Affective Experience Research Articles

The role of emotion recognition in reappraisal affordances.

Emotion regulation is essential for psychological well-being. One strategy that is commonly researched is reappraisal. Individual differences regarding the tendency to use reappraisal, as well as its implications for affective experience, were extensively studied. In recent years, interest has emerged in the choice to use reappraisal, based on stimuli properties. Recently, we suggested that reappraisal is related to emotion recognition processes. Emotion recognition (and affective labeling, as an explicit form of emotion recognition) is regarded as a form of emotion regulation, however, the relations between emotion recognition and reappraisal have not been previously investigated. The aim of the current study was to explore the relationship between reappraisal affordances (the opportunities of re-interpretation that are inherent in a stimulus) and emotion recognition. For this purpose, we used the Categorized Affective Picture Database, a database that provides data regarding the emotional category of each picture, agreement levels for each category, and intensity ratings. Agreement levels were used to assess the certainty regarding the emotion evoked by the pictures. Findings suggest that reappraisal affordance is predicted by both agreement levels and intensity, in negative pictures alone. In negative pictures, intensity was negatively correlated with the difficulty to reappraise. These findings strengthen the hypothesis regarding the relationship between emotion recognition and reappraisal, and provide evidence for the role of emotion recognition in reappraisal affordances.

Gender, Feeling and the Making of Korean Christian Knowledge in Sengoku Japan*

This essay explores the production of Korean Christian knowledge in Sengoku Japan by analysing narratives about a vision said to have been experienced by an evangelised Korean woman, which circulated within Jesuit correspondence from Japan and in subsequent publications. These texts, about a convert's journey to diverse netherworlds, made affective experiences central to spiritual perception, and to Jesuit interpretation of faith. They held important implications for how women living in a society permeated by Buddhist beliefs and practices could be represented as producers of Christian knowledge and as faith guides to others, whose bodies did not hinder spiritual perception but rather offered tools for achieving it.

Attachment insecurities, emotion dynamics and stress in intimate relationships during the transition to parenthood

BackgroundIn intimate relationships, which are characterized by emotional interdependence, partners act as attachment figures which serve emotion regulation functions. The experience of emotions as well as the strategies that partners use to regulate them and to respond to relational experiences, especially during stressful periods, differ greatly according to their attachment orientation. An important aspect in emotion dynamics is emotional inertia, which reflects the degree to which a person’s current affective state is resistant to change on a moment-to-moment basis. Inertia has been related to maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, like suppression and rumination, preferentially used by highly anxious and avoidant individuals. The aim of this study is to examine associations between attachment orientations and reports on the experience of positive and negative affect, and their dynamics in daily life across the transition to parenthood.MethodsLongitudinal data from a sample of 152 mixed-gender couples collected across the transition to parenthood was analyzed. We predicted that individuals with a more insecure attachment would report more negative and less positive affect, and that their emotional experience would be more resistant to change over time. We explored effects when participants reported feeling stressed.ResultsThe data suggested that attachment anxiety was associated with less positive and more negative affect and that attachment avoidance was associated with more positive affect. Anxious individuals showed lower emotional inertia and not higher as we expected. Reported stress for anxious and avoidant individuals was significantly associated with more negative but not less positive affect.ConclusionsResults are discussed in the light of their impact on couples during stressful periods. Differences between anxiety and avoidance are found, emphasizing the importance of attachment insecurities on the experience of emotion. Furthermore, our findings on momentary fluctuating affect offer complementary insight into the emotional functioning of individuals with different attachment orientations.

Experiential effects on mass sport participants’ event satisfaction and behavioral intentions: examining sensory, affective, behavioral, intellectual and relational dimensions

PurposeThe purpose of the present study was to investigate the interrelationships among the dimensions of sport event experience, event satisfaction and event behavioral intentions.Design/methodology/approachThe sample was comprised of 186 individuals who actively participated in a mass participation sport event. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to test the relationships among the latent constructs.FindingsThe results indicated that the dimensions of sport event experience predicted 55% of the variance of event satisfaction and 63% of the variance of event behavioral intentions was predicted by sport event experience dimensions and event satisfaction. Specifically, the sensory, affective and relational dimensions of experience sought to have a statistically significant and positive association with event satisfaction, while event satisfaction and the relational dimension of experience were found to have a statistically significant and positive correlation with event behavioral intentions. In addition, event satisfaction was found to mediate the relationships between sensory, affective and relational experiences and event behavioral intentions.Originality/valueThe present study is one of the first that explores the relationships among sport event experience’s dimensions, event satisfaction and positive behavioral intentions in the context of sport event participation.

Poetic inquiry to explore the relational values of a transforming peat landscape

Abstract Restoring degraded peatlands is a promising strategy for mitigating carbon emissions. Large‐scale landscape transformations, such as rewetting of land used for intensive agriculture, often lead to conflicts. Elicitation of the relational values acting as barriers to landscape transformation may support the resolution or taming of such conflicts. This study aimed to explore the relational values associated with a transforming peatland site in Northern Germany. We focused on the value of living and non‐living peat landscape elements; cultural heritage values and identities; educational values; spiritual values; recreational values; and sensory, affective and cognitive experiences. Additionally, we sought to understand how past landscape changes have influenced these values. We conducted interviews with land managers and local residents. Using an art‐based research method, we created six thematic participant‐voiced poems that capture the diverse peatland values. Subsequent interpretation of these poems revealed three key observations: the importance of multisensory experiences; the significance of specific living elements; and the deep cultural and historical values linked to peat landscapes. Landscape changes impact peat landscape values, potentially weakening bonds between people and the peatland. Our study indicates that considering the cultural and historical significance of landscapes may prevent conflicts and foster support for peatland restoration. Ensuring the well‐being of those living and working in these areas requires value‐inclusive landscape planning that embraces a broader focus on relational values. This also involves the potential promotion of value shifts. Such an approach may cultivate a more sustainable and inclusive transformation of the landscape. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Not the only novice in the room: Partnerships and belongingness in a research immersion program

AbstractLack of access to STEMM mentors has been identified as a critical barrier to biomedical research careers, leading to a lack of diversity in this field. To address such a barrier, the National Institutes of Health invested funds to support institutions in developing research immersion programs to provide “underrepresented” students with mentored research experiences. While providing access and opportunity for research experiences is an important equity endeavor, a focus solely on broadening participation neglects the role of institutions in perpetuating hegemonic views of science. Institutions often fail to recognize how entanglements of affect and emotion shape youth experiences in these programs and work to (de)legitimize their sense of belonging in science and perpetuate the notion of science as for an exclusive few. In this paper, we describe findings from a project aimed at understanding the entanglement of emotion and affect in a research immersion program and how these entanglements shaped participants' sense of belongingness in the program and research more broadly. Drawing on a poststructural feminist framework, we come to understand how individual histories and emotional experiences with racial and gender stereotypes work at the meta‐affective level to contract feelings of belongingness in science for students.

Current English Language Teaching Using Production-Oriented Approach: A Systematic Review

In recent years, the production-oriented approach (POA) has grown to be a popular research topic in China. Despite that, it is noticeable that a systematic literature review of the international journals written in English (2019-2023) on POA is not available, which has raised a need to promote POA to other parts of the world, especially to benefit more English learners. This review is focused on three questions: What is the present state of implementation of POA? What are its influences on students’ acquisition of the English language? What are the obstacles encountered in promoting broader adoption of POA? Based on a search via three databases (Scopus, WoS, and ERIC), 35 journal articles between 2019 and 2023 were analysed finally. The findings indicate that: (1) POA research is now mainly empirical research, related to theory development, teacher development, and textbook development. (2) The effects of POA on English learners are as long as they are manifested in terms of their effects on students' writing ability, speaking ability, translation ability,  positive affective experiences and learning awareness. (3) At present, the main problems encountered by POA lie in the limited classroom teaching time, the relatively small sample size, and the remaining gap between the selection of teaching materials and the teaching design to keep students’ continuous motivation. In addition, this article also discusses the future direction of research, which needs to work on linguistics, literature, western culture, ESP programs and other languages, as well as the integration and development of teaching materials and teacher development.

Organizational and Individual Resources as Buffers of Work–Family Conflict Linkages to Affect: An Application of the Job Demands and Resources Health Impairment Model

Work–family conflict is a phenomenon known to affect an individual’s well-being. However, its affective consequences are yet to be explored. In this study, we focus on understanding work–family conflict affective consequences on positive and negative affect. Our approach aims to refine the Job Demands and Resources model (JD-R model) by incorporating affect as a psychological mechanism in the health-impairment process and by exploring family-supportive organizational perceptions and psychological detachment as moderators. The final sample was composed of 195 couples, with men’s mean age around 46 years old (M = 46.85, SD = 0.34) and women’s age around 44 (M = 44.23, SD = 0.37). Men worked an average of 44.46 h per week (SD = 0.83), while women worked an average of 39.79 h per week (SD = 0.65). The majority of couples had full-time jobs (77.9% of men and 73.8% of women), worked fixed schedules (55.4% of men and 73.8% of women), were employed by others (75% of men and 82.8% of women), and worked for small companies (54.6% of men and 40% of women). Concerning education, most of the men (81.3%) and women (71.4%) attended high school or had less than 12 years of education. To test our moderation models, PROCESS version 4.1st macro for SPSS was used. Additional analyses included correlations and paired mean comparisons. Our findings indicate that work–family conflict correlates positively with negative affect and negatively with positive affect. Psychological detachment moderated the effect of work–family conflict on negative affect for women, but did not moderate the relationship with positive affect for men or women. Family-supportive organizational perceptions also did not moderate any of the proposed relationships. This study highlights how the ability to detach and separate family and professional domains is important and supports the health-impairment process of the Job Demands and Resources model through affective experiences.

Unpacking affect maintenance and its association with depressive symptoms: integrating positive and negative affects

ABSTRACT Depression is associated with increased maintenance of negative affect (NA) and reduced – blunted and short-lived – maintenance of positive affect (PA). Studies have focused on factors associated with the maintenance of NA, specifically, the emotion regulation strategy of brooding and the capacity to hold negative affective experiences in working memory (WM). Despite its theoretical importance, less attention has been given to factors associated with the maintenance of PA in depression. This study aims to synthesise factors playing a role in the maintenance of both NA and PA. Specifically, we used self-reported assessment of PA and NA regulation and performance-based measures of NA and PA processing in WM to predict depressive symptoms severity. Participants (N = 219) completed the Affective Maintenance Task (AMT, Mikels et al., 2008), which provided performance-based measures of PA and NA maintenance, and filled out questionnaires assessing brooding, positive rumination and depressive severity. Brooding, positive rumination and AMT-based measures of positive (but not negative) affective information processing were independently associated with depressive symptoms. We highlight the unique contributions of PA processing, as well as of self-reported emotion regulation strategies in understanding depression maintenance.

360 Diffusion Imaging-Derived Structural Changes in Cerebral Pain Regions of Chronic Low-Back Pain Patients Implanted With Thoracic Spinal Cord Stimulation

INTRODUCTION: Thoracic spinal cord stimulation (tSCS) is an effective treatment of chronic low-back pain (cLBP). Although diffusion imaging has been conducted in this group of patients, the study of diffusion-derived structural imaging of regions involved in pain processing has not been conducted. METHODS: Diffusion-weighted imaging scans were acquired in five patients (1 female) post-tSCS with cLBP and five healthy subjects (2 female). Patient MRI scans were taken post-implantation with the SCS device turned off during the MRI session. Four DTI maps and four MAP maps were derived and normalized into MNI space and smoothed. DTI and MAP values for each measure from the pain ROI atlas were extracted and compared between patients and controls. RESULTS: Statistically significant differences were found in regions involved with sensory processing of pain (ASG, PSG) as well as affective pain experience (ACC) across the DTI measures. MAP measures showed significance across five ROIs involved with sensory processing of pain, affective pain experience, and fear response (AMYG). CONCLUSIONS: Diffusion-derived structural imaging of pain regions suggests that cLBP patients receiving SCS have differences in diffusion imaging-derived structural parameters involved with pain processing, cognition, and fear response.

Hauntology: The Emotional Costs of Social Policy for Mothers Experiencing Homelessness

ABSTRACT The article is concerned with the emotional effects of homelessness on women who are mothers. It develops a multi-disciplinary conceptualization of “haunting” to bring understanding to the ongoing grief and trauma associated with losing a home and children. It explores how women’s embodied and affective experiences are not just responses to deeply distressing events, but inextricably intertwined with the unfurling of housing and child protection policies, sometimes long after a policy decision (eviction, child removal). Drawing on biographical research with 26 women, the article contributes new insights into both our limited understanding of women’s homelessness but also scholarly work that recognizes the diffuse power of social policy and its harms. The article advances a novel understanding of women’s lived experience of homelessness by conceptualizing and empirically investigating the emotional effects of policy decisions as hauntings that permeate past, present and anticipated futures.

Is it possible to run after positive affective experiences instead of health benefits without tackling social inequalities?

Is it possible to run after positive affective experiences instead of health benefits without tackling social inequalities?

Analyzing the Influence of Visitor Types on Location Choices and Revisit Intentions in Urban Heritage Destinations

Understanding visitors’ spatial choice behavior is important in developing effective policies to counteract overcrowdedness in attractive urban heritage areas. This research presents a comprehensive analysis of visitor location choice behavior, aiming to address two primary objectives. First, this paper investigates the relationship between visitor segments and the choice of particular Points of Interest (POIs). Second, this paper explores the impacts of visitors’ experiences and visitor segments on their revisit intentions. We used a sample of 320 visitors who had been to Amsterdam within the last five years to collect data about their location choice behavior and intention to revisit after a recent visit to the city. Combining the revealed choices and intentions of pre-defined visitor segments obtained from a stated choice experiment, association rules are extracted to reveal differences in the patterns of behaviors related to the segment. The findings identify associations between various POIs, including museums such as the Rijksmuseum and Madame Tussauds, and visitor classes, which include “cultural attraction seekers”, “selective sightseers”, and “city-life lovers”. Furthermore, binary logistic regression analysis reveals that affective experiences, such as feelings of comfort, happiness, and annoyance, have a significant influence on visitors’ intentions to revisit the destination in the future. This research found that “cultural attraction seekers” and “selective sightseers” display a higher likelihood of considering a return visit to the city.

Social excluder's face reduces gaze-triggered attention orienting.

Social ostracism, a negative affective experience in interpersonal interactions, is thought to modulate the gaze-cueing effect (GCE). However, it is unclear whether the impact of social exclusion on the GCE is related to the identity of the cueing face. Therefore, the present study employed a two-phase paradigm to address this issue. In the first phase, two groups of participants were instructed to complete a Cyberball game with two virtual avatars to establish a binding relationship between a specific face's identity and the emotions of social exclusion or inclusion. In the second phase, these two virtual avatars (exclusion faces/inclusion faces) and two new faces (control faces) were used as cueing faces in the gaze-cueing task. The results found that, for the exclusion group, the magnitudes of the GCEs for the exclusion and exclusion-control faces were similar in the 200 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) condition, while the exclusion face's GCE was significantly smaller than that of the exclusion-control face in the 700 ms SOA condition. In contrast, for the inclusion group, the GCEs for inclusion and inclusion-control faces in both the 200 ms SOA and 700 ms SOA conditions did not significantly differ. This study reveals that the effect of social exclusion on the GCE is related to the identity of the cueing face, with individuals more reluctant to follow the gaze direction of excluder and shift their attention and provides experimental evidence that the perception of higher social relations can exert a top-down impact on the processing of social spatial cues.

Objectivity vs affect: how competing forms of legitimacy can polarize public debate in data-driven public consultation

ABSTRACT How do data and objectivity become politicized? How do processes intended to include citizen voices instead push them into social media that intensify negative expression? This paper examines the possibility and limits of ‘agonistic data practices’ (Crooks & Currie, 2021) examining how data-driven consultation practices create competing forms of legitimacy for quantifiable knowledge and affective lived experience. Drawing on a two-year study of a private Facebook group self-presenting as a supportive space for working-class people critical of the development of ‘low-traffic neighbourhoods’ (LTNs), the paper reveals how the dynamics of ‘affective polarization’ associated the use of data with elite and exclusionary politics. Participants addressed this by framing their online contributions as ‘vernacular data’ and also by associating numerical data with exclusion and inequality. Over time the strong statements of feeling began to support content of a conspiratorial nature, reflected at the social level of discourse in the broader media environment where stories of strong feeling gain legitimacy in right-wing sources. The paper concludes that ideologies of dataism and practices of datafication may create conditions for political extremism to develop when the potential conditions of ‘agonistic data practices’ are not met, and that consultation processes must avoid overly valorizing data and calculable knowledge if they wish to retain democratic accountability.

Wilding cities for biodiversity and people: a transdisciplinary framework.

Accelerating urbanisation and associated lifestyle changes result in loss of biodiversity and diminished wellbeing of people through fewer direct interactions and experiences with nature. In this review, we propose the notion of urban wilding (the promotion of autonomous ecological processes that are independent of historical land-use conditions, with minimal direct human maintenance and planting interventions) and investigate its propensity to improve biodiversity and people-nature connections in cities. Through a large interdisciplinary synthesis, we explore the ecological mechanisms through which urban wilding can promote biodiversity in cities, investigate the attitudes and relations of city dwellers towards urban wild spaces, and discuss the integration of urban wilding into the fabric of cities and its governance. We show that favouring assembly spontaneity by reducing planting interventions, and functional spontaneity by limiting maintenance practices, can promote plant diversity and provide ecological resources for numerous organisms at habitat and city scales. These processes could reverse biotic homogenisation, but further studies are needed to understand the effects of wilding on invasive species and their consequences. From a socio-ecological perspective, the attitudes of city dwellers towards spontaneous vegetation are modulated by successional stages, with grassland and woodland stages preferred, but dense shrubby vegetation stages disliked. Wild spaces can diversify physical interactions with nature, and enrich multi-sensory, affective and cognitive experiences of nature in cities. However, some aspects of wild spaces can cause anxiety, feeling unsafe, and the perception of abandonment. These negative attitudes could be mitigated by subtle design and maintenance interventions. While nature has long been thought of as ornamental and instrumental in cities, urban wilding could help to develop relational and intrinsic values of nature in the fabric of cities. Wildness and its singular aesthetics should be combined with cultural norms, resident uses and urban functions to plan and design urban spatial configurations promoting human-non-human cohabitation. For urban wilding to be socially just and adapted to the needs of residents, its implementation should be backed by inclusive governance opening up discussion forums to residents and urban workers. Scientists can support these changes by collaborating with urban actors to design and experiment with new wild spaces promoting biodiversity and wellbeing of people in cities.

Pacing mobility trajectories: Temporality and agency in ‘home’ visits by migrant youth

AbstractResearch on transnational youth mobilities has shown the importance of visits to the ‘home’ country for young people's identities, sense of belonging and access to resources. Yet what transpires on these visits and how do young people agentically shape their experiences? This paper brings into dialogue scholarship on ‘homeland’ mobilities, trajectories and temporalities to shed light on how youth experience their attachments to a ‘homeland’ and reveal the mechanisms through which young people's lives are affected by ‘home’ visits. We use the temporal concept of pacing, recently developed in mobility studies, to analyze how young people experience ‘home’ visits at different moments in their lives. Drawing on 18 months of multi‐sited ethnographic fieldwork using mobile methods with Ghanaian‐background youth who live in Belgium, we show that visits to Ghana are experienced differently by youth throughout their life time in relation to how much control they exert over the pacing of their visits. Through their mobility and their practices before, during and after ‘home’ visits, young people craft affective experiences with people and places in Ghana and experience different paces of life across space and time. This ultimately shapes how young people imagine a future ‘good life’ that involves a transnational lifestyle and that has the ‘right pace’ by incorporating aspects of life from both Belgium and Ghana. A focus on pacing and trajectories contributes to acknowledging both temporal and spatial dimensions of transnational youth mobility.

Understanding the Relation Between Agency and Communion and Victim Impact Statements

AbstractVictim impact statements (VIS) have been widely introduced across different jurisdictions. Although early research examined the impact of VIS on sentencing outcomes, more recently researchers have focussed on their effects on victim posttraumatic stress symptoms. This article offers a different framework to this therapeutic approach. Instead, we emphasize that victims’ affective experience can be conceptualized using the Big Two Framework of agency and communion. Victims suffer damage to their sense of agency—status, respect, and the like—and communion—their experiences of connectedness to others. VIS could provide an opportunity to restore these orientations to self and others. Our research offers an empirical investigation into this framework. Victims who delivered an oral VIS in a Dutch criminal court completed an online survey on their experiences (N = 118). In addition, we conducted in-depth interviews to enrich the information from the survey (N = 24). The results show that both agency and communion-related aspects are present when victims talk about their experiences. Victims, for instance, mention feeling stronger—agency and also to be able to help others—communion. The agency aspect of being heard is apparent both in the survey the interview results. These findings suggest that both agency and communion seem to play a role in the effects of delivering a VIS. Implications of the agency and communion approach are discussed.

School trips to historical sites: students’ cognitive, affective and physical experiences from visits to Auschwitz

History can be experienced in many ways, including visits to historical sites. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly common for Swedish schools to organise trips for their students to historical sites; in this case, to concentration camps. This article analyses how cognitive, affective and physical experiences frame students’ interpretations of historical sites, and discusses how visits to historical sites might contribute to history education. The research questions we examine are as follows: What forms of experience did the students express, and how did these forms relate to each other? What implications might these expressed experiences pose for how teachers organise their teaching, including trips to Holocaust memorial sites? This article analyses seminars that comprised part of the examinable work in a course that involved a study trip to Auschwitz concentration camp. Empirical data were analysed using a model in which cognitive, affective and physical experiences were identified and described. The results demonstrate how cognitive, affective and physical responses interact with students’ experiences. Students described how the school trip contributed to their understanding of what is and is not possible to know, and to their will to influence society. Thus, the results indicate that physical encounters with historical sites can create new opportunities for students’ learning of history and the meaning making that comes from it.

The Other Side of Abortion: The Doctor-Writer in Martin Winckler’s La Vacation (1989)

ABSTRACT In 1989, physician and author Martin Winckler published his first novel, La vacation, in which he introduced the fictional medical practitioner Bruno Sachs. In the novel, the author focuses on Bruno’s moves and gestures, his thoughts and feelings as he performs abortions in a French public clinic. In this article I argue that the novel is a complex, metanarrative account of a medical gesture that engenders and reveals conflicting (and conflictual) situations, emotions and experiences. I suggest that through an elaborate narrative form La Vacation foregrounds the ‘sticky’ feelings surrounding abortion—that abortionist doctors are deeply touched and taxed by the procedure, as convinced as they might be of its importance and rightfulness. Making reference to further works by Winckler, such as La maladie de Sachs and Les trois médécins, this article analyses how the novel’s form is crucial to address the complexity of the affective experience. I will show how Winckler’s novel problematises the subjects and objects of abortion and I will argue that, in his first literary work, he is inscribing himself into a lineage of doctor-writers who are also activist writers who use their pens as swords.