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Affect Theory:
The Emotional Roller Coaster
Colleen Dungey
Clemson University
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Affect Theory
Tomkins (1962, 1963) development of affect is used to bring understanding to how behaviors are
manipulated by emotions, the primary motive of man and how it can be involuntary responses to
stimuli.
Tomkins (1968) answers the questions of what are the primary motives of man and where
they originate. Affect conceptualizes that the body responds to sensory feedback which is either
inherently acceptable or the unacceptable (Tomkins, 1968, p 326). The development of
affect aided in the understanding of how the muscles in the facial region respond to the feedback
and express emotions more rapidly than other movements are capable of doing. Tomkins (1963)
explains the complexity involved in affect, the facial responses and the awareness of the face
displaying them. Stored in the memory, images of similar responses will generate from previous
experiences and individuals will become aware of the facial responses that coordinate
accordingly.
The significance behind the development is clearly expressed in three categories of
affect. And because affect is primarily a facial response the categories represent positive, neutral
and negative affects of emotion. The three primary categories of affect become the foundation
for understanding the key functions of the ideology; to focus on the positive affects over the
negative affects to improve mental health upon controlling and listening to the messages being
sent as innate activators.
Key Terms
Affect is positioned to help understand human motivation in psychological studies
focusing on the biological event of expressing emotions. The key terms associated with affect are
categorized into three primary types of innate affect, positive, neutral and negative. Positive
affects include interest-excitement and enjoyment-joy. Neutral affect includes only surprise-
startle, and negative affect includes distress-anguish, anger-rage, fear-terror, and shamehumiliation.
Since the development of affect is found within psychology, Tomkins (1962, 1963)
describes each of the affective categories in a series called, Affect Imagery Consciousness. Two
volumes were written, each focusing on the positive and negative affects. This series of texts
explains in great detail about affect and offers an understanding of how affect is motivated,
constructs meaning and how often emotions are expressed involuntarily by individuals.
The significant developments of affect within the field of psychology helped to construct
the foundation of the preceding scholarship written on affect. The conceptualization of affect has
opened many doors into various fields and allowed for momentous amendment into what is
known as the affective turn. Scholars approach to the affective turn have not only challenged
but also amended affect towards the understanding of emotion outside of the psychological
approach and depicted the significance as a body experience.
Preceding Scholarship
After the development, many early scholars preceded Tomkins (1962, 1963, 1968) affect
through cultural and critical approaches. Raymond Williams (1977) and Lawrence Grossberg
(1986) set aside the biological approach and responded to affect as basics of emotions. The
transformation of affects development will be the main focus for this next section and how
scholars responded to the concepts fundamental foundation of emotions and applied it to the
lived experiences in critical and cultural studies.
Transforming Affect
Raymond Williams (1977) began the transformation of affect from biological evidence to
what he coined structure of feeling. The structure of feeling explains that meanings and
values are actively lived through experience, the characteristic elements of impulse, restraint,
and tones; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against
thought, but thought as felt and feeling as through embraces the social experience (Williams,
1977, p. 132). Aside from the biological understanding Williams (1977) identified that the root
of emotion are specific feelings, specific rhythms that need to be recognized and categorized to
define the social experience of affect (p. 133). Williams (1977) structure of feeling builds a
foundation of how individuals live their relationships and experiences. As understood by
Tomkins (1962, 1963, 1968) affect is a feeling that is stored from individuals experience.
Williams (1977) responded to Tomkins concept of affect by exemplifying the importance of how
experience structures feelings.
Larry Grossberg is identified as another influential scholar who became known as a
principle figure of how passion, emotion and affect intertwine into cultural studies (Gregg &
Seigworth, 2010). Grossberg (1986) constructs his understanding of affect with how music
influences experiences. He describes how music is determining, that its politics are inscribed
within it and how the power of music changes every day life (Grossberg, 1986, p. 69).
Grossberg (1986) encountered Williams (1977) structure of feeling and developed his
understanding of experience into how music intersects youths impact of contemporary culture.
Music empowers its listeners and enables them to experience and regulate the structures and
rhythms of daily life (p. 53).
Affect, as developed by Tomkins (1962) has not been critiqued by Williams (1977) and
Grossberg (1986) but challenged. The position of affect within the psychological realm is the
understanding of how emotions are motivated. Today, affect, as explored by Williams (1977)
and Grossberg (1986) challenged and developed the concept through cultural application. Since
constructed alterations of affect. The body is an integral part to understanding emotions and is
described how bodies are sensory receptors that allow experience to be internalized and meaning
is constructed.
Clough (2008) derives her work with Massumis (1995) basis of how affect is identified
as an autonomic bodily response. She clarifies his interpretation of how affect is autonomous in
the formations of individuals conscious responses. Clough (2008) defines the turn of affect as a
dynamism immanent to bodily matter and matter generally matters capacity for selforganization in being in-formational (p. 1). Massumi (1995) and Clough (2008) stipulate the
idea that affect exists in the temporality of emergence, where individuals recall bodily responses
from their conscious recognition.
Ahmed (2004) departs from the conscious moment of recognition and distinctly differs
affect with the direct feeling. Ahmed (2004) explores how emotions work to shape the
surfaces of individuals and collective bodies (p. 1) and determines that affect corresponds with
preexisting objects. Ahmed challenges the idea of the existence of different emotions and
clarifies that bodies change impressions of affect by evaluating the bonds with the objects they
encounter. Ahmed (2004) explains how our emotions are connected with objects that make us
express different emotions, as identified by Tomkins (1962).
Research in Practice
Introduced in the early 60s with a psychological foundation researchers study on affect
has since then found various ways to help construct that affect is socially constructed emotions.
The following research studies are pertinent to the communication studies field in critical,
culture, gender, feminism and media studies. As affect reaches into more fields of studies
relevant to todays communication, researchers amend Tomkins (1962) original development to
how it has progressed within the field of communication. These research applications will be
identified and integrated to indicate if the study appropriately and sufficiently examined affect
within critical media communication journals.
Political Affect
Deriving his understanding of cinematic rhetoric Ott (2010) integrates a multi-modal
approach to the interplay of discourse, figure and ground political affect in cinema.
Ott (2010) analyzes the film V for Vendetta in an impressive representation of how senses appeal
to viewers. In this multi-modal rhetorical analysis he identified the importance of how critics
examined not just the symbolic and sensory aspects of messages, but also the very technologies
of communication that underlie them (Ott, 2010, p. 41). The term affect is described to involve
a corporeal continuum, which ranges, on one end, from the experiencing body, on the other end,
our body of experience (p. 49).
In the film Ott (2010) identified three affects that represent the narrative perspective:
repression and fear, resistance and excitation, and rebellion and release, in which moves the
audience to react and take action in favor or rejection of a political struggle. There is a strong
representation of political affect in this piece where Ott (2010) is able to identify with Tomkins
(1968) origins of emotional experience and Ahmeds (2004) politics of emotion and how it
characterizes in critical media studies.
Gendered Affects
The construction of pornography as found in Kolehmainen (2010) article exemplified a
production of affects and emotions moving subjects toward and away from negative and
positive affects. Kolehmainen (2010) analyzes young adult womens magazines and directs the
attention of how women and men react both negatively and positively with the subject matter of
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pornography. In the 1970s porn has been a subject of feminist debates and was often
emphasized as a means of degrading women and shifting the representation of social reality.
Kolehmainen (2010) piece is inspired by Ahmeds definition of how emotions do
thingsthey involve affective forms of reorientation by moving the subjects both toward and
away (p. 181) from concepts. This study connects the production of emotions and the process
of gendering and sexualizing subjects. Kolehmainen (2010) analyzed 17 agony columns in
magazines through their own archives from a time period from 2000-2007. Through the analysis
of text the construction of porn lays in the eyes of the gender and Kolehmainens (2010) findings
of how women use them as a source of sexual information. Kolehmainen (2010) interpretation of
his analysis agrees that affect is culturally constructed. Affect developed as a concept that is
cultured from natural response and through this study it is articulated with the negative and
positive affects associated with consumption of an experience, or its relevancy with porn.
Kolehmainen (2010) applied Ahmeds (2004) notion of production of emotions to
constitute gender and sexuality in this construction of affect in young womens magazines. The
textual analysis utilized in this Feminist Media Studies journal emphasized the relevancy of
affect within media studies, as does Ott (2010) piece on V for Vendetta. Affect is a perspective
that is necessary for communication, cultural, critical, gender, and feminist scholars due to its
highly subjective view it personifies in practice.
Methodology
Although the ideology of affect originally grounds itself in quantitative research,
affective turn transformed the methodological approach to a qualitative examination. As
represented in the articles, scholars in communication studies take a social constructionist
position, because affect is a social reality that is constructed through communicative experience
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With all that said and done the exploration of affect was a tedious yet gratifying task. The
progression of affect into interdisciplinary fields opens a whole door of issues and misconstrues
the meaning of affect. As represented through this research there are many approaches to affect
and together scholars need to construct a primary meaning within qualitative methodologies.
However, the amount of knowledge that was gained from this experience helped me to
appreciate the complicated positions that theories/concepts in communication studies encompass.
The interdisciplinary field of communication makes affect an entertaining and not doubtful
rollercoaster of an adventure when trying to captivate the constituent of the concept.
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References