Affective Attunement Research Articles

Rethinking Intrusiveness: Exploring the Sequential Organization in Interactions Between Infants and Mothers.

To date, studies investigating maternal postpartum depression (PPD) have mainly focused on identifying failures in interactions of postpartum depressed mothers and their infants, often attributed to single dysfunctional maternal behaviors. Intrusiveness has been identified as a dysfunctional behavior characterizing mothers suffering from PPD. However, this research does not consider the co-constructed and sequential nature of social interactions, in which single behaviors cannot be conceived as isolated or disconnected units. The aim of the work presented in this paper was to explore the interactional dynamics underlying maternal behaviors previously identified as intrusive by mainstream literature on postpartum depression. Through a conversation analytical approach, we analyzed filmed interactions between mothers with and without postpartum depression and their 3-months-old infants. The analyses of 4 selected episodes illustrate similar dyadic activities, yet presenting different levels of mutuality and affective attunement. Results showed two normative features of social interactions that contributed to the different quality in the mutual adjustment of the partners: interactional rhythm and preliminaries. Interactional rhythm refers to the structuring of infants' spontaneous activity into a turn sequence, whereas preliminaries consist of verbal or nonverbal moves that anticipate following action. As evident from our analytical observations, what seems to be hindering the mutual coordination (previously labeled as “intrusive”) is not based on specific individual behaviors but on the absence or violation of such interactional norms. Adopting an interactive and dynamical framework, we shifted the focus from maternal behaviors considered as dysfunctional to observing the unfolding of interactional aspects contributing to better or poorer sequential structuring. We argue that these aspects shape the possibilities for the infant's participation. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of adopting a conversation analytical approach for a better understanding of the relational dynamics related to clinical and non-clinical interactions.

Affective attunement in peer dyads containing children adopted from institutions.

Children who have experienced institutional care early in life tend to show deficits in behavioral and adrenocortical regulation that impact their ability to form friendships and have positive social interactions with peers. Understanding how post-institutionalized children interact with unfamiliar peers and the factors that predict the quality of these interactions may shed light on the processes contributing to the persistent, often increasing social deficits seen in post-institutionalized children. In this study, one child (either post-institutionalized or non-adopted; the "target") interacted with another non-adopted child (the "peer"; N=58 dyads, M age=9.65years) through a series of competitive and cooperative games during which interaction quality and affect of each participant were coded. Three saliva samples were also collected from each participant to measure cortisol production across the session. No group differences in behavior, affect, or cortisol were found. However, non-adopted target children's affect was positively associated with their peers' affect and negatively associated with peers' change in cortisol across the session, while post-institutionalized target children's affect was not associated with their peers' affect or cortisol. Thus, future interventions may want to promote social skills in children exposed to early adversity by focusing on dyadic social contingencies rather than individual behavior.

‘Working on a rocky shore’: Micro-moments of positive affect in academic work

Neoliberal ideologies, marketization and performative regimes associated with recent reforms in universities have exerted considerable pressure on academic working conditions and subjects in recent years. While analysing these pressures is important, it is also productive to consider the ways in which academics engage in moments of resistance by mobilising resources beyond those of critique. This paper therefore focuses on joy and positive affect in the everyday moments of academic life. It utilises the feminist methodology of collective biography to explore ways of making the restricted spaces of our working day more expansive and finding within them unexpected openings for joy. Our analysis of the stories included in this paper traces the mercurial and ambiguous affective atmospheres of academic work. We suggest that joy is founded upon connections with others, that it arises in different academic spaces and that it can lead to revised knowing of ourselves. We argue that the glimpses of joy evident in this paper provoke affective attunement within the everyday, sensitizing us to other fragments of joy and providing strategies to strengthen that resistance.

Designing affect into security: shared situational awareness protocols and the habit of emergency response

The article engages with and extends emergent debates regarding the envelopment of affective life in practices of security through research into the design of shared situational awareness protocols used in emergency response. Crafted to address what are commonly called ‘multi-agency’ incidents, shared situational awareness protocols aim to generate real time, dynamic understandings of emergency situations that can be held consensually among different authorities in order to facilitate coordinated modes of intervention. I draw on recent conceptualisations in cultural geography of the notion of habit in two ways to explore how such protocols enrol, regulate and mobilise the affective capacities of responder bodies to orchestrate emergency response. Habit first opens up to consideration the complex temporality that protocols may inscribe into the embodied performance of emergency response. Read in relation to habit, protocols appear as security techniques that simultaneously formulate response into a sequence of actions in anticipation of emergencies whilst enabling responders to adapt to emergencies as volatile situations unfolding in an indeterminate, real-time present. Second, habit orients exploration towards the modes of affect-based sense-making practices that protocols seek to integrate into this performance. On one hand, protocols have been designed with the goal of affording responder bodies the capacity to enact what Brian Massumi refers to as affective attunement as a means to render emergencies intelligible. On the other, protocol design seeks to inculcate responder bodies with the capacity to execute what I call ‘empathic sense-making’ whereby authorities are able to coordinate with one another by operating with a perception of the emergency that traverses the confines of their immediate spatial and temporal embodied encounter with it. Synthesising protocol design with habit ultimately reveals much about how emergency planners consider bodily capacity an active agent that both guides the structure of intervention and enrols particular modes of cognition into emergency response and security.

Towards an ‘ever more wordly sensitive interface’: the affective turn and site-based and participatory performance training – a practice-led perspective

This article discusses the use of affect theory in thinking through non-verbal and non-human participation within site-based directing performances and reflects on the possibilities offered by the affective turn in performer training for these forms. It describes three ‘affective dramaturgies’ developed in the author’s practice-based PhD research, linking them to their theoretical underpinning, and proposing ways that each approach is of value in continuing training for site-based performance and other forms, from immersive to intimate theatres and beyond. It discusses affect theory drawn from Spinoza’s radical notion of bodies, Nigel Thrift’s perspective from cultural geography in which the combined spatial and biological emphasis of affective thinking are foregrounded, and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s writings on ‘affective attunements’. The use of affect theory to develop conscious recognition of porousness between one another and things offers students of performance what Gregg and Seigworth term: ‘a pedagogic nudge aimed toward a body's becoming an ever more worldly sensitive interface, towards a style of being present to the struggles of our time’ (p12). The article makes reference to two site-based processes within the author’s PhD, discussing moments from rehearsal and from performance of She Wrote Massacre When She Meant Revolution (2014), and A Testimony and a Silence (2014).

Becoming small: Concepts and methods of interdisciplinary practice in theatre for early years

ABSTRACTThis article aims to look at core concepts in two artistic research projects exploring interdisciplinary approaches to performing arts for young children (interdisciplinarity can here be understood as integrating knowledge and methods from different disciplines to develop common approaches to artmaking). Playing, improvisation, presence, musical communication, affective attunement, participation, and interactivity are all concepts that are used widely in the field of art for the early years. To be able to reflect on the concepts and discuss how they are used, I give a short presentation of my PhD project, The Red Shoes Project (2008–14), about improvisation, participation, and children´s play in theatre for early years (TEY). In addition, I give examples from The SceSam Project (2012–16), which investigated interactive dramaturgies in performing arts for children. With research perspectives from these two artistic research projects as context, the particle presents and discusses interdisciplinary artistic research methods and the need to find overarching concepts. The concepts work as tools for reflection and can provide insight, from a theoretical point of view, into the artistic works.

Theorizing affective ethnography for organization studies

This article introduces a new label, ‘Affective Ethnography’, and grounds it within the debates on post-qualitative methodologies and affective methodologies. Affective ethnography is theorized as a style of research practice that acknowledges that all elements—texts, actors, materialities, language, agencies—are already entangled in complex ways, and that they should be read in their intra-actions, through one another, as data in motion/data that move. I discuss three pillars for affective ethnographies that relate to researchers’ presence in doing fieldwork and their bodily capacity to affect/be affected. The first is embodiment and embodied knowing. Doing fieldwork implies the ability to resonate with, becoming-with, and the capacity for affective attunement. The second aspect relates to place as flow, and process—to placeness. The third relates to affect as the power to act and therefore to the presence in the fieldwork of the capacity to ‘make do’, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Performative interviewing: affective attunement and reflective affective analysis in interviewing

ABSTRACTIn this essay, we develop an affective framework that offers performance ethnographers new methodological ways of orienting to and analyzing interviews. Affective attunement is the notion that individuals relationally orient themselves to spaces, encounters, events, histories, futures, and other selves through somatic interplay. Reflective affective analysis involves a form of retrospective sense-making where researchers reflect on the ways in which affects, rhythms, and intensities animated the interview. We suggest a shift in terms of how we think of what an interview is, what the role of the interviewer and interviewee are, how we navigate through the interview, and how we make sense of it all after the fact.

Vocal Nest – non-verbal atmospheres that matter

In my artistic doctoral research project “Vocal Nest”, I worked with the potentialities of non-verbal vocal art in the conditions of psychical suffering. The situation-sensitive human sound installation was actualized at the central corridor of Helsinki University Central Hospital´s Psychiatrycenter in Finland. I used the compositional practice of vocal affective attunement as a research medium, to catalyze groups of people, who were as inpatients in the hospital, to create a collective resonance sphere by vocalizing and listening. How did embodied encountering with the human atmospheres create differentiated patterns of meaning making in this material-discursive environment? This exposition, made up of vocal, visual, and textual aspects, proposes that the artistic transmission from the registers of silence toward vocal utterances, as well as from the linguistic reality toward non-verbal vocal expression attuned an archaic mode of connection to the strictly regulated hospital space. It offers alternative and more holistic understanding of the assumedly clear boundaries between subject and object, and healthy and sick, by expanding the expressive scale of what is typically considered as communicative and reasonable. This exposition may be of interest to those interested in the sensate forms of knowledge production and affective potentialities of the human voice, not from the perspective of health benefits, but from the viewpoint of rendering heard the vulnerable, and peripheral attributes of being a human. The blurred atmospheres invite the reader to slightly let go of oneself and attune to a dwelling mode of (reading as) listening. “Vocal Nest” was first of a three-part series entitled ”Hospital Symphonies”, an artistic modulation of the mutually transformative relations between art and psychiatry.

Wild Profusions: An Ode to Academic Hair

With the intention of expanding educational conversations through playful encounters, we braid curricular intensities inspired by wild profusions, written in our academic hair and offered as expressions of life writing. Through our hairatives, we share discomforts and provocations that are the stories of our scholarly identities, rooted in the body-word nexus as affective attunements. Through our entanglements, we map our networks of relations and invite curricular conductivity concerning how and why hair is formative in the context of the academy. Living on the precarious margins of stories, we share our narratives within the folds of educational theory to passionately and poetically render our richly textured events as the moments of knowledge creation. In this way, our hair serves as an artistic configuration, where we are manifest in “situated inquiry about the truth that it locally actualises”, to borrow from Badiou (2005), opening what may be described as an “eventual rupture” of our scholarly truths (p. 12). Our ruminations are the imaginaries of academics, or simply living intensities. We intend to crack open from the inside that which is “a reality concealed behind appearances” in an attempt to reconfigure “a different regime of perception and signification” (Rancière, 2009, pp. 48, 49).

When care is defined by science: Exploring veterinary medicine through a more‐than‐human geography of empathy

Veterinary medicine is the profession that is widely perceived as being at the forefront of animal care in the United Kingdom (UK). It is a form of care that is multi‐spatial and multi‐species: veterinary surgeons are involved in broad debates about animal welfare while also intimately caring for our pet companions. In order to regulate the profession, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons provides the Code of Professional Conduct (CPC) as the principal ethical framework that must be adhered to by all UK veterinary surgeons. The main aim of the CPC claims to ensure that the animal is, first and foremost, the primary consideration in veterinary medicine. By exploring the CPC in relation with animal geographies, emotional geographies and science and technology studies, this paper shows how the CPC remains anthropocentric and focused on a rational scientism that limits affective attunement with non‐human animals and distrusts the role of emotion and affect in veterinary medicine. These ethical‐spatial implications are then shown to extend beyond the CPC and into the conceptual terrain of ethics teaching in undergraduate veterinary education. As a way through this ethical tangle, a more‐than‐human geography of empathy is proposed. This notion takes the site of empathy as its geographical focus and suggests that a more critical, situated and holistic understanding of empathy might allow for a more thorough consideration of the tensions between human and animal and science and emotion in veterinary medicine and human geography more widely.

Les foyers de protection judiciaire de la jeunesse et la prise en charge des jeunes auteurs de délit : représentations sociales et réflexions autour de groupes d’adolescents et d’éducateurs

The educators’ work in juvenile justice residential communities and their capacity of affective attunement to the adolescent's needs is essential for the creation of a protective and enriching context for the adolescent and his life trajectories. This article aims to explore the social representations of educators and young people in residential communities in Italy, through the analysis of their discourses gathered during focus groups. Our results reveal the need to compare these representations and work to narrow the gap between the caregivers and the users, in order to improve the relationship between the different protagonists of the interaction and, consequently, the possibilities of good success of interventions.

From autonomic reactivity to empathic resonance in psychotherapy mutual regulation of post-traumatic stress (PTS) – What does that take in the role as psychotherapist?

This paper discusses autonomic reactivity and empathic resonance in the psychotherapy setting. Autonomic reactivity is understood as involuntary nervous system responses we experience when exposed to activations in our autonomic nervous system (ANS). In an autonomic reactive state, we may revert to defensive strategies resulting in ‘stuck’ behavioural patterns, diminishing our capacity to consciously choose our response. While we cannot override autonomic reactivity, we can build psychomotor skills to notice our reactivity and employ affective attunement, self-regulation and mutual regulation skills that move us into a state of empathic resonance – moving from reactivity to conscious response. Therapists can manage challenges associated with autonomic reactivity with acceptance, normalisation, and psychomotor skill development. This article presents a road map to address ANS responses and three case examples highlighting three different states, namely hyper-arousal, hypo-arousal and dissociation of disorganised states, to clarify concepts presented here.

Affect Matters: Strolling through Heterological Ecologies

The recent “materialist turn” stresses the fundamental role of nonhumans in the constitution of humans’ social and political life and argues that the inability to grasp their importance dooms normative prognoses for ordering society to ethical, political, and practical failure. This article combines insights from recent affect theory and indigenous and non–North Atlantic societies in response to this epistemological and theoretical critique. It argues (1) that affect analyses can give a fuller account of the ways in which nonhuman others participate in the creation and maintenance of human sociability and (2) that societies such as those organized along totemistic or animist lines have a different “affective attunement” toward nonhuman others, whom they admit as social members (we call these heterological societies). However, anthropocentrism renders insensible the logic of their modes of social organization. Referring to ethnographic examples, this article shows how affect analysis can help translate the insights of heterological societies, so as to eventually dismantle the current anthropocentrism.

Aestheticizing Addiction to Generate Change

As a director and Applied Theatre-maker who creates performances with, for and by people in recovery from addiction, I have staged scenes of intoxication, rituals of drug use and various representations of ‘active addiction.’ Such work involves aestheticizing stories of addiction, including the highs and the lows of the ‘graft-score-use’ cycle. The performances involve emotive affects such as shock and shame which, given the largely biographic content co-created with performance collaborators, raises sticky dilemmas about aesthetic strategies and ethics.Focusing on my staging of Too High Too Far Too Soon, a solo performance of Simon Mason's like-named biography, I reflect on the complexities of aestheticizing moments of drug use intended to have an impact upon the audience whilst also negotiating an ethical approach to authenticity. I argue, using aspects of affect theory as a theoretical framework, that aestheticizing moments of lived experience of drug addiction, whilst sometimes uncomfortable to watch, can be a generative experience for both the performer and audience. Through affective inter-relation in the making and performing of a theatrical performance, new potentialities may emerge, particularly for the performer, but also perhaps the audience, to reconsider their way-of-being in the world.I outline how such an aesthetic involves embracing chaos and indeterminancy and negotiating risk in both the devising and performance processes. It also entails a mutual reciprocity and reflexivity enhanced by a shared understanding of practices of recovery through which director and performer might be in affective attunement with each other. Ultimately, the affective experience of the performance generates sensations that could provoke new thought, action or interaction that in turn opens the potential for change, be that simply a moving forward in one's understanding of addiction.

Peculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment Mimesis

Peculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment Mimesis

The Theoretical Principles of the Body-Centered Therapy to Promote Affective Attunement in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Background: The roots of autism spectrum disorders become evident in first attunement mechanisms between mother and child that allow a first level of mentalizing. Neurosciences and current developmental theories confirm the existence of defensive mechanisms related to body and affectivity that psychodynamic theories had already highlighted. Reading child’s behavior not only by administering tests but also through careful clinical observations allows a better understanding of the communication and social difficulties present in autistic children. The identification of the zone of proximal development can promote a therapeutic intervention that respects the individuality of the child and the specificity of his relational approach to the world. Conclusion: The paper presents the theoretical principles of a body-centered therapy to promote the attunement processes necessary to activate cognitive resources.

Cat-alysing attunement

ABSTRACTThe natural resource management of wildlife in Australia encounters tensions between concerns for the environment and for the welfare of non-human animals. I explore the conservation biology practice of culling feral cats to preserve Australian native species and demonstrate how ‘feral cat’ has become a trope, affording persuasive power to the storyline of native species conservation. Massumi’s reading of ontopower develops Foucauldian biopower, enabling analysis of how modes of power are powered by an operative logic or rationale, a conceptual persuasion to a certain truth. I examine the event assemblages of the Australian government’s Threatened Species Strategy and the Threat Abatement Plan for Predation by Feral Cats as the pragmatic working out of the conceptual formula of cats kill → feral cats kill → feral cats kill and render extinct threatened native species → feral cats must be exterminated. The formula channels conditions of possibility towards a particular actualisation through mobilising apparatuses of knowledge, objectivation and power in order to catalyse an affective social attunement of cats as ‘killing-machines’ and legitimate the decreed extermination of 2,000,000 feral cats in Australia. I suggest possibilities for alternative formulations based on Foucault’s idea of environmentality and the environment as milieu.

The emotional tunes and the role of mirror neurons: From primary relationship mother-child relation to rehabilitation and therapeutic music therapy

This article mainly intended as a tribute to one of the fathers of Infant Research, Daniel Stern, who with his studies on the development of the sense of self in children, has expanded the field of observation of the mother-child relationship, from a simple vision drives a real relationship, characterized by sensory elements global. His research has been forming the basis of the theoretical and methodological focus of music therapy to psychodynamic. The ability to reproduce the relational process characterized by affective attunements in a rehabilitation setting - music therapy where there are dis-evolution, as in the case of patients with Alzheimer's disease, you can reactivate capacity affective and relational residual strengthening in the subject 'personal and social identity mortified by the disease. Role within that path is done by a very peculiar type of neurons, mirror neurons, the subject of study in recent years by the neurosciences, whose characteristic would be to get excited is when a person performs a certain action, both when it is another to do it before his eyes.

Musical Bodies: Corporeality, Emergent Subjectivity, and Improvisational Spaces

Interactive improvisational musical spaces (which is to say, nearly all musical spaces) involve affective relations among bodies: between the bodies of human performers, between performers and active listeners, between the sonic "bodies" that comprise the multiple overlapping events that constitute a musical performance’s unfolding. Music scholarship tends to focus on either music’s sonic materialities (the sensible; what can be heard) or the cultural resonances that locate in and through music (the political or hermeneutic; how meaning is inscribed in and for a listening subject). An embodied turn, however, has recently been manifesting, bringing music scholarship into communication with feminist theory, queer theory, and approaches that foreground subjectivity and embodiment. Exemplary in this area are works by Naomi Cumming (who asks a critical question, “does the self form the sound, or the sound the self?;” Cumming 7), Suzanne Cusick, Marion Guck, Fred Maus, and Susan McClary. All of these scholars, in various ways, thematise the performative—what it feels like to make or experience music, and what effect that making or experiencing has on subject-formation. All of these authors strive to foreground the role of the performer and performativity in the context of the extended Western art music tradition. While each makes persuasive, significant points, my contention in this paper is that improvised music is a more fruitful starting place for thinking about embodiment and the co-constitutive relationship between performer and sound. That is, while (nearly) all music is improvised to a greater or lesser degree, the more radical contexts, in which paths are being selected and large-scale shapes drawn in the “heat of the moment,” can bring these issues into stark relief and serve as more productive entry points for thinking through crucial questions of embodiment, perspective, identity, and emergent meaning.