Silvan Solomon Tomkins (June 4, 1911 – June 10, 1991) was an American psychologist and personality theorist who developed both affect theory and script theory. Following the publication of the third volume of his book Affect Imagery Consciousness in 1991, his body of work received renewed interest, leading to attempts by others to summarize and popularize his theories.
Biography The following is a summary based on a biographical essay by Irving Alexander.
Silvan Tomkins was born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish immigrants, and raised in Camden, New Jersey. He studied playwriting as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, but immediately on graduating he enrolled as a graduate student in psychology. However, he withdrew upon completing only the master's degree, finding the Penn Psychology Department's emphasis on psychophysics unfriendly to his interests. Remaining at Penn, he received his PhD in philosophy in 1934, working on value theory with Edgar A. Singer, Jr.
After a year handicapping horse races, he relocated to Harvard for postdoctoral study in Philosophy with W.V. Quine. In time, he became aware of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and in 1937 he joined its staff, entering a particularly productive and happy period of his life. During this period, he published his first book, Contemporary Psychopathology, containing a survey of contemporary thought as well as his own contribution to it. He wrote a book about the projective Thematic Apperception Test, then developed the Picture Arrangement Test that combined elements of projection and forced choice.
In 1947, he married Elizabeth "BeeGee" Taylor; the marriage would last nearly three decades. The same year, he moved to Princeton University's Department of Psychology to take a position that would entail a large amount of frustration. First, he would work at the Educational Testing Service, which required him to submit documentation of the precise hours he worked in the building. At the same time, he worked for Princeton University, which never fully supported the graduate program in Clinical Psychology which he tried to establish.
During his Princeton career, he was able to spend a year at the Ford Center in Palo Alto, California, where he wrote what became the first two volumes of Affect Imagery Consciousness. At this point in his career, he began to have a mentoring relationship with two younger scholars—Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard—who would later become better known than Tomkins and whose early concepts of emotion owe much to Tomkins'.
After receiving an NIMH career research award, he left Princeton for CUNY Graduate Center in 1965, then in 1968 moved to Rutgers University, from which he retired in 1975 to work on his script theory.
Tomkins' theoretical constructs The title of Tomkins' four volume work Affect Imagery Consciousness (AIC) is a three-word summary of his entire "Human Being Theory." Affect stands for human motivation: 'why' do humans do what they do? Affect represents "amplified" (p. 6) body 'energy' and motivation by "care" (p. 131), or more accurately "caring" (p. 10). Imagery stands for cognition, or the 'how' of human mental processes and the complex interactions between perception, body control, memory, and feedback systems, all within a "central assembly" (p. 287) of executive control. Consciousness is to be human, or the result of the structures and processes comprising a human being. The word denotes a uniquely human, non-specific 'site' of awareness, where information from motivation (affects, drives), cognitive (perception, motor, memory), and feedback subsystems is combined, duplicated, processed, and reported, or made conscious.
While Tomkins began with an interest in determining the essential motivations of humans as animal, he also needed to consider how people did what they did, and in turn, where consciousness fit in the puzzle. Initially, he divided his human being theory into two major halves. The first half of his total formulation, presented in volumes 1 (1962) and 2 (1963) of Affect Imagery Consciousness, is the most phenomenological in focussing on physiology, drives, affects, and other "nonspecific amplification" (p. 1) systems within the biological body. He was chasing the question, "What do human beings really want?" (p. 53). But, as a 'Personologist,' the study of personality in the tradition of Harvard professor Henry Murray, Tomkins easily understood that biology was only a beginning factor for theorizing a complex set of processes comprising individual humans. Biology could never be a full determinant of human beings. With the release of Affect Imagery Consciousness volumes 3 (1991) and 4 (1992), almost 30 years later, he directly confronted the second issue, cognition: How do humans do what they do? Answering the why? and how? of 'human beingness' became the foundation for his Human Being Theory. However, as his ideas developed, he recognized a missing link. Tomkins needed a third concept as an intermediary between cognition-motivation and consciousness. Thus he imagined Script Theory, which is explored most in Affect Imagery Consciousness volume 3.
Affect theory Tomkins' affect theory is detailed most in volumes 1 & 2 of Affect Imagery Consciousness. He first presented affect theory in 1954 at the Montreal meeting of the International Congress of Psychology with his paper "Consciousness and the unconscious in a model of the human being." Chapter one of AIC volume one is an expanded version of that early paper. He begins by challenging Freud and Hull's drive theory which dominated psychology at the time. Tomkins argued that the drives are inadequate general motivators and their priority a misinterpretation, or a "misidentification of the drive 'signal' with its 'amplifier'" (p. 53) . The drives are too time and body-place specific to account for the vast range of human 'wants' and 'don't wants.' Contrasting the drives, Tomkins' affects are general, flexible, and abstract.
Tomkins names nine 'affects' and they are universal, bio-chemical, neuro-physiological mechanisms and processes of the body that amplify triggering information. Nathanson (1992) succinctly calls affect the "biological portion of emotion" (p. 49). Tomkins' affects are not 'emotions.' Emotions, in this context, are a complex evolution of innate affect, felt experiences, and social development across a lifetime.
Michael Franz Basch and Donald Nathanson helped clarify Tomkins' notions of affect, feeling, and emotion as follows:
affect: an evolutionary inheritance of universal, bio-chemical, neuro-physiological mechanisms and processes in the body that amplify, or make salient, triggering information. feeling: as with the James-Lange theory, feeling means "some level of awareness that an affect has been triggered" (p. 50). In fear, for example, the little hairs on the back of the neck may stand up; anger can trigger a clenched jaw and fist; humiliation can be felt as the embarrassment 'flush.' Following affect, feeling awareness begins "around eighteen to twenty-four months, when the involuntary based affective reaction begins to be related to a concept of the self" (p. 78). emotion: complex combinations of affects with personal memories and with the affects they also trigger. Nathanson: "Whereas affect is biology, emotion is biography" (p. 50). Given that the human organism is innately endowed with affect, E. Virginia Demos writes that the "newborn infant, then, has the capacity to experience affect but does not yet have past experience to draw on" (p. 76), and so has not yet learned to emote. Emotion is a "further step in affective maturation" resulting from joining feeling states "with experience to give personal meaning to complex concepts such as love, hate, and happiness" (p. 78).
Though affect is assumed as universal and feeling as ubiquitous (high similarity though individually nuanced and idiosyncratic), every person's experience of emotion is as unique as their experience. Of these working definitions, Lucas succinctly writes, the "steps affect-feeling-emotion, then, correspond to biology-psychology-biography, which in turn corresponds to a movement from the general to the particular to the specific. This is the biopsychosocial matrix in which every person exists" (p. 54).
Tomkins' nine named affects are: interest-excitement and enjoyment-joy; surprise-startle; distress-anguish, anger-rage, and fear-terror; disgust, dissmell, shame-humiliation. Importantly, the last three labels are better understood as drive auxiliaries (disgust, dissmell) and an affect auxiliary (shame-humiliation) rather than affects per se. The hyphen in each label indicates the range potential for each affect, from mild to extreme. Affect is also multi-faceted: "At the neurological level, affect is correlated with density of neural firing. At the behavioral level, affect is primarily facial response and secondarily bodily and visceral response. At the phenomenological level, affect may be considered a motive" (Tomkins and Izard, p. 88).
The two positive affects are:
interest-excitement: optimal increasing neural density; and enjoyment-joy: decreasing neural density, the lower end of which Nathanson (1992) suggests can be thought of as "contentment" (p. 79) and following from intense affect stimulus;
The neutral:
surprise-startle: very sudden increase, and functions as a cognitive 're-set' mechanism, thus allowing cognition (information processing) to shift attention.
The first negative three, which amplify their triggers, includes:
fear-terror: increasing neural activity at higher rates than interest but lower than surprise; distress-anguish: non-optimal, high steady-state; and anger-rage: very high to extreme, non-optimal steady-state.
The second negative three, which attenuate their triggers, include two drive auxiliaries and an affect auxiliary:
disgust: evolved from gustation; dissmell: evolved from olfaction; and shame-humiliation: curiously described by Tomkins (1995) as "an affluent emotion" (p. 392) because it involves an incomplete reduction in positive affect when faced with an impediment to positive social affiliation; but the experience feels bad.
The "auxiliary drive mechanisms" disgust and dissmell are not affects per se, but they have affect-like status because, though derived from the gustatory and olfactory systems, they "also function as signals and motives to others as well as to the self of feelings of rejection" (p. 84). Tomkins could not explain how the drive auxiliaries evolved from biological drive toward emotional expression, but he observed an "intrinsic connection" (p. 55) between disgust and dissmell, and the way humans express disapproval. In English, for example, the expression 'that's disgusting' is ubiquitous in judging perceived moral transgressions.
As a foundation for motivation, Tomkins answers his 'What do humans really want?' question with regard to the affects as follows. It is "all but inevitable" that humans will develop for "General Images," or Life Goals (p. 328):
Positive affect should be maximized Negative affect should be minimized Affect inhibition should be minimized Power to maximize positive affect, to minimize negative affect, to minimize affect inhibition should be maximized.
This is the ground upon which human motivation is built.
Script Theory Tomkins' script theory is outlined most in volumes 3 & 4 of Affect Imagery Consciousness. Tomkins calls scripts "ways of living in the world" (p. 9). Human personality is a complex of affects and bodily functions, memory and mentation, cognition as 'information processing,' will, and importantly, personal experience in a social context.