The stimulus might be external to the person or originate from inside the person. These 9 affects form the basic motivational system of all people from the first moment of birth to old age. All interactions with the world around us are directed by affect, according to Tomkins, because an affect must be triggered for us to become conscious of a stimulus. Tomkins saw the evolution of the affect system as a simplifying mechanism that assigns salience to the near infinite number of stimuli that bombard us as we move through our world, thus freeing our rather limited channel of consciousness to attend to that which is most important, i.e., that which triggers affect. In other words, affect is the lens through which we interact with the world around us and inside of us, and it is the starting point and basis of our psychological selves.
Many scenes are short lived and of no consequence and are, therefore, soon forgotten.
But other scenes bunch together because of their similarities or their intensity or other reasons and are then stored together in memory. Scripts form as a mechanism of dealing with groups of scenes that have bunched together. Each personality contains a unique combination of many different scripts, some more prominent than others. Because of a number of factors including the fact that positive affect is inherently rewarding and negative affect inherently punishing, the guiding principles behind healthy script formation are that positive affect should be maximized, negative affect minimized, and the inhibition of affect minimized. The scripts that begin in childhood are, of course, adaptations to the situation imposed upon the child.