Starting with an occupational psychology intervention involving occupational physicians and using the clinic of activity methodology (Clot, 2008), we came to choose affectivity as our research subject. One of the results of the intervention was a transformation in how professionals felt about practising their profession. The intervention in a clinic of activity included film recordings of sequences of work activities, accompanied by discussions of the activities (Clot et al., 2000). We then had in our possession a corpus in which to try to discern traces of affective phenomena so that we could better understand them. A multimodal method combining looks, voice and words was developed to analyze the data. We will return here to a methodology for analyzing traces of affects that was presented in this research and repeated in later research (Bonnemain 2015; Tomàs & Bonnemain, 2019). The analytical approach seeks to show that through interventions pursuing the objective of empowerment, affectivity development is also made possible.