Search Results

This chapter explores the Finnish expression /voi että/, which is used as a response cry. It lacks referential meaning but is not devoid of meaning: it has become conventionalized as an index of affect display. /Voi että/ is part of a larger paradigm of phrasal affective responses. It is the most “open” one initiated with the interjection /voi/: there is no characterizing element but the interjection is followed by /että/, used elsewhere e.g. as a subordinating connective (’that’). This response merely voices recognition of the co-participant’s prior turn as one that has made an affective response relevant and that displays attunement to that affect. The chapter argues that by deploying a response type that expresses an affective stance but does not make the stance lexically explicit, the recipient orients to the ambivalence of the sequential implications and/or affective character of the prior talk.

This chapter explores, and ultimately rejects, the thought that enjoying erotica or pornography must always involve imagining something about oneself. After distinguishing between different kinds of imagining de se, and clarifying the general claim that there is a connection between emotional engagement with fiction and implicitly imagining de se, it turns to the case of pornography, examining and rejecting three possible arguments for a necessary connection between imagining, from the inside, being aware of represented events (that is, implicitly imagining de se), and being aroused by them. Since versions of these arguments might equally be applied to affective responses to fiction more generally, this chapter goes at least part way to undermining the ‘argument from affective response’, that is, the claim that one can provide a good explanation of our emotional responses to fictional events by construing imagining in relation to these events as imagining being aware of those events.

This chapter reviews a number of perceptual, cognitive, and behavioural (indirect) measures of affect that may help us understand musical emotions. It is organized as follows. First, the problems and limitations of self-report are described. Two main problems – demand characteristics and limited access to one own's internal processes – are discussed. Following this, the logic of indirect measures of affect is outlined, along with a set of definitions. This section also features a conceptual model of affective responding, which aims to facilitate distinctions and integration between different classes of indirect measures. The subsequent section describes seven classes of indirect measures and provides detailed examples of each class. The chapter ends with a brief summary and conclusions.

The promotion of physical activity and exercise has been a persistently challenging problem for industrialized societies. Traditionally, these behaviors have been conceptualized as resulting from the rational processing of information (e.g., regarding anticipated benefits, personal capabilities, sources of support). Therefore, attempts to change these behaviors have relied on the provision of information. The persistent failure to account for substantial portions of behavioral variance or raise physical activity and exercise behavior in a sustainable manner is forcing researchers to expand their theoretical perspective. Thus, emerging dual-process conceptualizations postulate that, besides an information-based pathway, physical activity and exercise may be influenced by affect, such as the energy and tiredness felt in daily life, or the pleasure and displeasure responses to past exercise. This chapter highlights potential conceptual and methodological pitfalls in this emerging line of research and summarizes the promising results of early correlational and experimental studies.

Philosophical aesthetics has increasingly turned towards empirical evidence to settle long-standing questions. Yet, surprisingly, given philosophers’ tendencies to cautious critical analysis, the use of such evidence is not always inspected as scrupulously as it could be. In this paper, Stock presents a case study illustrating what she takes to be one instance of the misuse of empirical evidence in a current debate within aesthetics: that of the so-called ‘paradox of fiction’. In some relatively recent literature, there has been a shift towards the citing of sub-personal events as a means of attempting to address this problem. In particular, those neurological or other physiological events that accompany imaginative responses to fictional entities are often cited. Yet, Stock argues, there are often flaws in the way empirical evidence is used to support this sort of account.

The chapter explores the neglected affective dimension in reader-response frameworks in cognitive poetics and narratology to advance a more holistic model of how readers make sense of stories. Future narratological frameworks need to accommodate emotion-derived reader responses in story comprehension as a complement to traditional, more narrowly intellect-based reader cognitions. The argument is divided into three sections. First, reiterating Stockwell’s conviction that affect is integral to understanding fictional narrative, a theory of ‘literary emotions’ is proposed in order to account for affective reader responses to fiction. A distinction is highlighted between discrete ‘emotionologies’ (i.e. culture-specific forms of emotional sense-making that produce idiosyncratic reader responses) and an evolutionary repertoire of basic emotions that warrants intercultural intelligibility of fiction. Following this exposition, a close reading of James Joyce’s short story ‘Eveline’ (1914) illustrates the interplay of affective and cognitive-rational components in decision-making processes that surface in fictional characters and reading audiences alike. The hapless heroine epitomizes the topical struggle between pragmatic and emotional contemplations as she unsuccessfully strives to break free from stifling personal circumstances. Readers, by the same token, will find themselves hesitant to condemn the heroine’s indecision as their empathic responses towards Eveline influence their evaluation of the fictional other. As a contribution to narratological theory formation, finally, an appendix attempts to jointly theorize affective and cognitive-intellectual reader responses within the unified framework of a ‘natural’ narratology. Monika Fludernik’s model, due to its emphasis on readers’ cognitive-constructivist construals of narrative, provides a theoretical model well suited to accommodating affective reader responses to literature.

This chapter considers the funeral lament as an integral part of larger adaptive process regulating emotions. Sustainability of the lament is understood here in the spirit of Jeff Titon's pioneering approach to sustainability of music cultures. For centuries, the lament retained its capacity to change not only in response to extremely emotional situations and life transformations, but also as a direct channel of their productive management. Ethnographic studies of the lament demonstrate its role both in expressing emotions of grief and in mobilizing social support. By juxtaposing earlier ethnographic studies with new empirical research on the affective heart responses to lament, this chapter offers insight into the lament's role in preventing the physical and cognitive breakdown of the grief-stricken body and thus in sustaining human life.

Visitors to the Gazelle Peninsula were intrigued by the local monetary system and the way in which tambu was intricately interwoven into the very texture of social life. One such traveler commented that New Britain was the only savage country he had visited where the natives had a true money currency of a standard value. This chapter discusses how the tambu is invested with powerful affect that moves people to act in various ways. It also examines Tolai attitudes toward death and their cultural and affective responses to it in order to provide a deeper understanding of the attachment to tambu.

Susan T. Fiske reflects on her most underappreciated work: her research on affect and its relation to schema, which went against the cognitive tide sweeping social psychology at the time. The first wave of social cognition research focused on social knowledge structures (self schemas, personality prototypes, social categories); Fiske argued that affective responses are determined by schema match.

Chapter 13 reports on research that demonstrates a correlation and supports a causal connection between longer-term, more intense participation in nominally secular yoga or mindfulness and changes in religious self-reporting and affiliations. The chapter develops a theory to explain how embodied practices may produce religious effects. Participating in practice communities may shape perception through 1) intensification and heightened awareness of sensory experiences; 2) reinterpretation of experiences through the lens of socially constructed beliefs and values; and 3) cultural associations that remain after subtracting religious language. This interplay may elicit emotional and affective responses, inspire attitudes performed metaphorically, and establish ideas in memory. Because meditative practices are embodied, regularly repeated, and emotionally charged, such practices may be more efficacious than doctrinal teachings in conveying and reinforcing religious meanings. This chapter argues that marketing yoga and mindfulness as secular science can both veil and heighten religious effects through encouraging involvement by those who would abstain if they initially perceived these practices as religious. Practitioners may experience emotional reactions or affectiveresponses that motivate actions to generate desired emotions; internalize metaphorically enacted attitudes; and interpret experiences as confirming truth and goodness of religious assumptions, values, and world views associated with yoga or mindfulness.

The aim of this chapter is to develop a viable characterization of aesthetic experience, clarifying along the way the relation between aesthetic experience and aesthetic attitude, aesthetic attention, and aesthetic properties. Before spelling out a new conception of aesthetic experience, the chapter engages at length with two current competing conceptions, the content-oriented account of Noel Carroll, and the valuing-based account of Gary Iseminger, where differences expressed here with the former are substantial, while differences with the latter are rather less so. What distinguishes aesthetic experience on the characterization of it, the chapter proposes is the conjunction of a certain sort of perceptual engagement with an object and some sort of broadly affective response to that engagement. In light of the characterization developed the chapter assesses, in the last section, the status of three experiences that might be said to lie on the periphery of the aesthetic, namely sexual, pharmacological, and mystical ones.

This chapter discusses the notion of musical expectancy. Musical expectancy is defined as a process whereby an emotion is aroused in a listener because a specific feature of the music violates, delays, or confirms the listener's expectations about the continuation of the music. Every time the listener hears a piece of music, he or she has such expectations, based on music he or she has heard before. For example, the sequential progression of E-F# may set up the expectation that the music will continue with G#. In other words, some notes seem to imply other notes; and if these musical implications are not realized — if the listener's expectations are thwarted — an affective response might be induced.