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In last month’s newsletter…
We have been exploring how our earliest, innate feelings work—“primary affects.”
To review the positive, resetting, and negative feelings:
Positive Affects
Interest | Enjoyment
Resetting Affect
Surprise
Negative Affects
Distress | Anger | Fear | Shame | Disgust | Dissmell
Last month we examined Interest, Fear, Surprise, Distress, and Anger. This month we look at Enjoyment, Shame, Disgust, and Dissmell (Tomkins, 1991).
Enjoyment
How about enjoyment? What triggers the big smile and bright eyes of joy? By the way, the bright eyes are no illusion—the “gleam in the eye” is quite real. Darwin (1872) noted long ago that the expression of enjoyment was characterized, in part, by brightness in the eyes due to slight fluid secretion by the lacrimal glands.
So what does trigger this joy response? It appears to be a rapid decrease in stimulation (see Figure 3). If excessively high levels of sound or light are suddenly decreased, the infant will respond with a big smile. Or recall the relief you feel when something scary or painful stops. Rapid decreases in feelings such as distress, fear, and shame can trigger the smile response of enjoyment.
Any sudden decrease in stimulation which reduced the rate of neural firing, as in the sudden reduction of excessive noise, would innately activate the smile of enjoyment.
Shame
How does one understand shame? Many are surprised that shame is considered a built-in, universal response. Does shame have facial and bodily manifestations? Absolutely. The response of shame includes lowering of the eyelids, lowering of the head due to the reduction of muscle tone in the neck, and a tilting of the head in one direction.
So, what triggers shame, i.e. how does shame work? Shame is called an affect auxiliary because it always involves other affects, namely interest and/or enjoyment. Shame is triggered only after the affects of interest or enjoyment have been activated, and it inhibits one or the other or both.
How does this look in real life? Say the one-year-old baby is in a high chair with a cup of milk in front of her while father is making her some breakfast. Father leaves the room briefly. The baby goes to pick up her cup, bumps it, and some splashes out. The milk smells and tastes good and the splashes make neat patterns. She picks up the cup and more slops out, making interesting noises as well as patterns. This is getting exciting! Now she raises the cup way up, and slowly pours the milk out all over, with wonderful noises, splashes, tastes, patterns. Her interest and enjoyment are clearly in full gear. At this point, Dad comes back in and sees all this. “What in the world are you doing?! Look at this mess!” he says somewhat irritably. The interest and enjoyment are now interrupted, with the typical shame response resulting: lowered eyes and head, drooping shoulders, and averted face.
Another way to look at this example is that a mismatch is created, a mismatch between the expectations of the infant (that her interest would be appreciated and validated by her father) and the actual response from the environment, i.e. father.
As emotional life develops, the basic feeling of shame may manifest in additional ways, e.g. guilt, shyness, and discouragement. Shame is about inferiority, interruption of interest, mismatch, and guilt about moral transgression; shyness about strangeness of the other; and discouragement about temporary defeat (see also Tomkins, 1991).
Disgust and Dissmell
The last two feelings to consider are disgust and dissmell. Disgust and dissmell are biological responses to noxious tastes and odors, respectively.
Disgust is a reaction to items that taste bad to the infant, and one readily sees the infant protrude her tongue and spit out the offending material.
Dissmell is a made-up word—a neologism coined by Tomkins, for which he apologized! It refers to the characteristic way in which an infant reacts to odors that smell bad to her: she wrinkles her nose and raises and turns her head away.
Disgust and dissmell are reactions designed to protect the baby from dangerous substances. These reactions achieve psychological standing later on: consider the phrases “that meeting left a bad taste in my mouth” or “this situation stinks.” Contempt is a later feeling which relates to disgust and dissmell.
Next Month…
We will take a brief look at some of the conceptual issues and questions surrounding our early emotional life.
REFERENCES FOR INTERESTED READERS
Darwin C (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Third Edition, P. Ekman, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Tomkins SS (1991). Affect Imagery Consciousness (Volume III): The Negative Affects: Anger and Fear. New York: Springer.
Article of the Month
Brusatte S, Luo Z (2016). Ascent of the mammals. Scientific American, June.
Recent discoveries reveal that mammals got their start far earlier than experts had once imagined possible—and they evolved a number of specializations while the dinosaurs still ruled. The eventual demise of the dinosaurs (about 66 million years ago) allowed placental mammals, in particular, to flourish.
About Dr. Paul C. Holinger
Dr. Holinger is the former Dean of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Professor of Psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center, and a founder of the Center for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy. His focus is on infant and child development. Dr. Holinger is also the author of the book What Babies Say Before They Can Talk.
