Running head: Affect Theory

Affect Theory:
The Emotional Roller Coaster
Colleen Dungey
Clemson University

Running head: Affect Theory

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Affect Theory

The conceptualization of affect initially defined as an impingement or extrusion of a

momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage of forces or
intensities has traveled through scholars research as if it were on a roller coaster (Gregg &
Seigworth, 2010). Emotion builds the concrete identities that individuals observe and experience.
Theorizing about affect is a term defined to harness the understanding of how emotions create
meaning and how it retains the cognitive process of human motivation and consciousness. While
in the early maturation stage of our lives individuals visibly express their emotions; however,
through maturity affect is identified as a system, telling us something needs our attention.
As a system, affect draws attention to our emotions, feelings and mood. The ability to
receive and interpret emotions makes this system a multi-functional process activated by what
drives this psychological mechanism of movement in and out of the body. This drive system
entices motivation, which informs the body when it does not know how to help itself. Affect can
be understood as affective dimensions of embodied experience, as incipient attitudes, as
energies, intensities, and sensations that function as the first step toward an evolving attitude
(Ott, 2010, p. 50). Although affect was formally recognized as an ideology within the
psychology field the aspect of communication being transferred from the body to the
motivational drive is how it transforms into a communication perspective.
The approach of this theoretical paper is to not identify the biologically motivations of
affect but to follow how scholars responded to the original development. Even though the key
individual behind the development of affect centers their theoretical findings on psychology this
scholar is the foundational piece. By identifying preceding and subsequent scholarship affect

Running head: Affect Theory

theory will be recognized as an interdisciplinary study. The methodological perspectives that

these scholars take outline their clear argument for responding to the concept of affect.
Interest
With a personal interest in the use of nonverbal communication affect intrigued the
scholar inside me because the primary site of affect is in the face. Communicating on a daily
basis demands for the exchange of words and nonverbal cues. These cues are vital in all
conversations because they affirm the message of the conversation being transmitted. The
expressions with the face affect both the sender and receiver in a conversation by way of
feedback to a stimulus. With an attempt to engage my internal cognitive process of creating
meaning of my emotions I hope to connect my emotions with their inner drive and recognize the
source of affect across its interdisciplinary fields.
Development
Although affect theory was established in the field of psychology, today it presents itself
as an interdisciplinary field. The foundational history that the psychology field establishes for
affect is the groundwork for how it is approached today in the critical, gender, and feminist
studies. The historical perspectives that scholars take today with affect have developed their
understanding from Silvan Tomkins (1962, 1963, 1968) and his foundational work with the
biological understanding of emotion. Although todays affect theory has been greatly amended
from the previous scholarship affects foundational work is credited in psychology and continues
to influence scholarship work today.
Key Individual
Psychologist and personality therapist Silvan Tomkins (1962, 1963, 1968) attributed to
the development of affect as an ideology to describe the phenomena of how affect is influenced.

Running head: 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-

Running head: Affect Theory

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

Running head: Affect Theory

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

Running head: Affect Theory

affect cannot be measured to authenticate it, it is acknowledged as a concept. Identified as a

concept rather than a theory, affect transformed from biological feeling to the lived experience of
how individuals encompass emotion, feelings and passion.
Subsequent Scholarship
To many scholars today affect possesses little value to psychoanalysis and influenced its
path through many fields making it interdisciplinary. Consequently, through these broad ranges
of studies the definition of affect is shaped accordingly and undoubtedly creates a wide
composition of meanings. An explanation of subsequent scholarship will help identify how
various scholars responded to and amended affect. With application of affect in recent research
found within the communication field affect will be presented as a theory that contributes in
many interdisciplinary fields.
Affective Turn
Affect has taken an emotional turn in scholarly work and has brought light to new
feelings and themes around emotions. Tomkins (1962, 1963, 1968) work in affect took a
psychological approach and today scholars in cultural, queer, gender, and feminist studies have
inspired these turns. Gregg and Seigworth (2010) created a compilation of scholars in their text,
The Affective Theory Reader, that partake in the affective turn, where affect is conceptualized
in multiple trajectories. Scholars in this text have amended and developed their own
understanding of affect through much of Tomkins (1962, 1963, 1968) work.
Gregg and Seigworth (2010) showcase in their text The Affective Theory Reader many
scholars that have contributed to the affective turn. Massumi (1995), Clough (2008), and
Ahmed (2004) are all scholars that study within the field of affective turn and have amended the
concept in their individual application. Massumi (1995) explains how feelings are socially

Running head: Affect Theory

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

Running head: Affect Theory

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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(Miller, 2005). As represented in the research affect is subjective in epistemological nature

because, the social world is essentially relativistic and can only be understood from the point of
view of the individuals who are directly involved in the activities (Miller, 2005, p. 29).
According to studies on affect the research is produced involving both values and experiences of
both research and participants (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Miller, 2005). Scholars (Ahmed,
2004; Clough, 2008; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Grossberg, 1986; Massumi, 1995; Williams,
1977) have clarified that affect is conceptualized through the lived experience of emotions and
takes an interpretive stance because reality cannot be understood except through the social
process of constructing experience (Miller, 2005).
Conclusion
From the development of affect to the modification and challenges it faced this concept
was strapped in for an emotional rollercoaster. The psychological development of affect through
the constructed meaning of emotion to the cultural understanding of lived experiences, affect has
undergone numerous considerations. After exploring its history, scholarly responses and
amendments affect is understood by experiential and how the world affects us (Gregg &
Seigworth, 2010). It is elucidated by the research that affect is defined in many different ways;
however, the introduction of the affective turn helped shape investigations within cultural
criticism.
Despite the dynamic and ongoing process of modifications the advancement of affect into
interdisciplinary fields makes it exceedingly influential. Beside the initial curiosity, affect was a
highly complex concept to comprehend. The integration of the concept into different fields of
research helped me to critique the challenges and amendments that numerous scholars
mentioned. The components helped to predict and identify the fruitfulness that affects embraces.

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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.

Running head: Affect Theory

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References

Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge.

Clough, P. T. (2008). The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory,
Culture & Society, 25(1), 1-22.
Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. J. (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Grossberg, L. (1986). Is there rock after punk? Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 3, 5074.
Kolehmainen, M. (2010). Normalizing and gendering affects: How the relation to porn is
constructed in young womens magazines. Feminist Media Studies, 10 (2), 179-184.
Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Culture Critique, 31, 83-109.
Miller, K. (2005). Communication theories: Perspectives, processes, and contexts (2nd ed.).
Boston: McGraw Hill.
Ott, B. L. (2010). The visceral politics of v for vendetta: On political affect in cinema. Critical
Studies in Media Communication, 27(1), 39-54.
Tomkins, S.S. (1962). Affect imagery consciousness: The positive affects, vol. 1. New York:
Springer.
Tomkins, S.S. (1963). Affect imagery consciousness: The negative affects, vol. 2. New York:
Springer.
Tomkins, S.S. (1968). Affects-Primary motives of man. Humanitas, 3(3), 321-345.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.