stimuli that impedes, gets in the way, of our ongoing interest. When your partner gets mad it is EXACTLY THE same mechanism as your getting mad but the intensity may vary. The trigger is something that stimulates an affective center in the brain and then an automatic response is put in play, a script and makes us feel BAD(SHAME). This produces a typical response(for us).

Crisis is then inevitable. Looking at the diagram we see then that there are basically two choices in life. We can do something positive, which is looking to what is getting in our way or we can do something negative and if we do we will just feel worse. But the problem is that we really do not chose anything. We are always reacting based on learned responses. Stimuli come in to the brain hit the brain. They are processed and bounce back. The processing is instantaneous and the brain has to interpret what to do. Staying with the initial "hit" is one option but we often relate the "hit" or "shame" to a "script" that we have LEARNED to relate to the stimuli, and that is always influenced by our personal history that history leads to an automatic ACTION, that is we DO something in the world we: Withdraw, Attack Other, Attack ourselves or we Avoid. We FEEL, DO AND THEN THINK. What we want to do at painful times is FEEL, THEN THINK AND THEN DO. But this later sequence does not just come automatically with growing up.

This is not to say that these things are all bad or unhealthy. Sometimes we need to withdraw but it is all a matter of degree. If we are raged at and go out and get drunk then we wake up and attack ourselves... "boy that was stupid" and we suffer guilt. But we left in the first place due to SHAME. Guilt is what? A new shame. Society has given a structure that will inform me via stimuli that what I have done is "wrong." Guilt is a higher order shame. It is still shame and so we have to respond to it. Some people are just very severe in their reactions and some seem to have a much more GLOBAL shame lesion. They are SHAME sensitive. They have many negative scripts that make them feel very very bad.They come to feel that they = shame. Until WE and THEY can separate ourselves from the emotion we will go a very little distance.

TAKE A BREAK WITH THESE AFFECTS

Full length videos at home page. This video is a short review of some of the material you just read.

When we say people do not have a sense of self. No wonder! imagine yourself continually on the edge of the Compass of Shame running from one pole to another in intense ways, who has time for a self? The self is lost in the eye of the hurricane and can and should be found. The shame has to be calmed. It is biological , it is often calmed by our friend Prozac and the like. It is biological. Therapy is needed to sort things out. A knowledge of this on our part can free us from our unhealthy reactions to OUR OWN FEELINGS AS WELL AS OUR REACTIONS TO OTHERS.

The brain cannot distinguish where the stimuli is coming from in terms of affect, whether it is internal or external. We are all biological. We all respond to stimuli. A note of caution: one must know another quite well before making a judgment whether that person is using his response to shame in a healthy or unhealthy way. If one is trapped in the compass in a negative way then form the outside one might say how together that person is,"look she works out one hour a day, has a great job that she works at 12 hours, and says she loves it." But on a closer look the work and the work out can be seen as simply avoidant behavior as she has not had sex in a years and has an explosive temper in private. What is shaming her??? That is a very difficult question, or it can be, often times the person can tell you what happened in their life, they simply have not connected it to their present unhealthy activity.

Ok, does this theory back us into a corner with no way out? Are we simply left with our "automatic" reponses to the "stimulus-affect" link?  Well yes and no.  

There is room here to learn NEW ways of responding. I have dwelt on the "negative" to "teach" or emphasize the idea that if we or someone else is having trouble it is for good reason and there is little "responsibility" has to do with it. Reason and action are pretty much a slaves to affect-emotion. 

The solution over a long period is for us to learn to raise our children in more helpful caring ways. Ways that do not block their interest. Ways that do not produce shame and embarrassment. 

However we can change as adults too. We can help other adults change. Why? Because we have moments of calm, moments when we can reflect and learn. We think these changes then are exactly like learning to change a bad backhand. That is way too simple on the one hand but on the other hand it is not.

We change and others change by  helping others and ourselves  process the bad times. Every day we are going to have our interests interrupted. Everyday we have to solve problems. This is really all this is about. It is about solving problems.

We want to teach people to recognize the moment their interest is interrupted then:

 

• Define the problem.
• Evaluate the problem.
• Moderate, do something about the problem.
• Control the problem (DEMC if you will)

SUMMARY DIAGRAM.

So we can learn something new or get back to our former interest that was interrupted.

I have tried to explore many aspects of these ideas in my other web pages and my book "What?! Another  Book On Emotion!?"

Finally another way I found to summarize the theory is to put it in the form of "Twelve Steps."

Thank you.

Brian Lynch, M.D.

BOOK AND CD'S

ANOTHER PRESENTATION

Recommended reading: SHAME AND PRIDE: Affect, Sex, And the Birth of the Self, Donald L. Nathanson.

Any suggestions as to revision of or correction of my interpretation is greatly appreciated as is any feedback concerning these pages. Thank you.

Dr.BrianLynch

A discussion of these ideas can be found at Affect and Script Theory .

Please send a comment, positive or negative if constructive, to DrBPLynch@aol.com
Comments are sought.

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