surprise, fear, anger, disgust, contempt, sadness, and joy. The affect programs
are short-term stereotypical responses involving facial expression, autonomic
nervous system arousal, and other elements. The same pattern of response
occurs in all cultures and homologues are found in related species. These
patterns are triggered by a cognitive system which is ‘modular’ in the sense
that it does not freely exchange information with other cognitive processes.
This system learns when to produce emotions by associating stimuli with
broad, functional categories such as danger or loss.... It is not possible to
do justice to Ekman’s views using the common opposition between ‘natural-
istic’ and ‘social constructionist’ views of emotion....The ‘naturalist’
is normally claimed as someone who believes that all or some emotional
responses are the same in all cultures. But at the very least a distinction must
be drawn between the input and output sides of emotional responses. Ekman
claims that the output side of affect programs is stereotyped and pan-
cultural, but be makes no such claim about the eliciting conditions of affect
programs.
(Griffiths 199 7 : 7 9)In other words, the affect programme approach makes a case for the view that
certain so-called lower order affects at least have some degree of cultural generality
but are not therefore necessarily innate. It makes no such claim for so-called higher
cognitive affects such as love, jealousy, guilt and envy.
The second school of thought is that of William James and Carl Lange, often
referred to as the James–Lange theory. This famous theory essentially argues that
bodily responses give rise to affective states and is popularly rendered by statements
such as ‘crying makes us sad’. The primacy that James gave to bodily changes,
following in part from Descartes’ belief that emotions are passive perceptions of
bodily motions, has become a crucial element of modern experimental psychology,
in that it makes affect a matter of visual and auditory observation and so focuses
attention on physiological change. The theory is undergoing something of a revival
through the work of Antonio Damasio as the notion that emotion-feeling is the
perception in the neocortex of bodily response to stimuli, mediated through lower
brain centres. At the same time, the James–Lange theory is recognized to have
serious defects and not least its overly simple model of causality.
The third school of thought is that of Sylvan Tomkins, whose main concern
was to differentiate affects from drives. Unlike drives, affects can be transferred to
a range of objects so as to be satisfied: they are therefore adaptable in a way that
drives are not.
So, affect can enable the satisfaction of a drive (excitement might prepare the
body for the satisfaction of hunger) or interrupt it (so that disgust might
interrupt that satisfaction if you were served a rotten egg to eat)....Tomkins
was the first to suggest that they have a singularity that creates its own
circuitry. Thus affect may be autotelic (love being its own reward) or insatiable
(where jealousy or desire for revenge may last minutes or a lifetime).224 Part III