objective and veridical function of the Ego’s reality principle, many theoreti-
cians have stressed that affective adaptation implies that we are constituted as
dual human beings. On one hand, our inborn reflexes, affects, and proclivities
appear to make us into machine-like automatons that react to the environment
and in so doing maximize personal pleasure and minimize personal pain. On
the other hand, we are able to endure and even embrace negative affect in the
pursuit of growth and the creation of meaning. Thus, we are not merely reac-
tive creatures but also able to proactively and consciously direct our growth, to
act with self-determination and to strive for self-realization.
A Duality of Regulatory Strategies
While the more reactive aspect of affect is being emphasized by modern emo-
tion theorists, its proactive and self-constructive aspect has been the focus of
attention of cognitive-developmental approaches to self and affect. Spear-
headed by Piaget’s (1980) writings on affect, this approach has animated a
body of writings suggesting that with advancing development, individuals
consciously strive to transform their emotions and identity into systems that
expand on original hereditary organizations and create more complex cogni-
tive-affective structures (e.g., Fischer, Kenny, & Pipp, 1990; Kegan, 1982;
Kohlberg, 1969; Labouvie-Vief, 1982; Loevinger, 1976; Selman, 1980). One
aspect of that complexity concerns the ability to drive away from the comfort
of the accustomed-to and to endure unfamiliar and affectively negative expe-
rience in an effort to eventually construct integrated cognitive-affective repre-
sentations. How such integration can be achieved, however, often has re-
mained a source of some disagreement, and theoreticians have tended either
to point to the primacy of affect in directing cognition, or to else the capacity
of cognitive representations to modulate affect and even alter its very nature.
The view basic to the integration offered in this chapter has been stimu-
lated by Piaget’s theory of cognitive-affective development. This may appear
a paradoxical choice at first since, although Piaget has occasionally written
on affect (e.g., Piaget, 1980), his theory of affect remains limited since it tends
to make the affective dimension secondary rather than affording it the same
powerful status that cognitive operations occupy. Even so, one reading of his
theory is quite compatible with that of an emerging view of many modern
emotion theorists who suggest that complex cognitive-affective structures
emerge out of systems that are primarily instinct-based, reflex-like, and
sensorimotor at the outset, but that in the course of development become in-
creasingly integrated into higher-order cognitive control mechanisms (e.g.,
Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002; Labouvie-Vief, 1982, 1994; Met-
calfe & Mischel, 1999; Schore, 1994; Sroufe, 1996). Before offering a more
modern view of how such integration is accomplished, we focus in this sec-
tion a relatively brief summary of the core processes that appear to drive this
- AFFECT OPTIMIZATION AND DIFFERENTIATION 239