Modern Affect Theory

The emotional safety model is founded in modern affect theory. This theory of emotion was developed by Silvan S. Tomkins and is described in a series of four volumes published by Tomkins between 1962 and 1992. Affect theory is still unfamiliar to many mental health professionals because most graduate programs focus on traditional psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, and/or systems theories to explain psychological functioning.

Affect theory contends that human infants are born with a finite set of innate affects. These affects provide the biological component of emotion. The affects are experienced throughout the body but they are most visible on the face. The actual experience of an affect state is quite brief, but affect states can be maintained by thoughts and memories which continue to stimulate the affect. This leads to the difference between affects and emotions. Emotions are composed of an assemblage of affect and cognition. Children are born with the ability to experience affects, but their emotions only develop over time as they develop memories associated with specific affect states. The result is that everyone has the same affects but each person’s emotions are unique. This leads to considerable potential for misunderstanding in intimate relationships.

Tomkins’ revolutionary insight was that affects provide the vast majority of our motivation. The positive affects motivate us to seek or continue the events that activate them, and the negative affects motivate us to diminish or escape the events that activate them. It is not our cognitive understanding that motivates us to leap out of the way of the oncoming vehicle—it is our fear affect.

Affect theory views the drives as simple biological needs. Thus, there is a drive to acquire sufficient water, a drive to reproduce, a drive to maintain a continuous supply of oxygen, etc. The drives provide relatively weak motivation—a drive must recruit an affect to bring a sense of urgency to the need. So it is not simply the drive to have air that helps us find the strength to fight our way to the surface if we are stuck underwater—it is the affect or affects that have been recruited by the drive.

Tomkins also noted that there are some affects that function only to moderate other affects. One of these is shame affect; it functions to moderate the positive affects. If a person is experiencing the pull of a positive affect toward some goal, and then encounters an impediment to achieving that goal, shame affect is activated. Shame affect is not the same as the emotion we know as shame, but it is an essential part of that emotion.

Links

The Silvan S. Tomkins Institute

Tomkins developed affect theory in a very thoughtful and thorough fashion—far beyond the brief comments offered here. If you are interested in learning more about this theory, you can begin by following the link to the Tomkins Institute.

Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self (Norton, 1992)

This book was written by Donald L. Nathanson, who is the current director of the Tomkins Institute. Nathanson’s insights into the emotion of shame provide a whole new way to understand human nature. This book opened my eyes to the power of shame and gave me the impetus to develop the emotional safety model. If you are interested in learning more about the most ignored—and probably the most important—emotion that people bring to therapy, this is the book to read.

The book can be obtained online through: