Tomkins' Affect Theory
Disagreements among theorists persist today over Tomkins’ firm insistence in his Affect theory that there were nine and only nine affects, biologically based. The basic six are: interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, surprise-startle, distress-anguish, anger-rage, and fear-terror. Tomkins always described the first six, and one that “evolved later” (shame-humiliation) in pairs. In these pairs, the first pair part names the mild manifestation and the second the more intense. The final two affects described by Tomkins are “dissmell” and disgust. Tomkins argued that these nine affects are quite discrete (whereas emotions are complex and muddled), that they manifest a shared biological heritage with what is called emotion in animals, and that they differ from Freudian drives in lacking an object.
Read more about this topic: Silvan Tomkins
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