The Subtle Importance of Affect ($)

Affect is both how you succeed and fail to present yourself.

I have learnt to keep quiet about certain things. —Nayanthara, actress

It’s amazing that people don’t know what affect is. I’m not sure that I know, so I have to make it up. I’m pretty sure I am correct. Affect is the ability to express emotion in a way that other people understand. The trouble comes when we try to evaluate it. You can’t judge affect.

I’ve been accused of being unemotional. I’ve been accused of being angry. I cannot relate to either of these assertions, but I use emotion sparingly. Experiences in my life have made me resent people who are or act stupidly. People who act stupidly are those who believe their own reasons with little or no reflection. Those people frustrate me.

Your ability to express affect is your ability to both communicate and direct how people relate to you. You cannot do this with reason because reason has no personal commitment. It is implicit in being reasonable that you’ll act on the conclusions you accept. Few actually do, but you’re supposed to.

Affect is essentially your commitment to what you think, which might be called your depth of feeling. If you can communicate this to others, then you can gain their trust. Trust that might expose vulnerabilities, needs, fears, and loves. This is a level of deeper motivation.

We refer to a person who displays exaggerated emotions as “affected,” and this is confusing because “affect” relates to emotions. But while being affected is an adjective, affect is a noun whose meaning is different. A person who lacks affect is flat and expressionless. They’re not just masking their emotions, they lack emotions.

There are levels of affect. I find that beneath every personality there is a grey zone of emotional uncertainty which is confusing. Beneath that, there are other levels which we rarely see or show. Therapy is an exploration of where affect leads.

A person who hides their emotions, someone with a good poker face, does not lack affect. They may choose not to communicate their feelings, or even the slightest hint of them, but such people convey a strong sense of presence. They appear to have feelings, but they’re not revealing them. Someone who lacks affect, on the other hand, seems emotionally absent, like a machine. You cannot have a relationship with an entity that lacks affect.

Rapport

There is both positive and negative rapport, though we usually think of rapport only as a positive trait. Teachers in my psychology degree program conveyed a strong sense of rapport, but it was retarded. These people were both absent and thoughtless, and that conveyed a strong message. On one hand, they were not aware, on the other hand, they thought they appeared as knowledgeable. They were proud authorities certified by other proud authorities.

We rarely ascribe emotion to a simple machine. This starts to change when we suspect the machine is following a program we don’t understand. We then start to see the machine as representing the intention of the people behind it. When we curse the computer or the car that won’t start, we’re cursing the situation and the people responsible for it. 

I’ll consider four people who I know well. Call them A, B, C, D: Alice, Blake, Carol, and David. They are friends or clients. Alice is an extraordinary sales person, and Blake a celebrity politician. Carol is has trouble managing her emotions, and David is dying of cancer. 

Each of these people offers a lesson in the role of affect and rapport. Their self-expression has much affect on how they understand themselves as how they’re understood by other people.

Alice will entrance you

At first, Alice is matter of fact, but quickly becomes enthusiastic. Regardless of your issue or perspective, Alice has a heart-felt connection to it, and she uses this to lead you back to her life and work. She represents an art program that’s always looking for funds. She knows that you know she’s committed to it, but she never sells overtly unless selling is the point.

Alice spends part of the year writing grants. Once the funds come in, she manages a program that serves several million people each year involving everyone from municipal authorities, neighborhood organizations, professional artists, and community volunteers. She is secretly judgemental and hard-edged, but she does not appear so in public. She reveals herself only in the confidence of private conversation, but even there you can feel her goal-oriented focus.

Her personal presentation is intelligent and emotional. She both knows what you want and how you feel, and she’s always on your side. Some people do cross the line, and with such folks she shows little tolerance. Threaten the program and you’re banished.

To be around her, you feel as if you’re being swept into a creative vortex. You may not have a creative bone in your body, or have uttered an enthusiastic shout in your life, but around Alice you feel like your genius has finally been recognized and you’re ready to sign on. 

How does she do this? We could say that Alice carefully manages her emotions to empathize with you in just the right way. I think she actually manages your emotions and knows your emotional G spot.

Her skill has many analogies with sex, and I mean this seriously. Alice’s program of social intercourse has phases: relaxation, engagement, excitation, elation, and consolidation. These are all emotional in nature and can ride on any intellectual content.

Most people are barely aware that they’re moving through prearranged phases as it feels both natural and spontaneous. It is and it isn’t. It must feel natural but Alice is watching from above. She is engaged and fully enmeshed, but she is also conducting the performance. Each phase has a distinct emotional tone which some might notice after the fact. 

If you’ve watched her interact enough, you can see these phases align. At each stage, Alice is fully present, adding fuel to the fire. She understands everything you feel and she honestly knows how to bring an idea to fruit. She really does.

It’s not that she leads you to her goal at the end, it’s that she commits you to her vision at the start. Once you’re on her side, all she needs to do is express to you her honest commitment and convince you of her skill, which she has in spades.

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Work on your contradictions. Call me.

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