The shift to analogue

• dismell/disgust by DWH, 8/19/98
  • Drive auxiliary affects by Dave McShane, 10/2/98
    • Still don't understand trigger by DWH, 10/3/98
      
      

Your question is quite important, and the answer leads one not to the core of affect theory (which, as you say, is involved in matters of stimulus density and the gradients at which stimuli occur) but to script theory. Our personal experience as humans confirms Tomkins's observation that there is a range of odors and tastes we find pleasant, but that substances outside that range are experienced as unpleasant. From the standpoint of physiology, these are hard-wired mechanisms---the rotten egg odor of hydrogen sulphide and the taste of bile are unpleasant not because of our conscious or unconscious associations to them, but because we have evolved to find them quite unpleasant. Tomkins named our physiological reaction to unpleasant odor "dissmell" and made more specific the common word "disgust" as the hard-wired physiological reaction to unpleasant taste. When some odorant triggers the dissmell reaction, the infant wrinkles the upper lip, withdraws the head and neck, and may utter the sound "eeeoooogh." When the tongue encounters some substance that triggers the disgust reaction, the infant extrudes the tongue, pushes the lower lip out and the head forward while expressing the sound "yucch!" That much is physiology.

Furthermore, Tomkins recognized that these two common reactions (present in the neonate and observable through all life into sensecence) operate as auxiliaries to the hunger drive, which "asks" us to search for food when we are hungry. Dissmell and disgust may be considered as built-in, evolved mechanisms that protect the organism from otherwise available potential foodstuffs that might be dangerous for life. I have read that until the recent development of novel poisons, all known deadly poisons tasted bitter.

Yet the human is capable of evaluating any experience as an analogue of something it resembles. Basch's concept of emotion (as differentiated from affect) involves the association of the affect triggered at any particular moment with our memory of previous experiences of that affect; as I have said so often, affect is biology but emotion is biography. Our advanced system of cognition allows us to group in memory all instances of Stimulus-Affect-Response Sequences that are similar; the resulting group or family of such scenes may then be considered by the organism as a new form of "stimulus" that then achieves an affective response. Tomkins described as "scripts" the set of rules we form for the management of such situations in which families of affect-magnified scenes come to rule our way of understanding life itself. After infancy, nothing can really be considered to be pure innate affect but rather is a matter of such affect-magnified families of scenes; this shift from affect to script implies that the brain mechanisms involved in our emotional life will come to include neocortical as well as the original subcortical brain from whence comes innate affect. In infancy, innate affect is triggered entirely by the six basic forms of stimulus increase, stimulus decrease, and stimulus level. Every day we grow and age, emotion becomes more and more a matter of scripted responses to these families of response to stimulus-affect-response sequences that are seen as analogues of previously experienced scenes.

Dissmell and disgust, then, start out as hard-wired responses to smells and tastes outside a certain range of substances. Yet as we grow and get increasing experience of the world, we encounter situations in which an individual or that individual's actions toward us are experienced as outside an acceptable range of behavior. In that sense, such people or actions may trigger the responses to which we grew accustomed as small children---dissmell for actions and people we wish to keep at a distance, and disgust for actions and people with which/whom we have been intimately involved and from which we would like to get away. The physiological mechanisms evolved for bad smell and taste come to operate as mental representations for actions and people who in no way actually trigger nose and tongue centered reactions. This tendency of the human to work in analogues is the basis of script formation and provides an excellent example of the aforementioned shift from innate to learned responses. (Writers like Alan Schore, who reject affect theory because we can find PET Scan and other neuroradiographic evidence for the action of cortical and neocortical brain in many emotional experiences, simply do not understand the importance of script formation.) The adult manifestations of dissmell and disgust as reactions to events that have nothing to do with physiological hunger are prime examples of this process. Examples of this include the disgust and dissmell responses observed by the experimenters who showed that people will not show aversion to a small amount of a reddish substance until they are told that it is "powdered cockroach."

I must thank our questioner for persistence in asking about this issue. Until I mounted this response I had not understood that these two "drive auxiliaries" represented script formation. That strikes me as the reason Tomkins initially described "contempt" as a primary affect but resolved it into a developmental fusion of dissmell and anger when he came to understand the nature of script formation.

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