Affective Contagion Research Articles

Rapport sans rapport: the affective bond in suggestion and transference

As scholars have reconsidered early scholarship on affective contagion and immaterial forms of communication, there has been a renewed interest in Freud’s work on suggestion, telepathy and transference. This article will employ Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s critique of Freud to develop an alternative account of the relation between affect and subjectivity. I will argue that the performative identification or affective mimesis found in both the rapport of suggestion and the psychoanalytic transference creates and dislocates affect even in the absence of the hypnotist or doctor.

Decentering the “White Working Class”

AbstractThis essay is a review of William Connolly’s Aspirational Fascim, and thus an extended analysis of the intersection of affect, race, class, and democracy. Connolly explores the role of negative affective contagion in mobilizing aggrieved white working class communities and argues for more inclusive pluralistic democracy and the use of positive affective democratic contagion to resist fascism. But he limits the radical potential of his argument because he focuses primarily on the white working class, thereby paying too little attention to the negative affective experiences of the trauma of racism. He should also interrogate not only fascist but also other types of negative affective support for Trump. I frame the essay as an invitation for productive engagement and conversation with Connolly.

Heartfelt Musicking

This essay proposes a somatic archaeology of German Lutheran music making around 1700. Focusing on a single cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, it sets out to reconstruct the capacities of early modern body-souls for musical reverberation, affective contagion, and spiritual transformation.

Viral justice? Online justice-seeking, intimate partner violence and affective contagion

What has been termed the survivor selfie is a recent and growing phenomenon whereby survivors of intimate partner violence or their close supporters upload graphic photos and accounts of their injuries and suffering to social media. In this article, we examine how the like economy of Facebook can lead to the rapid circulation of survivor selfies to large audiences, and in doing so, generate what we term viral justice: the outcome of a victim’s online justice-seeking post ‘going viral’ and quickly being viewed and shared-on by thousands of social media users. Through examining the trajectory and impact of one particular case—Ashlee Savins’s viral survivor selfie—we identify the technological preconditions of viral justice and three of its key dimensions: affective contagion; swarm sociality; and movement power. Through discussing the speed, sociality and contagion of viral justice, we critically consider some of its implications for online justice-seeking, and responding to intimate partner violence.

On the uses of fairy dust: Contagion, sorcery and the crafting of other worlds

We look to mythic resources to help us narrativise and conceptualise instances of ‘affective contagion' within social movements. We first review ‘Crowd Theory', from Gustave Le Bon to Freud, and then the mimetics of Richard Dawkins and his followers. We find both theories lacking when it comes to accounting for collective agency. Next we turn to the work of Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, drawing on their conception of capitalist sorcery and their suggestion of crafting techniques to protect oneself against capitalism's spells, to ‘denaturalise' capitalism and thus to repotentialise the world. While Pignarre and Stengers draw inspiration from neo-pagan witches, we instead look to the annals of pop history, where we discover the 1960s' band The Troggs struggling to grasp what turns any particular song into a hit record. We take their ‘sprinkling of fairy dust' notion and apply it to anti-capitalist struggles.

Trends in the Turn to Affect

This article explores the psychological logics underpinning key perspectives in the ‘turn to affect’. Research on affect raises questions about the categorization of affective states, affective meaning-making, and the processes involved in the transmission of affect. I argue that current approaches risk depopulating affecting scenes, mystifying affective contagion, and authorizing questionable psychobiological arguments. I engage with the work of Sedgwick and Frank, Thrift, and Ahmed to explore these points and suggest that the concept of affective practice offers a more promising social psychological grounding. Notions of affective practice are more commensurate with trends in contemporary psychobiology, explain the limits on affective contagion, and emphasize relationality and negotiation, attentive to the flow of affecting episodes. A practice approach positions affect as a dynamic process, emergent from a polyphony of intersections and feedbacks, working across body states, registrations and categorizations, entangled with cultural meaning-making, and integrated with material and natural processes, social situations and social relationships.

The Effects of Leaders’ Affect: An Integrative Perspective Based on Multi-level Theories

Leaders' affect influences subordinates' performance and team performance. However, the mechanisms for effect of leaders' affect are not clear. Drawing on affective events theory and emotional contagion theory, this paper develops a multi-level theoretical model to explain effect of leaders' affect at different levels. Firstly, at the individual level, leaders' affect influences subordinates' performance through subordinates' affect. In particular, emotional contagion and leader behaviors account for the relationship between leaders' affect and followers' affect. Secondly, at the team level, individuals' affect converge and form group affective tone through emotional contagion processes. Group affective tone in turn influences team process and thereafter shapes team performance. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

Affective Contagion in Effortful Political Thinking

We offer a theory of motivated political reasoning based on the claim that the feelings aroused in the initial stages of processing sociopolitical information inevitably color all phases of the evaluation process. When a citizen is called on to express a judgment, the considerations that enter into conscious rumination will be biased by the valence of initial affect. This article reports the results of two experiments that test our affective contagion hypothesis—unnoticed affective cues influence the retrieval and construction of conscious considerations in the direction of affective congruence. We then test whether these affectively congruent considerations influence subsequently reported policy evaluations, which we call affective mediation. In short, the considerations that come consciously to mind to inform and to support the attitude construction process are biased systematically by the feelings that are aroused in the earliest stages of processing. This underlying affective bias in processing drives motivated reasoning and rationalization in political thinking.

Who Speaks? Torture and the Ethics of Voice

This paper performs, in three movements, an exploration of the ethics not of torture itself but of writing it creatively. First movement: of the right to write. This first movement considers ethical questions of authorship in the fictional narration of the trauma of torture. It employs Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopower and testimony to position the act of writing creatively about torture in relation to torture’s political project and the subjection of the body to sovereign power, along with a reading of torture as affective encounter, to suggest the necessity of writing literary testimony to it. Second movement: of writing the torturer’s voice. The second movement draws on Deleuzian affect theory toarticulate a relational conception of this trauma that suggests, however distasteful, the need for the torturer’s voice to be heard beyond the torture chamber. Third movement: of being affected by unjust ethics. This third movement draws on concepts of affective contagion to gestures back towards the experience of being affected by writing unjust ethics. With their twists and turns, their connections and discontinuities, these movements navigate –necessarily incompletely – the messy complexities of the ethical space of voice in the writing of torture.

Affect-ing discourse: towards an embodied discourse analytics

The contemporary retheorisation of affect is impacting on an increasingly wide range of disciplines/inter-disciplines in the human sciences. Of particular relevance for this paper are, on the one hand, the emphasis on embodiment and, on the other, the ideas of “flow”, “intensity” and “contagion”. Together, these challenge traditional views of affect as equivalent to emotion, emanating from the self and ending at the boundary of the self. Discourse studies has not yet been significantly influenced by the “affective turn” now taking place within social and cultural theory. It has largely maintained, albeit implicitly, the traditional view of affect. Yet, if all human interaction is inflected with affect, in the sense indicated above, a different model of discourse seems called for. This paper aims to make a contribution to the development of a new “affect-ed” discourse analytics by identifying a variety of linguistic and discursive phenomena that could contribute to such a project. We draw primarily on the work of linguistics, bringing to notice a range of phenomena that may be unfamiliar either because of their technicality or because of the problematic status of linguistics in much cultural theory. The paper proceeds via a brief genealogical account of current affect theory to note a range of language phenomena that have been or can be read in terms of individual feeling and suggests an analysis of several forms of interaction re-read in terms of affective contagion. This section of the paper constitutes a preliminary inventory of components of an affect-ed discourse analytics.

An Examination into the Dyadic Effects of Mood in Social Interactions

Much of the research on mood and communication has failed to examine the potential social and interactive attributes of mood suggested by studies involving affective contagion. An experiment involving 63 dyads was conducted manipulating the mood of both individuals involved to investigate these issues. Results suggest that the mood of both individuals can potentially impact an individual within an interaction. The findings are discussed, and future directions are suggested.

Attachment, empathy and loving: neurosciences interests

Objectives The love is an intellectual representation of the senses said the priestess Diotima, Socrate's tutor. Unlike the animal what reacts physically to senses stimulations, man extracts some concepts and create some ideals from these stimulations. In effect, man have to process the elementary stimulations from the five sensory organs but also it has to integrate it into functions more complex which are the cognitive or superior functions (very developed in mankind). Methodology Detailed analysis of the literature review through the neurobiological researches about social (imitation, affective contagion, altruism and empathy) and sexual behaviors. Conception of a love feeling model. Results There is complexity gradient between attachment, empathy and “romantic” love. These phenomenones rest on different neurobiological substratums. Conclusions In mankind, we think that a combination of sensory signals with intracerebral hormonal processes is necessary to recognize and bond with the others. This is the chemistry of the natal bound, the first love story. But, what is this relationship between two adults? Indeed, there are in our respective live stories some repercussions of mother bond. So, love appears at birth, hold up during childhood and explode at the adolescence with hormonal influence. But contrary to animal, man has a sexuality is linked to the attachment for psychological explanations. The loving state turned to one person stays a complex sentiment. This latter is characterized by erotic, cognitive and emotional indissociable components. “Romantic love” is another experience what is different of the real love.

Consciousness and the social mind

Phenomenal consciousness and social cognition are interlocking capacities, but the relations between them have yet to be systematically investigated. In this paper, I begin to develop a theoretical and empirical framework for such an investigation. I begin by describing the phenomenon known as social pain: the affect associated with the perception of actual or potential damage to one’s interpersonal relations. I then adduce a related phenomenon known as affective contagion: the tendency for emotions, moods, and other affective states to spread from person to person in social contexts. Experimental studies of these two phenomena suggest that affective consciousness depends on perception of the social world in much the same way that it depends on perception of the body – in short, that consciousness is ‘socially embodied’. In the second part of the paper I argue that the distinctive sociality of our species, especially its moral dimension, rests heavily on our ability to represent the conscious states of others. In closing, I put these ideas together and show how they point to a circular causal-mechanistic nexus between consciousness and social mindedness.