Affective Attunement Research Articles

How residents and volcanoes co-produce risk knowledge: Ways of knowing and affective attunement to the rhythms of Lonquimay volcano, Chile

In this paper, we present our understanding of the importance of affects in people's sense-making of volcanic risk in everyday life. In doing so, we explore how local knowledge on volcanism is produced and circulated through communities' ongoing affective encounters with volcanoes. Through ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, we draw on the heterogeneous experiences and narratives of Malalcahuello residents living next to the Lonquimay volcanic complex in the Southern Andes of Chile. Its last eruption in 1988–1990 formed a new cone on the NE flank, called Navidad (Christmas), which has allowed residents to experience active volcanism in a twofold sense: being affected by its impacts during the eruption, and responding affectively to the volcano in everyday life. The results pave the way for a typology of affect-based ways of knowing volcanism. These are constituted by multiple people's viewpoints: 1) knowing the ground, 2) knowing the territory, 3) knowing the risk, and 4) knowing the behaviour. These ways of knowing vary according to, and are in part determined by, the different rhythms of the volcano itself. Therefore, active volcanism becomes a more-than-human agent of knowledge through its rhythmic presence in people's everyday lives. Over time, the local population has become affectively attuned to both ‘hazardous situations’ related to volcanic eruption and ‘risk and safe situations’ during volcanic quiescence. These attributes of human-volcano encounters turn hazardous spaces into affect-laden spaces at different times, raising the need to rethink spatio-temporal dimensions in knowledge dialogue and disaster risk reduction. Overall, the paper underlines the importance of affect-oriented risk research in Chile and worldwide to account for the pre-existent viewpoints from which a volcano is at the heart of people's concerns.

On Bion's Concept of Truth in an Extra-Moral Sense.

The paper explores the concept of truth in Bion's theory and in the post-Bionian context of the analytic field. Truth is addressed on three levels: epistemological, metapsychological, and clinical. Bion criticizes positivism in psychoanalysis, and the same vertex when it appears in psychoanalysis itself, stating that the search for truth at all costs is similar to the arrogance and stupidity of the psychotic part of the personality. He revolutionizes the analytic concept of truth by orienting it to the function of the emotional linking between analyst and patient rather than to content. Post-Bionian analytic theory further develops these concepts. In a field or radically intersubjective perspective, the author emphasizes the shift from an "I/you" perspective to a "we" perspective. The treatment is less about the abstract search for supposed truths and more about the truth being expressed in the process of emotional and affective attunement.

Navalny’s direct-casting: Affective attunement and polarization in the online community of the most vocal Russian opposition politician

Social media has a significant impact on the process of political polarization. Despite a large body of research on polarization and social media in democracies, studying this relationship in autocracies remains a niche field. This paper describes the content, composition, and behavioral patterns of discussions that take place on YouTube in the community of Russia’s most vocal opposition politician, Alexei Navalny. Based on a corpus of more than eight million comments, this study provides empirical evidence on the relatively short-term nature of affective attunement induced by a leader promising social changes within an authoritarian context. This discovery is manifested in the observation that periods of high public interest in Navalny’s activities are marked by a significant influx of new audience members into his community. However, the retention rate of this cohort of users was lower than that of the cohort of commenters, who started discussions during periods of lower public interest in Navalny’s activities. This conclusion applies not only to the entire set of commenters, but also to pro-government and anti-government users. According to the exploratory text analysis, the most common topics in discussions were praising Navalny’s activities, criticizing the government, and enticing people to share videos to change the minds of apolitical citizens or pro-government supporters. Finally, one of the affective polarization parameters, the degree of toxicity of discussions, is higher on Navalny’s community than on an apolitical celebrity’s YouTube channel, which establishes a baseline for the level of incivility.

“Use your common sense to navigate, and you're gonna get along okay”: Exploring the sensorial politics of attunement, survival, and resistance in Canadian federal prisons

What does prison feel like? This question has generated a theoretically and epistemologically innovative body of literature known as sensory criminology. However, due to the bureaucratic barriers that researchers experience in trying to access prison spaces and incarcerated people, much of this literature is written about/from the privileged experiences of prison ethnographers, undoubtedly missing many of the sensory nuances of prison life. To collapse the distance, and to prioritize the value of the sensory from the perspective of incarcerated people, we use qualitative data gleaned from 57 semi-structured interviews with former federally incarcerated people in Canada to examine the sensory dynamics of prison life as they are grounded in lived experiences. To concentrate our discussion, we focus analytic attention on the sensorial politics of survival and resistance, highlighting how incarcerated people must first become affectively and sensorially attuned to the prison environment to survive and resist the state-sanctioned violence of incarceration. After contextualizing our project – Feeling the Carceral – we analyze what incarcerated people describe as the shocking and tumultuous process of affective attunement to the prison environment. Next, we demonstrate how incarcerated people use their sensory interpretations of prison spaces to both protect themselves from, and resist, state-sanctioned violence, ultimately questioning the ethics and usefulness of carceral intervention. Specifically, we contend that attending to the ways incarcerated people sensorially decipher and interpret the prison environment not only demonstrates the intelligence and resourcefulness of criminalized people, but it also reveals more subtle, yet nonetheless totalizing, forms of prison violence that have been previously overlooked in the literature.

Resonance and Atmosphere: An Affect-Theoretical Exposé

Abstract This article examines the relationship between two phenomena and their respective concepts circulating in contemporary affect theory, i.e., ‘affective resonance’ and ‘affective atmosphere.’ Identifying the main aspects of the two concepts clarifies how the phenomena differ from each other, as well as how they may relate in a dynamic interplay. In light of a distinction between and a conjunction of the aspects of ‘affective relationality’ and ‘affective spatiality,’ the paper proposes a conceptualization of this dynamic interplay through the concept of ‘affective attunement,’ in which resonance and atmosphere are held to converge. As part of this endeavor, the paper further investigates the diverging philosophical traditions to which the two concepts of affective resonance and affective atmosphere originally belong, respectively Spinozist affect theory and New phenomenology.

Jeu de rôle en ligne : un espace de narrativité inscrit dans la mise en scène de soi et de la famille

AimThe purpose of this research is to study how the way in which players use their avatar in Massive Multiplayer Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) contributes to self-construction. This particular space leads the players to the creation of a specific narrative identity, nurtured by interactions and experiences shared with peers, onto which they project fragments of themselves and their personal history that will be staged through image, action, and language. MethodFour participants were recruited through a notice published on communication servers belonging to different communities of the same online game. The hypotheses were assessed through a series of two semi-structured remote interviews based on a grid of ten themes. ResultsThe results show that role-playing is used as a tool for rewriting personal history, enabling participants to heal, on the level of the fantasy, their individual and family wounds and trauma. In this study, we also noticed that digital transparency supports the spontaneity of communications thanks to its disinhibiting function. Thus, online role-playing games turn out to be a potential space of real creativity where participants can interact by trial and error without fear of failure, where they can be destroyed and can express their own emotions and desires without destroying the other, because it's just pretend. In this way, they develop their subjectivity and try to develop a better affective attunement in order to integrate into the virtual and material human community. Digital transparency also facilitates participants’ investment in online role-playing as a place of projection and staging of their psychic contents in a symbolic repetition where the family history, even the family romance, are reinterpreted and become factors of transformation, reconciliation, or emancipation. DiscussionNarrative identities are true reflections of the participants’ concerns and are invested during and outside game sessions. Through the position of narrator, the participants talk and develop meaningful friendships with other players. They try to give meaning to a shared subjective experience that they record as their own heritage as well as the group's collective memory. In this study, role-playing provides a form of containment for possible depressive affects and diverts attention from anxieties, like Pascal's entertainment. At first, this space could serve as a kind of technological substitute, a “prosthesis” for some players with defective psychic functions, who struggle to express their emotions and to bond with others. But over the years, they seem rather to seize upon the support provided by this “psychic orthosis” that links and connects to rewrite their own history, to seek out and to come to terms with others and themselves. ConclusionIn these overlapping potential spaces of creation, players try to orient their own lives by relying on the experiences they have been able to co-construct through a common narrative, presented as both foreign and unique to themselves. They may feel better equipped to face an intersubjectivity that could sometimes be experienced as disappointing or threatening.

“We got so much better at reading each other’s energy”: Knowing, acting, and attuning as an improv ensemble

ABSTRACT Background Long-form dramatic improvisation has been investigated as an accomplishment of emergent creativity among an ensemble of “players,” focusing on how the group achieves “group flow” in performance. Methods This article employs ethnographic methods (focus group, interviews, and video-assisted self-interviews) to investigate the case of a musical theater improv group. The analysis focuses on how the group describes its shared modes of knowing, drawing on the group’s history and their interpreted enactment of these modes in an improvised scene. Findings Improvisation in this group requires two inter-related forms of knowing: Shared Social Practice (SSP) and Collaborative Affective Attunement (CAA), where SSP involves definable repertoires, resources, conventions, and techniques, and CAA involves affective sensibility of in-the-moment responding, or affective attunement. These two forms of knowing develop over the course of a group’s history and are entangled in complex ways over the course of performance. Contribution Through a case study of a musical theater improv ensemble, the paper contributes to ongoing efforts to theorize the relationship between embodied experience, social practice, and affect in group knowing with special consideration for the significant role of collaborative affective attunement.

The Horizons of Chronic Shame

Experiences of shame are not always discrete, but can be recurrent, persistent or enduring. To use the feminist phenomenologist Sandra Lee Bartky’s formulation, shame is not always an acute event, but can become a “pervasive affective attunement” (Bartky, 1990: 85). Instead of experiencing shame as a discrete event with a finite duration, it can be experienced as a persistent, and perhaps, permanent possibility in daily life. This sort of pervasive or persistent shame is commonly referred to as “chronic shame” (Pattison, 2000; Nathanson, 1992; Dolezal, 2015). Chronic shame is frequently associated with political oppression and marginalization. In chronic shame, it is the potentiality of shame, rather than the actuality, that is significant. In other words, the anticipation of shame (whether explicit or implicit) comes to be a defining feature of one’s lived experience. Living with chronic shame has important socio-political consequences. Thus far, chronic shame has eluded simple phenomenological analysis, largely because chronic shame often does not have a clear experiential profile: it is frequently characterised by the absence rather than the presence of shame. The aim of this article is to provide a phenomenology of chronic shame, drawing from Edmund Husserl’s formulation of the ‘horizon’ as a means a to discuss structural aspects of chronic shame experiences, in particular how chronic shame is characterised by structures of absence and anticipation.

Changes in Affect Integration and Internalizing Symptoms After Time-Limited Intersubjective Child Psychotherapy-A Pilot Study.

Time-limited intersubjective child-psychotherapy (TIC) is an intensive, structured right-brain oriented therapeutic approach for children and caregivers aimed at both symptom reduction and strengthening core developmental processes such as affect integration. This is the first study to investigate changes in internalizing symptoms and affect integration after TIC. Thirty-three children between 9 and 13 years with internalizing difficulties were assessed after 10 h of TIC. Internalizing symptoms were assessed through the child behavior checklist and affect integration with the affect consciousness interview (ACI). Scores from the children with internalizing difficulties were modeled in a mixed linear model along with data from a control group without internalizing difficulties (n = 24) to control for effects of time and learning. Affect integration increased significantly from time 1 to time 2 in the children with internalizing problems, but not in the control children. Internalizing symptoms were also significantly reduced in the children with internalizing difficulties from time 1 to time 2. The results indicate that TIC may contribute to a decrease in symptoms along with an increase in affect integration in children with internalizing difficulties, making the children better able to notice, tolerate and communicate affective states. This can, in turn, aid development and day-to-day regulation and interactions. The article explores key elements of TIC, such as affective attunement, relational repair, and work with caregivers using one of the individual therapies in the study as an example. The article argues that TIC represents a right-hemisphere to right-hemisphere therapeutic approach to healing that can both enhance important common therapeutic factors such a relation and alliance and bring about growth-promoting change.

Landing in affective atmospheres

Studies on affect and affective atmospheres have been a topic of increasing interest in marketing, particularly in the management of consumption and retail spaces where service providers attempt to orchestrate a prescribed, collective affective response in consumers. This paper draws on the work of Sara Ahmed and Margaret Wetherell to bring the subject back to the fore, providing a more fine-grained theorisation of how individuals land in such atmospheres. We articulate surfacing and sticking as key dimensions of landing, highlighting the heterogeneity of our landing, whereby affect is individually felt through bodily reactions due to how our personal affective history intersects with the socio-political context. Using a poetic affective attunement method, we capture intensely affective atmospheres, namely spirit-permeated religious settings in Brazil; demonstrating how landing results in different orientations or disorientations through which often elided emotional experiences come into view, privileging some subjects and objects whilst disadvantaging others.

The Feedback and Noise of Hiroko Komatsu's Photographic Materialities

Abstract This article explores the dynamic forms of positive feedback found in Hiroko Komatsu's 2017 photography installation, The Execution of Personal Autonomy. This article details how Komatsu's installation generates an intensive interface among photographed materials and photochemical materialities that constitute a noise-like interface akin to the creative production of feedback in Noise music. As a redistribution of affective attunements that inhere within the urban landscape, this article discusses how Komatsu's photographic forms of feedback offer an evolving site for grasping, and potentially reimagining, the reproductive processes of capitalist society. Komatsu's photographic praxis reveals a novel understanding of photography's own role as a material and affective “infrastructure” critical to the reproductive relations of neoliberal and state capitalism.

How young adult videogames materialize senses of self through ludonarrative affects: understanding identity and embodiment through sociomaterial analysis

ABSTRACT This article contributes a novel mode of sociomaterial analysis that develops critical methodologies to analyze how videogames participate in the production of affect during gameplay. The authors report on a multi-year international study addressing representations of youth in Young Adult Videogames (YA Games), or games played through the perspective of an adolescent. Over 450 hours of gameplay, researchers used ludo-narratological concepts to create a novel methodological approach to critical game analysis through which player-researchers attune themselves to the affects of ludonarrative harmony and dissonance as units of analysis, asking: How do moments of ludonarrative harmony and dissonance in YA Games produce senses of being an adolescent? Analyzing how ludonarratives participate in the production of affect in YA Games foregrounded social constructions of youth, including experiences with mental health. Implications for attending to affect in videogame criticism are discussed, as well as pedagogies for focusing on adolescents’ affective attunement to ludonarratives.

What does it mean to ‘play’ in analysis?

ABSTRACT Playing’ in analysis within the frame of the post-Bionian theory of the analytic field has to do with a) listening to the discourse of the unconscious as if virtually everything reflected the dream of the couple or the analytic field, b) interpreting the process of analysis not as rectifying transference distortions but as promoting emotional transformations, c) using a simplestyle of conversation with the patient. In the new paradigm of psychoanalysis, which can be defined no longer as epistemic but as ontological, i.e. directed not so much to unveiling repressed contents as to promoting new psychic functions, the psychoanalysis of children, in which play has such an important place, serves as a model for the psychoanalysis of adults. The concepts of activity, vitality, intensity, curiosity, pleasure, exploration, spontaneity, openness, etc., become elements that ideally should be present in any analysis. In the play, everything is fiction and it is played à deux. Playing serves to make the mind grow through moments of affective attunement (at-one-ment). Hence the need for the analyst to have the conceptual instruments useful to intuit at the highest possible degree of resolution what is happening on the unconscious and shared level of the relationship.

Exil and the Cinematic Mood of Racism

Exil and the Cinematic Mood of Racism Olivia Landry (bio) Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. —Edward W. Said, "Reflections of Exile" How can cinema recreate the experience of everyday racism? This is the question that motivates this essay, and one that goes beyond mere narrative content. Racism and racist acts have long been portrayed in many different films. This is rather a question about how racism is experienced by those it targets and how this experience translates into the language of cinema, from genre and aesthetics to expression and affective attunement. What is the cinematic mood of racism? Jordan Peele's American horror film Get Out (US, 2017) has received much praise for its allegorical recreation of the experience of racism in liberal white society, specifically the experience of being Black in America. In many ways the first of its kind, Get Out is a film about racism that mobilizes the cinematic genre of horror with its conventions of suspense, jump scares, the fantastical, and slasher violence to portray racism in contemporary America. But the culminating racialized violence of the film and its crest, one that eventually becomes inverted by the main character's successful escape from a rich white family's plot to use his young body to achieve eternal youth, consists chiefly of the true-to-life microaggressions this character, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), faces vis-à-vis the police and the family. As Isabel Pinedo asserts, "In contrast to most American popular culture, Get Out centers black suffering in a way that neither [End Page 223] renders black people as abject nor mediates this suffering through a white character. The centrality of a black protagonist makes visible the otherwise invisible whiteness of characters (Dyer 1997) in horror film."1 As a point of departure, Get Out provides a notable example of a film's generic assertion of the experience of racism and therefore the possibilities of the cinematic medium to bring visibility to the otherwise invisible whiteness of characters. In this essay I turn to a more recent and lesser-known film, Visar Morina's 2020 Kosovan German film Exil/Exile. It is fair to surmise that what Peele does for the horror film, Morina does for the psychological thriller.2 Distinct in many ways from Get Out, Exil nonetheless similarly captures a cinematic mood of racism. The racism portrayed in Exil is not anti-Black racism and does not directly compare to the murderous threat and detriment evoked in Peele's film. The comparison nonetheless serves as a means of opening up broader reflection on how the experience of racialized discrimination is taken up in different ways in film. Exil presents a nuanced portrayal of a man originally from Kosovo, living and working in a nondescript city of Germany with his German-born wife (played by Sandra Hüller) and their three young children, and whose experience with everyday racism gradually draws out his rage. On numerous occasions, the main character, Xhafer, an Albanian Kosovar (played by Mišel Matičević), futilely attempts to explain to his wife the experience of living with racism in Germany. In an accusatory tone, he offers the following explanation: "You have no idea what it means to be a foreigner in this wannabe sophisticated and deeply dishonest country. Either they treat you with open racism, or they treat you like you are disabled in a manner that makes them feel oh-so-compassionate: 'Oh, you can walk. That's great! And wow, you can also count. Bravo! [he claps] And even better, you don't beat your wife. You are fully integrated!'"3 The directness and anger of Xhafer's words unapologetically lay bare the otherwise mostly implicit racism of contemporary liberal German society portrayed in the film through narrative and form. This essay will explore how Exil generates a mood of racism that underpins Xhafer's words with the power of experience that congeals into a suspenseful thriller. The film opens with an escalation, when implicit racism and bias appear to become more direct and their physical threat heightens. I begin by exploring how the daily experience of racism creates a daunting atmosphere of suffocation...

Dear Dr. D’Amour: Relational Psychoanalysis at the Heart of Teaching and Learning

Dr. Lissa D’Amour brings together relational psychoanalysis and developmental theory to offer practitioners of education an opportunity to unify theories of learning into a cohesive “dialectic model of learning and of learning’s refusal” (D’Amour, 2020, p. 142), a unification sorely needed in mathematics education as educators in Alberta feud over ‘back-to-basics’. Dr. D’Amour’s (2020) book, entitled Relational Psychoanalysis at the Heart of Teaching and Learning: How and Why It Matters, attempts to kick-start conversations about the relationships present in classrooms and offers respite from, and an alternative perspective of, the educational behemoth I have become a part of, one that increasingly ignores us humans, the relationships we have and our affective attunement with all that is around us.

Mother-Adolescent Neural Concordance in Response to Distress is Related to Greater Mother-Adolescent Concordance of Perceived Adolescent Anxiety

• Mother-child affective attunement is important for adolescent emotional development • Mother-adolescent dyads viewed clips of comforting interactions during fMRI • Mother-adolescent dyads rated adolescent affective symptom severity • Mother-adolescent brain concordance related to adolescent anxiety rating agreement • Neural similarity may help mothers and adolescents attune to one another

Dance movement therapy techniques to promote kinaesthetic empathy for couples: ‘I have to dance seriously with you’

ABSTRACT Dance movement therapy (DMT) for couples is characterised by including bodily discourses in the analytical space of the session, unlike other traditional approaches. Current studies have shown the importance of this inclusion to heal maladaptive relational styles developed by individuals in their childhood. This study, in which six couples participated, investigates the effectiveness of a pedagogical programme to promote kinaesthetic empathy (KE). The material analysed using movement analysis methods and thematic analysis, allows us to understand how affective attunement, somatic mirroring and synchronous movement, facilitate the emergence of empathy and the expression of unmanifested emotions, while promoting a feeling of connection between the members of the dyad.

Ethics and research with young children‐new perspectivesEdited byChristopher M.Schulte

Ethics and research with young children‐new perspectivesEdited byChristopher M.Schulte

ROCKETING SHEEP: AFFECTIVE DISCIPLINE IN ANONYMOUS MOBILE SOCIAL MEDIA JODEL DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked online discussion in unprecedented volumes, as citizens use social media to share their opinions and concerns regarding the prevention measures, for instance. Much of such activity takes place under real names on popular platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. However, parallel to these platforms more anonymous spaces remain and flourish, including completely anonymous services such as Secret.ly and Ask.fm, or pseudonymized services such as Reddit. This study focuses on Covid-19 related discussion on mobile social media platform Jodel, an anonymous-by-design social media application that allows messaging users who are geographically close. In this paper, we explore discussions about the Covid-19 pandemic on Jodel in Helsinki, Finland, through the theoretical notion of affective discipline. Our data is collected during a virtual, mobile ethnography that followed the discussions on the #corona channel in Jodel in Helsinki during 2020-21. We argue that the anonymity of Jodel provided its users a space to discuss the restrictive measures in a more relaxed manner than real-name-based social media. This also endows the conversations with deeper and different affective attunement than what public discussion would. While the discussions contain moral judgments, they were also rife with humor, irony and distanced spectatorship of the ongoing pandemic, resonating with the carnivalistic discussion cultures of other anonymous and pseudonymous platforms. We argue that anonymous and ephemeral platforms like Jodel, where identities and histories are nonexistent, bring out the affective dynamics of online discussions, and the related forces that assemble and disassemble communities.

In the mood for peace? Mood work and structures of feeling in the politics of peace education

ABSTRACT This paper puts in conversation Martin Heidegger’s concept of Stimmung (mood or attunement) with Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘structures of feeling’ to theorize ‘mood work’ in peace education. It is argued that the perspective of mood provides new insights in peace education that might be harder to grasp through the lens of affect or emotion, suggesting that mood is a term well suited to paying attention to longer duration of affective phenomena. In particular, mood work draws attention to the processes of affective (mis)attunement, that is, the successes and failures of individuals and groups to ‘fit the mood.’ The author offers a vignette from his ethnographic research to show the mood work conducted by a teacher in the context of a peace education initiative within a conflict-affected society. The analysis shows how mood work marshals bodies, objects, and feelings towards or away from particular political visions in peace education.