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Drawing on concepts and data from psychoanalysis, neuroscience, ethology, and experimental psychology, this paper suggests that affects are the prime movers of human motivation and have, in addition, these properties: (1) they are neurophysiologically generated, sensationlike signals origination not in classical sensory systems, but in limbic structures; (2) activation of the neurobiologic affect generators reliably triggers motor stereotypes—like facial expression, posture, and tone of voice—which in turn transmit the physical data underlying empathy and emotional communication; and (3) appetitively sought pleasant emotions-sensations and aversive dysphoric feelings serve respectively as the ultimate, "brain-synthesized" positive and negative reinforcers of emotional learning.
The latter ideas point to derivative hypotheses: that parental nonverbal behavior and communication evoke in children the affects that guide character development and choice of defense, and that these processes are consistent with an affect-reinforced associative learning model comprising both operant and classical conditioning paradigms.
Psychoanalysis as therapy, then, may mechanistically rely for its clinical effectiveness on extinctionlike processes in which new experience in the analyst-patient relationship leads to the modulation or extinction of initially crippling signal affects associatively linked to various other affects, appetites, and behaviors.
Finally, the core hypotheses mesh both with recent findings from the cellular study of affect and learning mechanisms and with associative learning-unlearning assumptions variably explicit in psychoanalytic writings since the time of Freud's (1895) Project.