Silvan Solomon Tomkins b. 1911
Silvan Tomkins was a psychologist who developed theory and
script theory. During his work at Princeton he began to mentor Paul Ekman and
Carroll Izard. Tomkins’ role in the emergence of research on the face inspired
Ekman to undertake his research on the universality of certain facial
expressions. According to Tomkins, humans have an enormous amount of
information to process so that it can determine, “What do I want, and what do I
need to avoid?”, so it needs a system for responding to information, storing
it, classifying it, retrieving it and ranking its importance. As we move we
learn, adapt, predict and decide. The Affect System evolved so that we can
experience what is important (what things are urgent), maximising positive
affect and minimising the negative. It’s the pattern of scripts (facial and
body displays) that a person uses to modulate affect that make up a
personality.
Read Affect Imagery Consciousness, Volume I (other
volumes followed) (1962) Springer Publishing
