The Psychology of Emotion in Restorative Practice by Vernon Kelly Margaret Thorsborne

Author:Vernon Kelly, Margaret Thorsborne [Vernon Kelly, Margaret Thorsborne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849059749
Goodreads: 20675022
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2014-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Sharing Affect Theory with Our Clients

One of the people who contributed to our journey was John Donald (2004) who assisted in connecting the research, theory and practice. It was John who suggested the benefit of explicitly sharing the theory with our clients, and so we looked for a simple description of affect theory which our clients could absorb in a therapeutic setting and apply in their own lives. We started by simply telling people about Silvan Tomkins, briefly explaining his work and his theory. We tell it something like this:

Tomkins noticed that regardless of where we come from, what race or religion, we all tend to respond similarly. At a really basic level, if we are happy, we smile, and if we are sad, we frown or cry.

From this starting point, he suggests that each one of us is born with nine innate affects. An affect, he argues, is a physical change within our body, including our skin, our muscles and our nervous system, that turns on an emotion. Affects make us conscious that something has changed, and, in fact, we only become conscious that something around or pertaining to us has changed because an affect has occurred. We now know an affect is information about something to pay attention to.

Simply put, an affect is a physical change which produces a feeling within our body, and an emotion is a combination of these two things, along with every memory we have of these two particular things happening.

The really important thing to remember is that affects are physical and that the face is the window that lets us see the affect in others.

There are two positive affects:

•Enjoyment-joy: basically ranging from contentment when we are just comfortable right through to the joy when a baby is born and everything in between; we can see that affect on someone’s face, the smile of joy, of recognition, of satisfaction.

•Interest-excitement: this is the affect which makes us pay attention to the world around us – look out the window to see the view, climb a hill to view a landscape, read a book, get attracted to someone, begin a relationship. It moves from mild interest where we might just notice something in passing right up to the wild excitement, for example, when our favourite sporting team wins. Without this affect there wouldn’t be much to do – even the drives depend on interest to become urgent. The hunger drive, for example, would be reasonably weak were it not amplified by an interest in food. Again, we can see if someone is interested just by looking at their face.

One neutral affect:

•Surprise-startle: this is like a reset system to blank our mind momentarily and make us aware of a sudden change in our environment. It is really easy to see startle or surprise on another.

Six negative affects:

•Anger-rage

•Distress-anguish

•Fear-terror

•Dissmell: stops us getting something that smells rotten anywhere near our mouth. Involuntarily, our head goes back, our lips protrude and our nose crinkles.

•Disgust: expels anything we have put in our mouth that might have looked all right but tastes or feels awful.

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