Affective Dispositions Research Articles

More or Less Likeable: The Role of Behavior-Independent Events in the Disposition Formation Process

ABSTRACT Affective disposition theory (ADT) and its extensions posit that character liking/disliking is based on viewer perceptions of character behaviors or the activation of character schemas that imply moral/immoral behaviors. This paper systematically examines whether events that happen to a character independent of their behavior also contribute to the development of character liking. Based on the modified affective disposition model (MADM), two studies were conducted where participants read a story introduction that manipulated whether a positive or negative event (described as egoistic need satisfaction/thwarting by the MADM) had befallen a character. In Study 1, the character was liked more when a negative economic event had befallen them and liked less when a positive economic event had befallen them as compared to a control condition. In Study 2, these effects were replicated. However, in Study 2 we also examined whether health-related events would elicit similar effects. Participants liked the character more regardless of whether a positive or negative health event befell her. These findings suggest unique contextual effects associated with which specific egoistic intuitions are satisfied or thwarted. As such they provide novel directions for research designed to test and specify the predictions of the MADM.

The Effect of Digital Storytelling on Secondary School Students' Perception of Environmental Behaviour and Affective Dispositions

The Effect of Digital Storytelling on Secondary School Students' Perception of Environmental Behaviour and Affective Dispositions

Navigating Morality in Parasocial Relationships. Exploring the Dynamics of Affective Disposition, Moral Foundations, and Expectancy Violations in Mediated Relationships

ABSTRACT The morality of a media character’s behavior and its influence on viewers’ parasocial relationships (PSRs) are analyzed based on different theoretical perspectives on media entertainment and psychological theories. Affective disposition theory is used to explain the relationship between moral judgments and character liking. Viewers’ connections with media characters are analyzed in the context of longer-term PSRs. Accordingly, morality is treated as a multidimensional construct that consists of care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and purity. These five moral domains are applied to viewers’ moral foundations and to the behaviors of media characters. Additionally, viewers’ moral expectations and their influence on viewers’ PSRs are considered based on the expectancy violations theory. In an experimental study, the morality of a character’s behavior was manipulated (moral vs. ambiguous vs. immoral), and the effect on viewers’ PSRs based on their moral foundations and moral expectations in the five moral domains was analyzed. The results show that while moral behavior generally strengthens viewers’ PSRs, different effects emerge when viewers’ moral foundations and expectations are considered. The different patterns that emerged between the five moral domains underline the importance of a multidimensional approach to morality in this mediated setting.

Solicitude, Emotions, and Narrative in Technology Design Ethics

The first objective of this paper is to recognize the role of emotion and feeling in Ricœur’s “little ethics” and what they can further add to it, then to explore in more detail how solicitude as a virtue, and affective disposition more broadly, can contribute to a modern ethics of technology. Ultimately, emotions help us to understand technologies and technological ways of being today; Ricœur’s “little ethics”, along with his narrative theory, provide a framework for understanding the ethically salient aspects of technical practice, especially through the openness to the other demanded by solicitude, and essentially by emphasising emotion or feeling as a way of being in the world, and a mode of existence: one which is done with, if not sometimes because of, technology and technical practice.

Spiritual Impact of Theocentric Outdoor Environmental Education on Affective Disposition among Malaysian Pre-service Science Teachers

Spiritual Impact of Theocentric Outdoor Environmental Education on Affective Disposition among Malaysian Pre-service Science Teachers

Reduced approach disposition in familial risk for depression: Evidence from time-frequency alpha asymmetries.

Despite the promising role of alpha and delta power in reflecting reduced approach disposition in depression, to date, it is unclear whether these measures can be employed to identify at-risk individuals. Hence, the present study investigated affective disposition in 32 unaffected individuals with a family history of depression (23 F) and 30 individuals without a family history of depression (21 F) through a data-driven analysis of alpha and delta time-frequency power during the viewing of pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures. Different patterns of posterior alpha asymmetry emerged within each group. Particularly, controls showed greater right posterior alpha desynchronization ~ 600 ms following emotional relative to neutral pictures presentation. Conversely, the group with a family history of depression showed greater posterior left alpha desynchronization only to unpleasant relative to neutral images in a later time window (> 900 ms). Hence, depression vulnerability seems to be characterized by a blunted reactivity to pleasant and delayed reactivity to unpleasant stimuli with a distinct posterior distribution relative to the controls. Finally, the two groups showed a comparable pattern of greater delta power to emotional relative to neutral cues. Overall, initial support was provided for the employment of time-frequency alpha power changes during affective processing in identifying blunted approach disposition in unaffected at-risk individuals.

Eliciting guilt in virtual reality games: interplay of self-attribution, presence, and morality.

This study investigates the psychological mechanisms in virtual reality (VR) games, focusing on the interplay between character morality, self-attribution, presence, guilt, and their collective impact on player enjoyment. Based on Affective Disposition Theory, it hypothesizes that players' moral judgments of characters significantly affect their engagement and enjoyment of VR narratives. A post-test between-subjects experiment was conducted with 97 participants to examine the influence of character morality on guilt through the mediation of self-attribution, and how these factors affect players' sense of presence and overall enjoyment in VR games. The findings indicate that self-attribution significantly mediates the relationship between character morality and guilt. Additionally, the sense of presence enhances enjoyment, with a stronger sense of 'being there' amplifying the emotional impact of players' moral decisions. This study highlights the full mediating effect of self-attribution in the context of VR gaming, intensifying players' emotional responses to moral dilemmas. The results suggest that VR game designers should consider the moral implications of game narratives and character actions to create more emotionally engaging and ethically reflective gaming experiences. These insights have significant implications for VR game design and ethics, promoting greater ethical sensitivity among players.

Music festival geographies: Place‐creation and attendee experience

AbstractWe examine how design features influence the experiences of attendees at New Zealand music festivals. Drawing on interviews with festival organisers and attendees, we argue that organisers configure particular atmospheres to provoke affective dispositions. By interrogating how festivals engage in this affective engineering, we argue that festivals are ephemeral spaces where design plays a central role in influencing the thoughts, feelings, behaviours and, ultimately, the place‐experience of attendees.

The self-regulatory role of trait mindfulness in workplace bullying, hostility and counterproductive work behaviours among hotel employees

While counterproductive work behaviours (CWB) harm hotels’ financial and non-financial performance, hospitality research ought to pay more attention to unpacking its antecedents and how employees are triggered to engage in CWB. Drawing on Affective Events Theory (AET), we posit that workplace bullying (WB) leads to enacting CWB by eliciting the targets’ emotions of hostility. Furthermore, considering the affective disposition in AET and adopting the self-regulation perspective, we argue that the mediating mechanism of hostility for the link between WB and CWB is moderated by trait mindfulness. Using a two-wave data collection from employees in hotels in Jordon (N = 328), we found that employee hostility mediated the relationship between WB and CWB. Trait mindfulness was found to attenuate the positive association between WB and emotional response of hostility, leading to reduced CWB. Our findings lend credence to the AET to further understand how WB induces CWB.

Enjoyment of Love-Related Dramas and the Implications of Perspective Taking

To understand how viewers respond to two common movie plots (falling in love and cheating), this study considers the perspectives they might take. Study 1 tests which protagonists’ perspective viewers adopt when watching movies with falling-in-love versus betrayal plots. Study 2 then shows that viewers’ perspective orientation influences their affective experiences and enjoyment of betrayal movies but not falling-in-love movies. Study 3 explores the processes that lead to varying levels of enjoyment, attained by viewing movies with falling-in-love and cheating plots. A moderated mediation model reveals three processes: affective states resulting from goal attainment/failure, meaning derived through identification, and affective dispositions formed according to moral judgments. Viewers’ romantic beliefs moderate the second process, and their morality standards moderate the third.

Making sense of politics: how affective dispositions and everyday experiences connect young people with the political

ABSTRACT This study aims to understand the cognitive, affective and socially situated processes through which young people make sense of politics. We ask (1) how young people construct understandings of political issues, and (2) when these understandings facilitate their orientation to and connection with political issues. To answer these questions, we conducted 4 × 4 focus groups with groups of 15–30-year-old Dutch people, each time focusing on a, then current, political issue: the Syrian Civil War, the (so-called) US Muslim travel ban, the 2017 Dutch general election, and the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. Our analysis of the group discussions shows that young people make sense of and become emotionally involved in political issues through: (a) feelings of indignation that link a political issue with one’s personal values, (b) media-facilitated affective orientations towards political actors that function as representations of a political issue, and (c) the connection of a political issue with meaningful social contexts and experiences. Our findings add to extant scholarly work on political learning by shedding light on the affective, situated and social processes through which political understandings and orientations are formed in young people.

MAGA (metamodernism as game aesthetic)

This article considers Trump’s presidency as metamodern, embodying contradictions within the established order and resonating with contemporary cultural trends. Oscillating between modernism and postmodernism, metamodernism is defined by coexistence of seemingly contrasting affective states and dispositions: enthusiasm and irony, hope and melancholy, attachment and alienation, generating a multifaceted subjecthood. Trump’s nostalgic slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) emphasizes this vacillation, a new inflection of an old phrase, received as both facetious and sincere, promising return to a prelapsarian state, while also taking neo-liberal ideals to extreme conclusions. This juxtaposition, the nostalgic impulse for something new, is traced as an increasingly dominant aesthetic form within digital games. As we explore, certain genres and aesthetics epitomize this, providing anachronistic audio-visuals, rhizomatic exploration, punishing gameplay, revolving around intertextuality and demands for community participation. We finally locate both Trump’s presidency and this nostalgic turn in contemporary digital games as symptomatic of a metamodern impulse, a search for stability and order amongst an increasingly fragmented, imbalanced and chaotic system.

Exploring the effects of similarity in basic needs on moral judgment of characters

ABSTRACT While affective disposition theory (ADT) claims that moral judgment of a character is the key mechanism underlying enjoyment, we often enjoy stories where characters violate our moral standards (morally ambiguous characters, or MACs). Initial research suggests that similarity between MACs and viewers (e.g. sharing ethnicity) may increase moral approval. However, the effect of internal similarity (similarity in higher-order human qualities) on moral judgment of MACs is underexplored. Humans share three basic psychological needs but are motivated by these needs to different degrees. Thus, similarity in degree of sensitivity to a given need is an internal quality that participants can share with MACs. The effect of similarity in basic needs on moral judgment of MACs is examined in a posttest-only experiment with 185 participants. Similarity in basic needs had a small effect on moral judgment of MACs as people, although it had no effect on judgment of a MAC’s behavior.

Voting propensity and parental depression

Among the most prevalent and costly of all illnesses worldwide, depression also has substantive consequences for democratic politics, not least because it is associated with lower voting propensity. One of the most reliable predictors of becoming depressed is a family history of depression, an intergenerational link thought to arise through multiple mechanisms that increase a person's cognitive, behavioural and affective disposition towards depression. We study if a person's voting propensity in adulthood is predicted by their parents' depressive symptomatology during early childhood and whether this is mediated by the likelihood of being depressed in adulthood. We analyse the 1970 British Cohort Study in which persons belonging to a same cohort have been systematically followed from early childhood to midlife. The results show that parents' symptoms of depression predict offspring's voting propensity, especially earlier in adulthood, although the effect is relatively small. Contrary to predictions, the effect is mostly direct.

The Banality as a Mood of Contemporary Society in Contrast to the Artist's Mood

Contemporary times witness significant transformations in economic organisation, deeply influencing social dynamics and emotional frameworks. This study aimed to elucidate banality as the prevailing mood of contemporary society, delineating two perspectives through art: one defined by a banal emotional framework and the other advocating innocence. Inspired by Heidegger and Nietzsche, an inquiry unfolded to reveal the emotional and affective aspects of the examined phenomenon, enriched by perspectives from acclaimed artists. Consequently, the findings established banality affective disposition characteristics as a hallmark of contemporary comprehensiveness, encompassing instrumental engagement with the world, acceptance, and incapacity to perceive its banal condition. In contrast, the banality of the broader world was juxtaposed with that of the artist, who focused on innocence as a manifestation of their being in the world. The outlined approach derived, in methodological terms, from a phenomenological-hermeneutic procedure anchored in the Heideggerian framework, which analysed the "mood" (Stimmung) as a determinant in the interpretation and unfolding of the world. The findings proposed alternative understandings of contemporary life as the result of the conquest of the banality of average mood and contrast it with the character of the artist who resists falling into the overarching banality of our time. The results reflected the difficulty of the current era, from which hopeful aspects of transformation are not evident. Conversely, resistance is concentrated in isolated occurrences that reclaim life and its evolution. This work sought to establish new avenues of research that enable the exploration of multiple contemporary phenomena, in addition to indicating paths of inquiry that link the thoughts of artists and their expressions.

How It Ends: Exploring How Narrative Closure and Character Outcomes in Series Finales Relate to Viewer Responses and Coping Behaviors

ABSTRACT Series finales garner much attention and discussion from viewers and the press, yet few studies have examined what makes finales satisfying. According to affective disposition theory (ADT) the outcomes that characters experience will predict audience gratifications; however, little is known about what other factors may affect responses to finales. An online questionnaire (N = 840) was administered to explore the associations between character outcomes and perceived narrative closure with affective responses (positive and meaningful), emotional distress (depression, anger, and anxiety), enjoyment, and appreciation, and to determine how these factors relate to post-viewing coping behaviors. Findings revealed that both the positivity of an outcome for a main character and perceived narrative closure were associated with heightened positive and meaningful affect, reduced emotional distress, and increased enjoyment and appreciation. Furthermore, appreciation and enjoyment were differentially related to coping behaviors, such that enjoyment was linked to decreased coping, whereas appreciation was associated with heightened engagement in these behaviors. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Care, Ecology, and the Crisis of Eco-social Reproduction: Politicizing More-than-Human Care

Abstract While the ethics of care has considered the possibility that caring occurs for the environment, it often remains silent about the caregiving that humans receive from the environment. This essay suggests that ecological justice requires humans to consider themselves not only as ecological caregivers, but also as care receivers from more-than-human earth dwellers. The argument is built by first accounting for the diverse forms of care that humans receive from other-than-humans. The focus then turns to eco-feminist and eco-Marxist thought to denaturalize this care, highlighting how capitalist economies put other-than-humans to work and appropriate their efforts to maintain the world. The fact that they cannot demand a salary and that the commodification of life increases its depletion leads to an examination of how the conceptual recognition of more-than-human care can be translated politically. The article sketches how the political tensions at work in practices and conceptions of care outlined by feminist and indigenous thought could allow to engage more critically with environmental issues, notably by blending environmental humanities’ emphasis on affective dispositions and attachments towards other-than-humans, with materialist ambitions to highlight exploitation and invisible labor.

Improvement of the Competence and Affective Disposition of Junior High School Teachers After the Implementation of Biodiversity Literacy Textbooks Containing Material on the Local Potency of West Java

This study aimed to analyze the improvement of competence and affective disposition of junior high school teachers after implementing biodiversity literacy textbooks containing material on the local potency of West Java. The study used a weak experimental design with the one group pretest post-test method. A total of 33 junior high school teachers from various districts in West Java Province were involved in the research conducted from January 2020 to August 2021. The results showed that there was an average increase in competence (71%) and affective disposition (69%) of biodiversity literacy. There was a sequential increase in biodiversity literacy competence, namely, scientifically explaining biodiversity phenomena (77%), evaluating scientific inquiry related to biodiversity (74%), scientific interpretation of biodiversity data and evidence (73%), and designing scientific inquiries related to biodiversity (68%). There was an increase in the level of biodiversity literacy competence at level 4 (21%), level 5 (15%), and level 6 (48%). There was an increase in affective disposition in the form of sensitivity and positive values (88%), self-confidence, personal and social responsibility (69%), interest (68%), and concern for biodiversity (67%). The results of hypothesis testing with the Wilcoxon Test resulted in a sig value of 0.000 for competence and attitude disposition. The study concluded that biodiversity literacy textbooks containing material on the local potency of West Java can help improve the competence and affective disposition of biodiversity literacy of junior high school teachers.
 Keywords: competence, affective disposition, biodiversity literacy, local potency, West Java

Vicarious punishment of moral violations in naturalistic drama narratives predicts cortical synchronization

Punishment of moral norm violators is instrumental for human cooperation. Yet, social and affective neuroscience research has primarily focused on second- and third-party norm enforcement, neglecting the neural architecture underlying observed (vicarious) punishment of moral wrongdoers. We used naturalistic television drama as a sampling space for observing outcomes of morally-relevant behaviors to assess how individuals cognitively process dynamically evolving moral actions and their consequences. Drawing on Affective Disposition Theory, we derived hypotheses linking character morality with viewers’ neural processing of characters’ rewards and punishments. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine neural responses of 28 female participants while free-viewing 15 short story summary video clips of episodes from a popular US television soap opera. Each summary included a complete narrative structure, fully crossing main character behaviors (moral/immoral) and the consequences (reward/punishment) characters faced for their actions. Narrative engagement was examined via intersubject correlation and representational similarity analysis. Highest cortical synchronization in 9 specifically selected regions previously implicated in processing moral information was observed when characters who act immorally are punished for their actions with participants’ empathy as an important moderator. The results advance our understanding of the moral brain and the role of normative considerations and character outcomes in viewers’ engagement with popular narratives.

How emotional contexts modulate item memory in individuals with high and low negative affect and worry.

Emotional stimuli are usually remembered with high confidence. Yet, it remains unknown whether-in addition to memory for the emotional stimulus itself-memory for a neutral stimulus encountered just after an emotional one can be enhanced. Further, little is known about the interplay between emotion elicited by a stimulus and emotion relating to affective dispositions. To address these questions, we examined (1) how emotional valence and arousal of a context image preceding a neutral item image affect memory of the item, and (2) how such memory modulation is affected by two hallmark features of emotional disorders: trait negative affect and tendency to worry. In two experiments, participants encoded a series of trials in which an emotional (negative, neutral, or positive) context image was followed by a neutral item image. In experiment 1 (n = 42), items presented seconds after negative context images were remembered better and with greater confidence compared to those presented after neutral and positive ones. Arousal ratings of negative context images were higher compared to neutral and positive ones and the likelihood of correctly recognizing an item image was related to higher arousal of the context image. In experiment 2 (n = 59), better item memory was related to lower trait negative affect. Participants with lower trait negative affect or tendency to worry displayed higher confidence compared to those with high negative affect or tendency to worry. Our findings describe an emotional "carry-over" effect elicited by a context image that enhances subsequent item memory on a trial-by-trial basis, however, not in individuals with high trait negative affect who seem to have a general memory disadvantage.