Appreciation (24) … Affecting effects
Torrey Orton
May 24, 2010
One coin, two sides
I realised that what happens is that I confuse an effect1 with an affect2, and vice-versa. First off, they are both nouns and verbs, and they both overlap with each other. Second, affect is the bigger concept – less differentiated and more prevalent in everyday experienced – e.g. we are constantly affected by our worlds, except when diseased, disordered or focussed!! At those times we are affecting our worlds with emotional infections.
Mental teeth…
My doubtful capacity to clearly discriminate between affects and effects probably signals the lack of mathematical consciousness which prohibited me from taking an interest in the hands on parts of scientific disciplines. I really cannot engage the kind of abstractions which dominate my own profession - psychology – because they don't have enough meat on them, enough visceral contents, to stick in my mental teeth.
On the other hand, I can quite comfortably do theory of time and dilemmas of particle physics (that the process of studying particles required constructing settings – e.g. bubble chambers – to study them, thereby distorting (the real) nature(s)). The latter dilemmas of scientific process are still beyond everyday discourse in the science of psychology. Within the discipline in Australia, it remains largely a dispute conducted across a vast chasm of difference, with an air of disapproval on both sides for the perspectives they cannot take of the others. A failure of professional empathy? See the recent edition of Australian Psychologist, Volume 45, Issue 1 March 2010 , pages 67 – 76 for a discussion bemoaning the continuing dominance of a positivist scientific paradigm in our discipline.
This may betray my naturally integral frame of mind which can also handle contextualised numbers like restaurant bills intuitively within a few dollars of the staff calculated truth. The effect of a bill is a reduction of cash-in-hand, while the affect may be a kitchen of fine tastes and a stomach's satiation. A preference for the former may lead to entertaining memorable for its meanness of spirit rather than the lingering of its tastes, textures and colours. Or maybe I should just note that the effect of eating well is an affect.
Whichever way the preferences work, one thing is increasingly clear to some researchers in my profession – that thought, action and emotion cannot be considered apart from each other. No human thought occurs without an embodied emotional aspect which is experienced as feeling(s). The almost unreadably intense review of this research by Carroll E. Izard (Emotion Theory and Research: Highlights, Unanswered Questions and Emerging Research Annual Review of Psychology; 2009. 60:1–25) provides some hard science underpinnings of the cognitive dominance of affect over effect in certain phases and events of life development processes.
The underlying problem here is the lack of understanding of the integral nature of experience. This lack is intrinsic to the scientific enterprise modelled on physics and chemistry, which proceed by dis-integrating things, by analysing them further and further. The counterpoint to this movement in these sciences is their intuitive, theoretical side. The latter is held at arm's length by the self-described scientists of psychology here in order to maintain the sanctity (?) of their evidence-base. A need to be seen as comparable in treatment specificity (and implicitly, effectiveness) to medicine increasingly drives this preference. It's not a matter of scientific requirements, but medical funding models. Meanwhile Izard reminds us:
Emotions are motivational and informational, primarily by virtue of their experiential or feeling component. Emotion feelings constitute the primary motivational component of mental operations and overt behavior.
(pg. 3, emphasis supplied)
What can a psychological science do which does not proceed from that assumption? That which does not finds itself endlessly struggling with dissociated affect.
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