Affect and the Development of the Self, Demos (1988)
Affects
Introduction. An affect is an inborn, automatic, physiological response to a stimulus. This response involves changes in one’s facial muscles, voice, and autonomic nervous system. “Because the facial muscles in humans are more finely articulated and can change more rapidly than the correlated autonomic responses (three-tenths of a second versus one to two seconds), Tomkins argued that the face is the primary site of affect and takes the lead in establishing and creating an awareness of an affective state, with the other correlated responses coming into play more slowly.”
Affects are innate. Ekman and Izzard “independently explored the validity of the facial expression patterns described by Tomkins. Their work demonstrated that these expressions were produced, recognized, and given similar meanings in a wide range of Western and Non-Western cultures. This cross-cultural consensus supports the proposition that affects are biologically inherited responses, universally shared by all humans.” They coded facial muscle movements “in the three regions of the face separately—the upper face, with forehead and brows; the eyes, cheeks and nose; and the lower face, the mouth and chin.” “This enables the researcher to distinguish between pure expressions and blends, for instance, anger components in the upper face, and distress components in the lower face, or vice versa.”
Physiological responses. Ekman, Levenson, and Friesen (1983) found that making faces reflecting different emotions produces different autonomic activity, “as measured by changes in heart rate, in right- and left-hand skin temperatures, and in skin resistance. Four negative emotions—disgust, anger, fear, and sadness—showed distinct autonomic patterns, which were different from the patterns of the positive emotions of happiness and surprise.”
Affects are communicative. Affects are the primary way infants and caregivers communicate, and they remain an important means of communication throughout life. Affective communication contains “motivational information about the other person or about oneself.” Thus, if I know what you’re feeling, I know whether your inner experience is rewarding or punishing, and consequently I know “the kinds of thoughts, intentions, fantasies, and memories” you’re probably having, and I know what kinds of behaviors you’re likely to perform.
Ekman, P., Levenson, R. W., & Friesen, W. V. (1983). Autonomic nervous system activity distinguishes among emotions. science, 221(4616), 1208-1210.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and coding. semiotica, 1(1), 49-98.
Introduction. An affect is an inborn, automatic, physiological response to a stimulus. This response involves changes in one’s facial muscles, voice, and autonomic nervous system. “Because the facial muscles in humans are more finely articulated and can change more rapidly than the correlated autonomic responses (three-tenths of a second versus one to two seconds), Tomkins argued that the face is the primary site of affect and takes the lead in establishing and creating an awareness of an affective state, with the other correlated responses coming into play more slowly.”
Affects are innate. Ekman and Izzard “independently explored the validity of the facial expression patterns described by Tomkins. Their work demonstrated that these expressions were produced, recognized, and given similar meanings in a wide range of Western and Non-Western cultures. This cross-cultural consensus supports the proposition that affects are biologically inherited responses, universally shared by all humans.” They coded facial muscle movements “in the three regions of the face separately—the upper face, with forehead and brows; the eyes, cheeks and nose; and the lower face, the mouth and chin.” “This enables the researcher to distinguish between pure expressions and blends, for instance, anger components in the upper face, and distress components in the lower face, or vice versa.”
Physiological responses. Ekman, Levenson, and Friesen (1983) found that making faces reflecting different emotions produces different autonomic activity, “as measured by changes in heart rate, in right- and left-hand skin temperatures, and in skin resistance. Four negative emotions—disgust, anger, fear, and sadness—showed distinct autonomic patterns, which were different from the patterns of the positive emotions of happiness and surprise.”
Affects are communicative. Affects are the primary way infants and caregivers communicate, and they remain an important means of communication throughout life. Affective communication contains “motivational information about the other person or about oneself.” Thus, if I know what you’re feeling, I know whether your inner experience is rewarding or punishing, and consequently I know “the kinds of thoughts, intentions, fantasies, and memories” you’re probably having, and I know what kinds of behaviors you’re likely to perform.
Affects are motivating. Darwin argued that expressive forms of communication “were selected for evolutionary survival because of their function as preparation.” For example, “the baring of teeth in primates, as an expression of anger, evolved because it prepared the animal to bite.” This expression also communicates to other nearby animals. Similarly, human facial expressions are preparations for action. “The facial expression of anger in humans is characterized by lowered and drawn-together brows, which creates vertical lines between the brows, by tensed upper and lower eyelids, so that the eyes have a hard stare and may take on a bulging appearance, and by open, tensed lips in a squarish shape, which bares the teeth, or by lips pressed tightly together with the corners straight or down, (Ekman and Friesen, 1975). This expression seems designed to focus the eyes intently on an object and to prepare the mouth for shouting or biting, or with lips pressed tightly together to contain the impulse to shout or bite. When we add the autonomic responses correlated with this expression, as reported by Ekman et al, and not known to Darwin, we find that when anger is on the face, the heart rate increases and the skin temperature rises.”
Amplifiers. Affects function as amplifiers of changes in the rate of neural firing. When there’s an increase in the rate of neural firing, surprise, fear, or interest will be activated; when this rate of neural firing remains at a non-optimally high level, anger or distress will be activated; and when there’s a sudden decrease in the rate of neural firing, enjoyment will be activated. The affects act as amplifiers by generating “correlated sets of facial muscle, autonomic, blood-flow, respiratory and focal responses.” Affects are either punishing or rewarding, and in so doing they motivate us to act in certain ways.
Affect complex. Every affect has a triggering event; the affect itself (involving the correlated set of responses); and the response to the affect, “which includes both the recruitment in memory of past experiences and motor and cognitive responses.” Each of these three components “has both innate and learned determinants, and thus can be influenced and modified by experience. For example, the facial and vocal expressions of affect are managed and controlled according to social, cultural, and familial ‘display rules’ that specify ‘who can show what emotion to whom, when.’”
Affects and infants
Since affects are innate, the infant is born experiencing negative affects as uniquely punishing and positive affects as uniquely rewarding. An affect will therefore “prime the infant to respond in a corresponding manner.”
Examples of affects motivating infants. “[T]he interested baby will focus its eyes intently on a stimulus, holding its limbs relatively quiet, and will tend to scan the stimulus for novelty. The joyful baby will smile and tend to produce relaxed, relatively smooth movements of its limbs, savoring the familiar. The angry baby will square its mouth, lower and pull its brows together, cry intensely, holding the cry for a long time, then pause for a long inspiration, and will tend to kick and thrash its limbs forcefully, perhaps even struggling against a caregiver. By contrast, a distressed infant will produce a more rhythmical cry, with the corners of the mouth pulled down and the inner corners of the brows drawn up, and will tend to move its limbs and head around restlessly.”
Affect regulation. Each affect has an adaptive function. A negative affect will “create a punishing, urgent state that will focus the organism to do something about the situation.” In order to benefit from an affect’s adaptive function, the infant cannot ignore the affect, and he cannot be overwhelmed by it. If he ignores the affect or finds himself overwhelmed by the affect, he will not be able to hear its message and thus will not be able to respond in an adaptive manner.
“Neonates possess some capacity to modulate their negative affective states at a low level of intensity, but as the intensity level rises they tend to continue to escalate, in a positive feedback loop that can lead from distress, to intense distress, to anger. Infants are therefore dependent on caregivers to modulate, soothe, and maintain them at more moderate or optimal density levels.”
Case study
Demos and Kaplan observed two infant girls, Cathy and Donna.
Interest and enjoyment. “Whenever Cathy would gaze intently at her mother's face, without smiling, the mother would interpret this quiet, focused interest as boredom. She would then pull her own face back, out of Cathy's visual range, and jiggle a toy in front of Cathy's eyes. Also, whenever Cathy's older brother was around, the mother would turn away from Cathy and focus her attention on him, even though this often meant interrupting or foreshortening an exchange with Cathy. Cathy would begin each new exchange with her mother in a moderately intense state of interest and enjoyment. Then, as her mother turned away either to substitute a toy for her face or to attend to her son the animation on Cathy's face would fade as she looked at the toy with only mild interest, or looked away with a somewhat blank expression.”
These experiences taught Cathy several things: (1) states of interest and enjoyment do not last long, (2) “she has no control over initiating, prolonging, or ending such experiences” (thus, “she cannot experience her self as an active agent”), (3) she is not interesting or enjoyable to others. “Cathy remained responsive to the social initiatives of others, but she rarely initiated such exchanges and did not protest their cessation. She had become a passive observer of events around her.”
Donna would engage in “long periods of focused, intent gazing at her mother's face,” and her mother “”consistently facilitated this display of interest as she maintained and prolonged en face interactions by providing Donna with an ever changing array of facial, vocal, and cutaneous stimulation, and allowed Donna to terminate these exchanges. The mother's capacity to allow her daughter to be the active agent made it possible for Donna to learn” the following: (1) states of interest and enjoyment can be sustain, (2) “her own behaviors were effective in bringing these experiences about,” and (3) others could find her interesting and enjoyable.
“Because of Donna's greater sense of agency and her greater embodiment or ownership of rewarding experiences, many more objects and events were interesting and enjoyable for Donna than for Cathy. Donna's experience of these positive affects was more varied, more intense, and more prolonged than was Cathy's, and Donna developed a larger repertoire of behaviors and more elaborate strategies than did Cathy for prolonging and creating interesting, enjoyable experiences. Donna's experience of ‘I’ and “we” activities was also more balanced than was Cathy's. [Meaning, that Cath engaged in more solitary, and less reciprocal, behaviors.] Thus Donna was continually able to expand her experience of her self as competent and effective in prolonging rewarding experiences and in developing instrumental skills.”
Distress, anger, and fear. “From the very beginning Cathy was not allowed to build up to even a mild level of distress or anger. At the first sign of restlessness or mild vocal fussing, the mother would pick Cathy up and nurse her. During the first five and a half months of our observations of this family, we never saw or heard Cathy cry.”
“Because of her mother's early interventions, there were very few experiences of even moderate distress or anger for Cathy. Thus her capacity to become aware of her internal states of distress and anger and to use their punishing quality as a guide for behavior, in terms of experiencing the need to do something about them, was being shortcircuited. This left Cathy with little motivation and few opportunities to make a connection between a felt need and the remedy offered and few moments to experience herself as an active agent in bringing about the remedy. And the mother's continued interventions also prevented Cathy from developing any instrumental behaviors for soothing herself.”
“Throughout the first year, Cathy was unable to sleep through the night and from roughly eight months on was unable to fall asleep without being nursed. We interpret this as a failure in the caregiving system to encourage and allow opportunities for self-regulation. The mother acknowledged that she could not give up these middle-of-the-night feedings.”
“Donna's mother presented a striking contrast. She saw herself primarily as a facilitator of Donna's efforts to be an active agent in her own regulation of these states. Thus, from the beginning Donna was allowed to experience a range of intensities of distress, going from mild fussiness to moderately intense crying, and occasionally even to intense, angry crying. The mother was able to respond to each situation with flexibility and confidence in her judgment as to what the baby could tolerate and manage. For instance, if Donna was fussing during a transition between sleep and wakefulness, the mother would tend not to intervene, thereby giving Donna the opportunity to regulate these transitions on her own, which Donna learned to do with relative ease. However, when Donna cried because she was tired of being in one position or of looking at the same thing for so long, or when she was hungry, the mother would respond quickly and appropriately by changing her position or providing her with a more interesting environment, or nursing her. And when she could not respond quickly with a solution, either because she was temporarily busy or wanted to stretch the feeding intervals out a little, she would offer a variety of supports or distractions to help Donna tolerate the delay. In general, then, the mother's reactions tended to provide the minimal responsivity needed to help the baby achieve and maintain an organized state.”
“Donna's experience of dysphoric affects was of sufficient intensity and duration so that she could become aware of the distinctive punishing qualities of the affects and of the need to do something about them, but they were not so intense and long-lasting that she was overwhelmed by them. These distinct experiences of distress and anger almost always resulted in Donna's own successful modulation of the negative experience or in bringing the mother, who successfully helped Donna to modulate the experience as she provided a remedy for the cause of the negative affect. This entire complex, consisting of a particular trigger, a distinct experience of a particular affect, and a successful management and remedy, was repeated many times during the first few months. And this enabled Donna to connect her awareness of each affect with a number of specific causes and consequences.”
“By three and a half months of age, Donna was able to produce a signal cry of distress and a protest cry of anger. Thus in this brief period, Donna's crying had gone from the expressive crying of early infancy that conveys neither a sense of the cause nor an expectation of relief to a signal or protest cry that conveys both the intent to communicate one's state and the expectation that the mother will respond quickly and appropriately. These changes represent an important advance in affective competence, for they require that the infant be able to modulate the cries in order to use them instrumentally, as a signal.”
“At about this same time, Donna also developed the ability to get her thumb into her mouth voluntarily. This represented a gain in her control over her own states of fussiness and distress, since rhythmical sucking enables a baby to overcome the random movements of thrashing. We understood Donna's use of her thumb to be motivated by a wish to control the level of nonoptimal stimulation, rather than by the presence of an oral drive. These new instrumental behaviors enabled Donna to experience her self as competent, and thus enabled her to respond to the challenges of potentially distressing and frustrating situations with confidence, flexibility, and persistence.”
Amplifiers. Affects function as amplifiers of changes in the rate of neural firing. When there’s an increase in the rate of neural firing, surprise, fear, or interest will be activated; when this rate of neural firing remains at a non-optimally high level, anger or distress will be activated; and when there’s a sudden decrease in the rate of neural firing, enjoyment will be activated. The affects act as amplifiers by generating “correlated sets of facial muscle, autonomic, blood-flow, respiratory and focal responses.” Affects are either punishing or rewarding, and in so doing they motivate us to act in certain ways.
Affect complex. Every affect has a triggering event; the affect itself (involving the correlated set of responses); and the response to the affect, “which includes both the recruitment in memory of past experiences and motor and cognitive responses.” Each of these three components “has both innate and learned determinants, and thus can be influenced and modified by experience. For example, the facial and vocal expressions of affect are managed and controlled according to social, cultural, and familial ‘display rules’ that specify ‘who can show what emotion to whom, when.’”
Affects and infants
Since affects are innate, the infant is born experiencing negative affects as uniquely punishing and positive affects as uniquely rewarding. An affect will therefore “prime the infant to respond in a corresponding manner.”
Examples of affects motivating infants. “[T]he interested baby will focus its eyes intently on a stimulus, holding its limbs relatively quiet, and will tend to scan the stimulus for novelty. The joyful baby will smile and tend to produce relaxed, relatively smooth movements of its limbs, savoring the familiar. The angry baby will square its mouth, lower and pull its brows together, cry intensely, holding the cry for a long time, then pause for a long inspiration, and will tend to kick and thrash its limbs forcefully, perhaps even struggling against a caregiver. By contrast, a distressed infant will produce a more rhythmical cry, with the corners of the mouth pulled down and the inner corners of the brows drawn up, and will tend to move its limbs and head around restlessly.”
Affect regulation. Each affect has an adaptive function. A negative affect will “create a punishing, urgent state that will focus the organism to do something about the situation.” In order to benefit from an affect’s adaptive function, the infant cannot ignore the affect, and he cannot be overwhelmed by it. If he ignores the affect or finds himself overwhelmed by the affect, he will not be able to hear its message and thus will not be able to respond in an adaptive manner.
“Neonates possess some capacity to modulate their negative affective states at a low level of intensity, but as the intensity level rises they tend to continue to escalate, in a positive feedback loop that can lead from distress, to intense distress, to anger. Infants are therefore dependent on caregivers to modulate, soothe, and maintain them at more moderate or optimal density levels.”
Case study
Demos and Kaplan observed two infant girls, Cathy and Donna.
Interest and enjoyment. “Whenever Cathy would gaze intently at her mother's face, without smiling, the mother would interpret this quiet, focused interest as boredom. She would then pull her own face back, out of Cathy's visual range, and jiggle a toy in front of Cathy's eyes. Also, whenever Cathy's older brother was around, the mother would turn away from Cathy and focus her attention on him, even though this often meant interrupting or foreshortening an exchange with Cathy. Cathy would begin each new exchange with her mother in a moderately intense state of interest and enjoyment. Then, as her mother turned away either to substitute a toy for her face or to attend to her son the animation on Cathy's face would fade as she looked at the toy with only mild interest, or looked away with a somewhat blank expression.”
These experiences taught Cathy several things: (1) states of interest and enjoyment do not last long, (2) “she has no control over initiating, prolonging, or ending such experiences” (thus, “she cannot experience her self as an active agent”), (3) she is not interesting or enjoyable to others. “Cathy remained responsive to the social initiatives of others, but she rarely initiated such exchanges and did not protest their cessation. She had become a passive observer of events around her.”
Donna would engage in “long periods of focused, intent gazing at her mother's face,” and her mother “”consistently facilitated this display of interest as she maintained and prolonged en face interactions by providing Donna with an ever changing array of facial, vocal, and cutaneous stimulation, and allowed Donna to terminate these exchanges. The mother's capacity to allow her daughter to be the active agent made it possible for Donna to learn” the following: (1) states of interest and enjoyment can be sustain, (2) “her own behaviors were effective in bringing these experiences about,” and (3) others could find her interesting and enjoyable.
“Because of Donna's greater sense of agency and her greater embodiment or ownership of rewarding experiences, many more objects and events were interesting and enjoyable for Donna than for Cathy. Donna's experience of these positive affects was more varied, more intense, and more prolonged than was Cathy's, and Donna developed a larger repertoire of behaviors and more elaborate strategies than did Cathy for prolonging and creating interesting, enjoyable experiences. Donna's experience of ‘I’ and “we” activities was also more balanced than was Cathy's. [Meaning, that Cath engaged in more solitary, and less reciprocal, behaviors.] Thus Donna was continually able to expand her experience of her self as competent and effective in prolonging rewarding experiences and in developing instrumental skills.”
Distress, anger, and fear. “From the very beginning Cathy was not allowed to build up to even a mild level of distress or anger. At the first sign of restlessness or mild vocal fussing, the mother would pick Cathy up and nurse her. During the first five and a half months of our observations of this family, we never saw or heard Cathy cry.”
“Because of her mother's early interventions, there were very few experiences of even moderate distress or anger for Cathy. Thus her capacity to become aware of her internal states of distress and anger and to use their punishing quality as a guide for behavior, in terms of experiencing the need to do something about them, was being shortcircuited. This left Cathy with little motivation and few opportunities to make a connection between a felt need and the remedy offered and few moments to experience herself as an active agent in bringing about the remedy. And the mother's continued interventions also prevented Cathy from developing any instrumental behaviors for soothing herself.”
“Throughout the first year, Cathy was unable to sleep through the night and from roughly eight months on was unable to fall asleep without being nursed. We interpret this as a failure in the caregiving system to encourage and allow opportunities for self-regulation. The mother acknowledged that she could not give up these middle-of-the-night feedings.”
“Donna's mother presented a striking contrast. She saw herself primarily as a facilitator of Donna's efforts to be an active agent in her own regulation of these states. Thus, from the beginning Donna was allowed to experience a range of intensities of distress, going from mild fussiness to moderately intense crying, and occasionally even to intense, angry crying. The mother was able to respond to each situation with flexibility and confidence in her judgment as to what the baby could tolerate and manage. For instance, if Donna was fussing during a transition between sleep and wakefulness, the mother would tend not to intervene, thereby giving Donna the opportunity to regulate these transitions on her own, which Donna learned to do with relative ease. However, when Donna cried because she was tired of being in one position or of looking at the same thing for so long, or when she was hungry, the mother would respond quickly and appropriately by changing her position or providing her with a more interesting environment, or nursing her. And when she could not respond quickly with a solution, either because she was temporarily busy or wanted to stretch the feeding intervals out a little, she would offer a variety of supports or distractions to help Donna tolerate the delay. In general, then, the mother's reactions tended to provide the minimal responsivity needed to help the baby achieve and maintain an organized state.”
“Donna's experience of dysphoric affects was of sufficient intensity and duration so that she could become aware of the distinctive punishing qualities of the affects and of the need to do something about them, but they were not so intense and long-lasting that she was overwhelmed by them. These distinct experiences of distress and anger almost always resulted in Donna's own successful modulation of the negative experience or in bringing the mother, who successfully helped Donna to modulate the experience as she provided a remedy for the cause of the negative affect. This entire complex, consisting of a particular trigger, a distinct experience of a particular affect, and a successful management and remedy, was repeated many times during the first few months. And this enabled Donna to connect her awareness of each affect with a number of specific causes and consequences.”
“By three and a half months of age, Donna was able to produce a signal cry of distress and a protest cry of anger. Thus in this brief period, Donna's crying had gone from the expressive crying of early infancy that conveys neither a sense of the cause nor an expectation of relief to a signal or protest cry that conveys both the intent to communicate one's state and the expectation that the mother will respond quickly and appropriately. These changes represent an important advance in affective competence, for they require that the infant be able to modulate the cries in order to use them instrumentally, as a signal.”
“At about this same time, Donna also developed the ability to get her thumb into her mouth voluntarily. This represented a gain in her control over her own states of fussiness and distress, since rhythmical sucking enables a baby to overcome the random movements of thrashing. We understood Donna's use of her thumb to be motivated by a wish to control the level of nonoptimal stimulation, rather than by the presence of an oral drive. These new instrumental behaviors enabled Donna to experience her self as competent, and thus enabled her to respond to the challenges of potentially distressing and frustrating situations with confidence, flexibility, and persistence.”
* * * * *
Demos, F. E. V. (1988). Affect and the development of the self: A new frontier. In Progress in Self Psychology, V. 3 (pp. 41-67). Routledge.
Ekman, P., Levenson, R. W., & Friesen, W. V. (1983). Autonomic nervous system activity distinguishes among emotions. science, 221(4616), 1208-1210.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and coding. semiotica, 1(1), 49-98.
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