affect vs. script

• Introducing Shame Language to Clients by Brett Schur - Havertown, PA - bschur@msn.com, 3/12/96
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    • Positive and Negative: a Rose by Any Other Name by Charles G. Yopst, 6/16/98
      
      

Tomkins really defined the affects as a series of physiological mechanisms that made salient certain basic variations in stimulus density and gradient---stimulus increase, stimulus decrease, and stimulus level. It is the innate affects that bring us from biology to psychology. Central to the definition of the affect system is that the affects have no inherent meaning; meaning itself is derived from the individual's summated experiences of SARS (stimulus-affect-response sequences).

What you describe is not the nature of innate affect, but of an ideological script that has great importance to you. This script is good and fine, and can lead to wonderful implications for human development through ministry and other forms of interpersonal interaction. Yet it is essential to understand that it is a script, a highly complex organization of affects into a theme that suggests a way of life you find important or meaningful.

The descriptors "positive" and "negative" as applied to innate affect are definitional. The two positive affects feel good to us and form part of a blueprint through which we are motivated to continue and maximize them. The six negative affects feel inherently uncomfortable and motivate us to do whatever we can to turn them off. No affect is inherently connected to any other affect. They are separate mechansims that amplify quite different physiological situations.

• Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall by Charles G. Yopst, 6/22/98
• Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall by Charles G. Yopst, 6/22/98
  • Where affect fits in psychotherapy by Don Nathanson, 6/25/98
    • Thank You: To Strike a Pose by Chuck Yopst, 6/25/98
• Shame necessary for negative affect? by (No author), 9/22/98
  • The independence of affective reactions by Don Nathanson, 9/23/98
  • The independence of affective reactions by Don Nathanson, 9/23/98