The first module in our 2023 series A New Theory of the Body involves an examination of affect and emotion, but we will also include a third component - that of disposition. We will need rigorous definitions of these terms.
Title
Note that in the literature, the terms are used in different, often contradictory ways. So if you are reading, make sure you figure out what definitions the author is using, before you get too deep in the weeds.
Disposition is actually the most fundamental term.
Because of this, it is more subtle and harder to define. Disposition is a state, --- we would refer to the dispositional state of the person. This is like a general mood, or energy signature of your body. Physiologically it has to do with a variety of homeostatic and regulatory systems and processes such as vagal tone, 1 gut biome and the enteric nervous system, chemical levels in the body (sugar, insulin, hormones, neuro-active chemicals and the like), as well as global oscillations in the nervous system associated with the kinds of brain waves we are familiar with (alpha, beta, theta) and the kinds of global physiological rhythms we are less familiar with.
Breath work is one of the most popular practices that directly affects your dispositional state. Posture and movement practices, like Qigong and Tai-Chi also directly affect your dispositional state.
Mind the GAP
In a previous course on embodiment I shared the GAP table which highlights groundedness, awareness, and presence as qualities of a healthy, responsive, alive dispositional state. You can ask yourself the following questions.
Affect streams
Above a certain arousal threshold, dispositional states start to flow through discrete anatomical, neuro-chemical, and global circulation processes that we call the affect streams. Below the certain threshold, you might have an equal chance of being fearful or being angry. Once the threshold is breached, the affect-laden energy in a sense “makes a choice” and the specific action protocols associated with the chosen stream come into effect. If I am fearful, the action protocols for making myself smaller and retreating boot up. If I am angry, the action protocols cause my fists and jaw to clench… you know how it goes!
We define “affect” as the particular configuration of the body associated with the particular threshold event that carries forward into the discrete anatomical, neuro-chemical and global circulation processes, and trigger specific action protocols (and perhaps a predictable sequence of events if the body is highly habituated).
“Particular configuration of the body” refers to phenomena such as\
- does the heart rate go up or down\
- do the pupils dilate or contract\
- which muscles become more tense and which ones relax\
- what special neuro-chemical cocktails are flooded into the blood and brain\
- what the gut microbiome is doing and how it is affecting the enteric brain\
- global responses in the immune system\
- opponent proccessing in the brain
which together create an affective tone from which (to use John Vervaeke’s term) both relevance realization and cognitive sculpting arise.
This definition is based on the work of Jaak Panksepp, which has become canonical in the field. Jaak traces the human affects from our animal nature, and discovers there is complete continuity throughout the animal kingdom. 2
Panksepp identifies seven discrete affect streams. Unfortunately he names them by the human emotion associated with them. In order to highlight their distinction from human emotions, he capitalizes the terms as follows: CARE, PANIC, SEEKING, FEAR, PLAY, ANGER, LUST
It is important to understand the difference between the affect itself and its human-emotional couterpart. Consider for example, the FEAR affect. Since we have defined affect as the particular configuration the body takes on, FEAR as an affect means just the following in, for example, a deer who is startled by the sound of the branch on the path ahead which triggers the FEAR affect state: the pupils contract, the body is primed to move in multiple directions such that the deer stands alert, poised and flexible. Notice this description doesn’t say anything about the deer being “fearful” in the sense that people think of being “fearful.” One might argue that the deer is “prepared and in its evolutionary- biological power.”
So this is the key point that the embodied affect state does not include all the human-centric “psychologically conditioned” meaning of what we are now calling the human emotion. 3
Emotional valence
So how does the affect turn into a full-blown emotion and how does the emotion get psychologically conditioned in the first place?
Above a certain threshold (that phrase again!) for humans, the affect becomes complexified by narrative-memory imaginal overlays and turns into the experience of an emotion. For some (if not most) 4 people this threshold is extremely low and the affective processes of the body trigger an emotional response almost immediately.
[Here is where it is critical that people purporting to be doing embodied work are able to make distinctions between the actual bodily-based affects and the imaginal and narrative shockwaves that are triggered by them. Adding to or even focussing on the narrative or imaginal constructions to the “memory stack of the emotional system” is not helpful, and can be more much harmful than the initial affective state, since it takes the person away from the embodied reality, rather than directs them back to the body and potential integration with the mind.]
It is important to be able to detect the narrative-imaginal- memory overlay that complexifies the affective response into an emotional one. The narrative-imaginal-memory overlay is actually *destabilizing *and disregulating to the system. Too much overlay and the person can experience what is called “limbic overwhelm” or “emotional flooding” where the regulator deep in the mid-brain becomes overwhelmed and in response floods the system with extreme levels of neurotoxins that shuts down the normal, response-able affect system down. 5
Emotional valence is conditioned in early childhood by the primary caregivers. Consider, for example, a mother’s reaction to her child falling and getting a cut on her knee. The child’s body is aroused into the FEAR stream and looks to the mother to get the “relevant information” that should be associated with that arousal. If the mother reflects back a disregulated state of panic, or even fear itself, this will set a strong negative emotional valence on the otherwise perfectly normal bodily response. On the other hand, if the mother reflects back seeking/curiosity… hmmm.. “Ok, let’s see what happened. Oh there is a cut, let’s see what we can do to make that feel much better.” then the emotional valence of that bodily response turns fear toward seeking and care.
This then, is how the affect streams work in unison. A Diana Fosha, a clinical psychologist and student of Panksepp in turn had a student Eileen Russel. Eileen noticed that for the purposes of healing and clinical work, the affects could be arranged as primary sequences or “streams” as follows:
She organized six of the seven affects into three affect streams: the *Connection *affects, *Tremulous *affects, and Mastery affects
Russel realized that there were pairs of affects that had the same “energy signature” as it were, but were distinguished by being either an expanded or contracted mode. 6 CARE and PANIC, for example, both have to do with the energy of “human connection,” but whereas care is nurturing and expansive (creates reciprocal openings) panic is the fear of losing someone (thing, situation) you care for/about. Russel realized that there was a therapeutic leverage point if you could get the patient/client to see that the contracted mode was “in the same arena” as the expanded mode, and could work, from an embodied, experiential sense 7 from the existing mode to the expanded mode.
Similarly, Russel noticed how that people (and animals) engaging in rough-house play are often triggered into anger when certain boundaries are crossed. If you think of “guys” hanging out at the bar, with a lot of play energy --- spoofing and teasing and toying with each other--- you can sense that line between play and anger. 8 She called these the “mastery energies” because it is how we master skills. Think of sports, but also a difficult math problem which can begin with playful “solving” energy and end with you breaking your pencil on the desk!
Russel paired the affects “seeking” and “fear” together, noting that fine line between seeking something and being fearful of it at the same time --- the curiosity killing the cat thing. Remember that deer in the forest --- they are simultaneously curiosly seeking what is there, at the same time as being fear-fully prepared to run. Ingeniously, she named these the “tremulous energies” because they both have the characteristic of the trembling body. You seek a lover and fear at the same time--- both trembling. You seek to deliver your speech and fear it at the same time--- and you tremble.
After discovering Russel’s work I added two dimensions to her grid--- a more seriously contracted state I call “depressive mode” (which is a energy collapse- shut down) and also a fully expanded state I call “awakened mode” (which has the energy of liberation)
From the standpoint of transformational practices, this grid tells us that we can start where we are and move the signature of the affect first down from the emotional narrative-imaginal-mimetic stack where it presents only an avenue for hopelessly complexifying the present moment into a simluation, an obvious obstacle for healing, and secondly toward the direction not only of well-being, but also toward liberating wisdom. 9
Side note 1: Anxiety
Before we go further, I just want to add another definition that is useful. It comes from the method/work of Habib Davanloo he called Intensive Short-term Dynamic Psychotherapy (which was foundational work for Diana Fosha’s AEDP). For our purposes we don’t need to get into all the details, so here is our working definition
Anxiety = dispositional state that results in the down-regulation of arousal energy.
Let’s say I have to speak at a funeral and I know that I am going to cry due to the panic/grief I feel for the loved one and family, and also I have fear arising too. I intentionally, or not, keep the system down-regulated at the dispositional state, rather than entering any specific affect stream. As a result I experience a generalized discomfort state of anxiety, which is the experience of down-regulation.
Or let’s say I am feeling lustful around someone. I go over to talk to them and I feel, well, the lust becomes fuzzy and is replaced by a sense of anxiety.
Or let’s say I get caught in a bad situation and am called out for it. Instead of getting angry, I begin to justify my actions with all kinds of bullshit. I probably will also experience quite a bit of anxiety, as I down-regulate the anger. Which brings us to side note 2:
Side note 2: Guilt and Shame
Guilt and shame are emotions not affects, because they depend on culturally conditioned interpretations of affect states. Guilt is the emotion that is associated with having done something wrong that one knew was wrong to do. This “knowing what is wrong” --- what is against the cultural norms and rules--- is the conditioned part. Guilt can trigger anger or fear, but it also can bring up play and seeking, as when the guilty person takes a game-theoretic approach to getting off the hook.
Shame, on the contrary, is a deeper, more complex emotion that always comes as a double-bind. It happens early in life when you have an authentic impulse to do something (like jump and clap for the fun of it) and it is reflected back to you as something wrong (stop it!). You are in a double-bind in the sense you either have to discomfirm the authentic impulse, or go against the cultural norm. You cannot accommodate both, you are forced to choose.
Guilt and shame can become entangled when, as for example, when people are born with a-typical impulses (like pedophilia) that are authentic to them, but they are smart enough or aware enough to not cross the moral line. See for example this medium article about one young man’s struggle with being a “morally responsible pedophile.” On the other hand, authentic impulses put pressure on society to reexamine the normative standards and moral rules as, for example, with homosexuality (which is an authentic impulse in some people, but was for a time considered socially immoral).
How does this fit into the sensemaking up-hierarchy model?
You might have already guessed that the energy flows from dispositional state to affect streams to narrative-imaginal-mimesis comprises a sensemaking up-hierarchy. This bottom-up processing is the natural operational state of the embodied being.
When the situation runs in reverse --- from the narrative-imaginal-mimetic down wherein the emotion dis-regulates the body and severs its participation in the present, the natural up-hierarchy becomes a top-down controlled, conditioned down-hierarhcy. Remember we defined up-hierarchy as a self-organized system where actions taken at the local level travel up as information to be generalized at the contextual level, rather than rules at the top functioning as instructions given to the bottom. This top-down process is a kind of dis-association, because what is actually happening (in the body, in the room, in the world) becomes dis-associated from experience (it becomes irrelevant) and so the energy runs in circles around a narrative-imaginal-mimetic loop, furthering the habituated reaction.
How does the loop take over?
We get caught in the loop because the sensemaking up-hierarchy requires an intermediate step that is missing from the looping one. And that is perception. A fully functioning sensemaking up-hierarchy goes from affect to perception and flow towards actions that satisfy. This route is interrupted when the affect turns toward virtual perceptions rather than sensorimotor perceptions, and become entrained as a loop when it is no longer flowing toward actions that satisfy. Hence we worry, ruminate and compound the situations in our mind, rather than take actions that either 1) satisfy the arousal toward an equilibirum in the dispositional state or 2) take real choice and action in the world.
Let’s consider a common example. You pay for something and you notice that spending money makes you nervous. It’s a kind of disruptive arousal. If you stay in the state of general nervousness (aka anxiety) you won’t discover what is the authentic affect that is wanting to come (note- there may be more than one!). Is it fear? or anger?
If is is fear, then you can ask yourself, what is it that you are seeking (because that is the other side of fear). If its a noble pursuit, you can choose to keep spending your money and taking the risk because it is a noble pursuit. You transmute that anxiety into a kind of defiant choice that, albeit comes with the taste of risk. What is “defiant choice that comes with the taste of risk?” --- none other than courage!
But if you ask yourself what is it that you are seeking, maybe there is not a good answer. Maybe you are being foolish with the way you are spending money and your fear is based on the actual uninteded risk you are accumulating. Now you face a different kind of choice. Maybe the question is deeper (probably is) and ususally is entangled with some kind of narrative you have about status. For example you fear that if you live within your means, then you will have less social status. That of course is a problem of another kind. That problem lives in your narrative-identity conditioning and should be examined there.
If there is anger wanting to be acknowledged, you might explore what play or mastery energy you are engaging. But anger might also be a response to some narrative-identity-boundary you are caught up in. You might find you are angry because you are caught up in a win-lose system and you are losing. In which case you take the reality of the situation (I can’t change the economy) as a hard constraint, but you still can find choice inside it (accept the risk, ride the wave, appreciate the constant reminder that keeps your spending in check). 10
Building powerful action protocols
One final piece of this pie is the relationship between all of this and action protocols. The practice here is to build a system of robust action protocols that, when a specific affect stream is called forth, moves the energy in an up-hierarhcy, from affect-laden drives toward clarity of perception in the external habitat (what is actually happening here, what is actually the case) and keep that flowing toward actionable choices (or real actions taken) that will satisfy the arousal state. Only then the information in the experience is updated in the memory stack (it actually happens overnight in sleep phases, when working current memory processes are downloaded from hippocampal areas in the mid brain to deeper, episodic memory stacks in the lower brain, essentially completing the descending “global updating” of the sensemaking up-hierarhcy). We will develop this more as we move on to perception and memory in the next modules.
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Footnotes
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From Wikipedia: Vagal tone is activity of the vagus nerve, the 10th cranial nerve and a fundamental component of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. This branch of the nervous system is not under conscious control and is largely responsible for the regulation of several body compartments at rest. Vagal activity results in various effects, including: heart rate reduction, vasodilation/constriction of vessels, glandular activity in the heart, lungs, and digestive tract, liver, immune system regulation as well as control of gastrointestinal sensitivity, motility and inflammation.
In this context, tone specifically refers to the continual nature of baseline parasympathetic action that the vagus nerve exerts. While baseline vagal input is constant, the degree of stimulation it exerts is regulated by a balance of inputs from sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the autonomic nervous system, with parasympathetic activity generally being dominant. Vagal tone is frequently used to assess heart function, and is also useful in assessing emotional regulation and other processes that alter, or are altered by, changes in parasympathetic activity. ↩
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At the nether edges, the same proto-processes can be traced back to the “lowly worms” and others have found continuity into single celled animals. ↩
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There is an interesting question of whether animals that are domesticated as pets, have some features of emotion that people have. Consider for example, the case of the “guilty dog” who looks like they are ashamed when caught doing something naughty. We know from the reports of highly-functioning autistic people that it is possible to learn the correlative body postures that the other expects to alleviate the situation, without actually experiencing the actual emotion. ↩
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As we will see, there is a cultural effect here, since parenting styles determine how fast the trigger from affect to emotion happens. In most western, modernized cultures, the trigger is almost simultaneous with the affect and emotional (limbic) flooding occurs immediately. For most other cultures, there is a broad spectrum from medium to lower emotional trigger thresholds. ↩
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This is more critical today than ever, since all of the emotional hijacking that takes place in media writ large, including propaganda, conspiracy theories and just plain old social media, hooks into this narrative-imaginal-memetic stack, while really having little or no ability to reach the body directly, except through this “limbic portal” which is a narrative-imaginal-mimetic stack. ↩
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There is some speculation that the difference is associated with vagal tone. ↩
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Russel was a practitioner of Fosha’s AEDP method Accelerated, Experiential, Dynamic Therapy ↩
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In fact, one of the most emphasized outcomes of Panksepp’s work is the importance of rough-house play for the development of healthy children, especially boys who are more at risk in this regard. There have been many follow-up studies confirming this both at the psychological and social level. ↩
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If you would like a taste of this, read Diana Fosha’s article Emotion and Recognition at Work for a more complete treatment read The Healing Power of Emotion ↩
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Note that these are hallmarks of wisdom --- facing the reality (awakening wisdom) and still finding choice in the hard constraints of reality (liberating wisdom). The unwise (foolish) alternative means going into fantasy (narrative-imaginal-mimetic) as a distraction from both the reality and the choice-making. ↩