Affect Intensity Research Articles

The Weariness of Hoping: Synchronizing Affect While Awaiting Organ Transplantation for Cystic Fibrosis in Germany

ABSTRACT We describe the challenges in synchronizing affect during the lengthy lead-up to organ transplantation. Our analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Eastern Germany among medical staff caring for patients with cystic fibrosis, a progressive, genetic illness. Patient and practitioners must together endure an uncertain wait for a donor organ, while simultaneously living and working toward living as well as possible. The organizing affective principle in this setting is hoping, which is a socio-material practice that must be continuously and interactively re-produced. Too little or too much hoping must be managed by adjusting affective intensities. A failure to strike this balance can lead to what we designate as the weariness of hoping.

Existential spectrum of suffering: concepts and moral valuations for assessing intensity and tolerability

This paper has two aims. The first is to defend a recent critique of the leading medical theory of suffering, which alleges too narrow a focus on violent experiences of...

Using Wearable Passive Sensing to Predict Binge Eating in Response to Negative Affect Among Individuals With Transdiagnostic Binge Eating: Protocol for an Observational Study.

Binge eating (BE), characterized by eating a large amount of food accompanied by a sense of loss of control over eating, is a public health crisis. Negative affect is a well-established antecedent for BE. The affect regulation model of BE posits that elevated negative affect increases momentary risk for BE, as engaging in BE alleviates negative affect and reinforces the behavior. The eating disorder field's capacity to identify moments of elevated negative affect, and thus BE risk, has exclusively relied on ecological momentary assessment (EMA). EMA involves the completion of surveys in real time on one's smartphone to report behavioral, cognitive, and emotional symptoms throughout the day. Although EMA provides ecologically valid information, EMA surveys are often delivered only 5-6 times per day, involve self-report of affect intensity only, and are unable to assess affect-related physiological arousal. Wearable, psychophysiological sensors that measure markers of affect arousal including heart rate, heart rate variability, and electrodermal activity may augment EMA surveys to improve accurate real-time prediction of BE. These sensors can objectively and continuously measure biomarkers of nervous system arousal that coincide with affect, thus allowing them to measure affective trajectories on a continuous timescale, detect changes in negative affect before the individual is consciously aware of them, and reduce user burden to improve data completeness. However, it is unknown whether sensor features can distinguish between positive and negative affect states, given that physiological arousal may occur during both negative and positive affect states. The aims of this study are (1) to test the hypothesis that sensor features will distinguish positive and negative affect states in individuals with BE with >60% accuracy and (2) test the hypothesis that a machine learning algorithm using sensor data and EMA-reported negative affect to predict the occurrence of BE will predict BE with greater accuracy than an algorithm using EMA-reported negative affect alone. This study will recruit 30 individuals with BE who will wear Fitbit Sense 2 wristbands to passively measure heart rate and electrodermal activity and report affect and BE on EMA surveys for 4 weeks. Machine learning algorithms will be developed using sensor data to distinguish instances of high positive and high negative affect (aim 1) and to predict engagement in BE (aim 2). This project will be funded from November 2022 to October 2024. Recruitment efforts will be conducted from January 2023 through March 2024. Data collection is anticipated to be completed in May 2024. This study is anticipated to provide new insight into the relationship between negative affect and BE by integrating wearable sensor data to measure affective arousal. The findings from this study may set the stage for future development of more effective digital ecological momentary interventions for BE. DERR1-10.2196/47098.

The affect-graph as a supervisory technique: theoretical foundations, procedures, and applications

ABSTRACT The nature of client and therapist affect displayed during psychotherapy has always been of interest within supervision, although systematic measurement of affect-appraisal has been surprisingly limited. The current article describes an innovative supervisory technique, the Affect Graph, designed to chart the nature and intensity of affect and to study (i) within-rater appraisal differences across affect types and over time, (ii) affect-appraisal variability across gender and cultural diversity, (iii) between-rater (e.g., supervisor-supervisee) appraisal differences, and (iv) the identification of appraisal ratings that consistently deviate from peer/expert-based consensus. The Affect Graph’s scoring system and its application in three case-scenarios are illustrated.

The Aesthetics of Affect in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles

ABSTRACT Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916) is a one-act play in which two women search for the truth about a murder in the absence of the play’s central character, Minnie Wright, who is accused of murdering her husband. The play’s dramatic components hinge on the affective shift of these two women as they break free of the masculinist ideologies that permeate the bleak setting. At the antipode of the masculine rationality, women’s affective intensity creates the connections between and among subjects and their environments. In this process, empathy toward the incarnation of Minnie arises and the reversal of values happens, recapitulating into the noncommunicative men’s rationality and communicative women’s affects. The tension between such opposing traits cast Minnie as a pharmakos, violating cultural gendered assumptions and literary conventions, enacting the emancipatory and participatory aesthetics in opposition to the coercive and transcendent male-centered aesthetics.

Short video marketing and travel intentions: The interplay between visual perspective, visual content, and narration appeal

Social media short videos represent a powerful tool for tourism destination promotion. However, little research has investigated their effect on tourist travel intentions. Drawing on the construal level theory and the elaboration likelihood model, this study investigates the interactive effects between visual and verbal framing of promotional tourism short video on travel intention through two scenario-based experiments. Study 1 examined the interaction effect between visual perspective and visual content. The results indicated that the match between first-person (versus third-person) perspective and activity-centric (versus site-centric) content fosters higher travel intention through enhancing imagery fluency. Study 2 further examined the moderating role of narration message appeal and revealed that first-person perspective with activity-centric content leads to higher travel intention when paired with rational (versus emotional) narration messages, with affect intensity playing a significant mediating role. These findings contribute to knowledge on short video marketing and provide valuable insights for tourism marketers.

Romantic Priority Claims, or, Who Has Priority in Deep Time?

ABSTRACT This essay seeks to extend the definition of the term priority claim, arguing that some kinds of priority claims operate across literature and science and may be made on behalf of past actors as well as oneself. My examples are drawn primarily from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of the place of early or ancestral humans in deep time, particularly those of Thomas Carlyle, John Lubbock, and Johann Gottfried Herder. In making this argument, I attend specifically to the role of race and gender in these accounts and to the rhetorical and affective intensity accruing around the identities of those imagined to inhabit deep time. Deep time, as a contentious and vaguely defined sphere of discovery prior to the establishment of radiometric dating, provides a field especially adapted to priority claims in this extended sense.

Prison Adjustment Among Military Veterans: The Impact of Traumatic Events, Service History, and PTSD.

Military veterans have been shown to differ demographically from non-veterans in the criminal justice system. However, relatively little is known about their psychological adjustment, institutional misbehavior, and the efficacy of programing received while incarcerated. Using data taken from a national sample of prison inmates, this study investigates how traumatic events experienced during military service can impact the intensity of negative affect among veterans. Additionally, we examine whether prison misconduct is influenced by military service history and the receipt of substance abuse treatment. Controlling for a host of relevant variables, our results indicate that traumatic events show a significant effect on psychological adjustment only indirectly through veterans who developed post-traumatic stress disorder and that misconduct is lower among those who received an honorable discharge. Overall, these findings suggest that the ability of veterans to resist adverse outcomes may depend on a variety of factors both within and outside the prison environment.

Psychological distancing and language intensity in Peer‐to‐Peer lending

AbstractPeer‐to‐peer (P2P) lending is referred to as lending money to unknown borrowers directly through online platforms without using traditional financial intermediaries. We leverage insights from the literature on psychological distancing and affective intensity to argue that linguistic styles, as the manifestation of social psychological distance, have a negative impact on P2P funding success. Testing our arguments with data from a major Chinese P2P platform, we find that using too many “you” and negations (proxies for social psychological distance) in the borrower's description will dampen a lender's willingness to support a funding campaign. Moreover, when the social psychological distance is large, language intensity can be perceived as desperate, making a lender even less willing to support the funding campaign. Our research shed new light on the role of language in P2P funding success and has practical implications for lenders, borrowers and regulators in overcoming barriers in P2P lending.

Investigation of momentary negative symptoms in patients with early psychosis in daily life: An experience sampling study

Negative symptoms are a key therapeutic target in promoting functional recovery in early psychosis intervention, but momentary negative symptom manifestations remain understudied in the early stage of illness. We employed an experience-sampling methodology (ESM) to evaluate momentary affective experiences, hedonic capacity for an event recalled, current activities and social interactions, and associated appraisals for 6 consecutive days in 33 clinically-stable early psychosis patients (within 3 years of treatment for first-episode psychosis) and 35 demographically-matched healthy controls. Adjusted multilevel linear-mixed models revealed higher intensity and variability of negative affect in patients than controls, but no group difference in affect instability as well as positive affect intensity and variability. Patients demonstrated no significantly greater anhedonia for event, activity or social interactions relative to controls. Higher preference for company (when alone) and to be alone (when in company) was observed in patients than controls. No significant group difference in pleasantness to be alone or proportion of time being alone. Our results indicate no evidence for blunting of affective experiences, anhedonia (social and non-social) and asociality in early psychosis. Future research complementing ESM with multiple digital phenotyping measures will facilitate more refined negative symptom assessment in the daily life of patients with early psychosis.

Emotion and judgment in young women of a society in transition

The present study asked whether emotional responses to narratives of moral transgressions are shaped by the reader’s assumed relationship with the injured party (i.e., oneself, familiar other, and unfamiliar other). Its goal was to test a cultural, religious, and individualistic account of such responses in young females of a traditional society in transition towards a sustainable integration into the global economy. To this end, female college students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were asked to identify their emotional reaction to each of several moral transgressions, report its intensity and then judge the severity of the transgression. In agreement with the religious norm hypothesis, whereby others are to be treated as oneself, reported emotions, affective intensity, and moral judgment did not change with students’ relationship with the injured party. The only exception was students’ lenient judgment when feeling angry for being the victim of a transgression, which underlies the tenet of forgiveness in religious doctrine.

Body odor disgust sensitivity (BODS) is related to extreme odor valence perception.

Odors are important disease cues, and disgust sensitivity to body odors reflects individual differences in disease avoidance. The body odor disgust sensitivity (BODS) scale provides a rapid and valid assessment of individual differences. Nevertheless, little is known about how individual differences in BODS might correlate with overall odor perception or how it is related to other differences in emotional reactivity (e.g., affect intensity). We investigated how BODS relates to perceptual ratings of pleasant and unpleasant odors. We aggregated data from 4 experiments (total N = 190) that were conducted in our laboratory, and where valence and intensity ratings were collected. Unpleasant odors were body-like (e.g., sweat-like valeric acid), which may provide disease cues. The pleasant odors were, in contrast, often found in soap and cleaning products (e.g., lilac, lemon). Across experiments, we show that individuals with higher BODS levels perceived smells as more highly valenced overall: unpleasant smells were rated as more unpleasant, and pleasant smells were rated as more pleasant. These results suggest that body odor disgust sensitivity is associated with a broader pattern of affect intensity which causes stronger emotional responses to both negative and positive odors. In contrast, BODS levels were not associated with odor intensity perception. Furthermore, disgust sensitivity to odors coming from external sources (e.g., someone else's sweat) was the best predictor of odor valence ratings. The effects were modest in size. The results validate the BODS scale as it is explicitly associated with experimental ratings of odor valence.

Relational Ethics of Care in Pandemic Research: Vulnerabilities, Intimacies, and Becoming Together-Apart

In this article, we draw upon the ethico-onto-epistemology of feminist new materialisms to reflect on our experiences as feminists doing research on women’s embodied experiences of sport, fitness, and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. For qualitative researchers around the world, COVID-19 presented a radically changed research environment. For many, the shift to doing digital interviews required the navigation of unfamiliar technologies and experimenting with different strategies for establishing connections through computer screens. As feminist scholars, working together and with the participants during times of increased stress and uncertainty prompted us to reimagine our ethical research practices. In this article, we engage and extend Rosi Braidotti’s writing on affirmative ethics and offer our personal experiences of grappling with the affective intensities of pandemic while doing ethical feminist research. Through this creative inquiry, we describe supporting one another through research and illustrate how the unique intersections of work, family, health, isolation, and exhaustion were influencing our own and participants’ lives differently. Engaging with Braidotti’s writings on affirmative ethics in the posthuman convergence, we illuminate the ways that our digital-material experiences and the human/nonhuman aspects of the research processes were re-turning our ethical considerations. Researching together, with a focus on creating space for the voices of women who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, we found moments of hope and joy as we creatively imagined expansive potentials for feminist research, fostered through caring collaborations.

In Search of Non-Linear Futures: Feminist Methodological-Analytical Strategies for Reading Against the Grain

ABSTRACT Feminist and queer thinkers are increasingly problematising linear time and developing other ways of theorising and exploring non-linear time and temporalities. In this article, we join such work as we formulate a set of methodological-analytical reading strategies that can assist us as scholars in writing up alternative futures from empirical data. We focus on young women whose ‘successful’ futures are typically represented as a linear trajectory where actions in the present ensure a gradual progression towards the desired future. However, linear time is not a neutral entity; on the contrary, it is both a performative and political force and, in this article, we argue that it is timely to consider temporal alternatives to the linear norm. Drawing on a QLR study of young women’s future-making in Denmark and taking inspiration from queer theory, affect theory and hauntology, we present three strategies for ‘reading against the grain’ of linear time: reading for temporal points of resistance, reading for lively statements and reading for affective intensities. We argue that these strategies can assist us in amplifying ‘cracks’ in the dominant, linear narrative and thereby can shed light on/‘travel to’ non-linear forms of future-making.

Emotional complexity under high stress: Do protective associations for risk behaviors persist even during a pandemic?

Risk behaviors like substance use and binge eating are often used to cope with negative emotions. Engagement in these behaviors has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Past research suggests that complex emotion conceptualizations captured as emotion differentiation (ability to discriminate between emotional states) and polarity (ability to integrate positive and negative features of emotional experience) may be protective. We examined associations of mean affect intensity, emotion differentiation, and emotion polarity with frequency of daily substance use and binge eating across 10 days in a demographically diverse sample of U.S. adults (N = 353) recruited between March 24 and April 9, 2020, when stay-at-home orders were initiated. Owing to the nested data structure and excessive zero values, analyses were conducted using multilevel zero-inflated negative binomial regression. Consistent with past research, negative affect was positively associated with frequency of substance use and binge eating. Importantly, results indicated that negative emotion differentiation was protective, predicting greater likelihood of not using substances and binge eating at all across the sampling period. These effects remained even after controlling for mean affect intensity, emotion polarity, and positive emotion differentiation. Neither positive emotion differentiation nor emotion polarity were significantly associated with either behavior. Our results suggest that greater complexity in conceptualization of negative emotions facilitates some protection against risk behaviors such as substance use and binge eating, even during periods of high environmental stress. These findings have important implications for optimizing interventions to reduce engagement in risk behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The mediating roles of pre-competitive coping and affective states in the relationships between coach-athlete relationship, satisfaction and attainment of achievement goals

ABSTRACT The study is aimed to explore the relationship between coach-athlete relationship, precompetitive coping and affective states, satisfaction and attainment of achievement goals. A sample of 567 French athletes (Mage = 22.10; SD = 5.66; 377 men and 190 women) involved in 75 training groups participated in the study and completed a series of self-report measures in a temporal design with three measure points. Results of multilevel analyses revealed that the coach-athlete dyad (level 2; between-person level of analysis or training groups) and task-oriented coping (level 1; within person level of analysis or individuals) significantly predicted goal attainment (level 1). Moreover, the results of the Sobel test revealed that task-oriented coping (level 1) marginally mediated the relationship between coach-athlete dyad (level 2) and sport satisfaction (level 1). Besides, the coach-athlete dyad (level 1) and Intensity of positive affect (PA) mediated the relationship between coach-athlete dyad and goal attainment. Finally, the coach-athlete dyad (level 1) and Intensity of PA mediated the relationship between coach-athlete dyad and satisfaction (level 1). In conclusion, the display of Coach-Athlete relationship strategies may enhance higher levels of precompetitive task-oriented coping, intensity of PA, goal attainment and satisfaction. Subsequently, coaches and practitioners should focus their training on enhancing coach-athlete relationship as a crucial part of training in order to perform in competitions.

Ghost in the Mall: The Affective and Hauntological Potential of Dead Mall Ruins

Dead malls haunt the internet. These malls are either left abandoned to decay, to be slowly reclaimed by nature, or are dying with few shops and fewer people, open but eerily empty and quiet. Dead malls are dreamworlds, portals to the dreams of the past (Buck-Morss, 1995; 2000) – a time when the mall was a mecca of mass consumer-capitalist society. The affects of these dreams imbue the mall – a sense of hope and optimism for a new world promised by consumer culture, global connectivity, and technological advances. But these promised worlds never arrived, they have fallen into ruin and nothing has come to replace them. An internet scene has grown in these ruins. They call themselves “dead mall enthusiasts” – an intimate public that shares and expresses worldviews, memories and affects centred around the figure of the dead mall. Enthusiasts sense the affective intensities of decaying 20th century consumer-capitalist futures that haunt these ruins – they sense “hauntological affects”. The dead mall and its enthusiasts alert us to our affective potential, they remind us of our ability to imagine the future.

‘They’re part of what we are’: Interspecies belonging, animal life and farming practice on the Isle of Skye

This article develops the concept of interspecies belonging: a process of co-habitation between humans and non-humans achieved through material, affective and situated practises. This dynamic is generative of an intimate, personal sense of belonging and a socio-spatial politics of belonging. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork amongst hill farmers and the animals they live alongside on the Isle of Skye, North-West Scotland. It considers how farming work is an embodied and sensorial immersion in more-than-human worlds, undergirded by affective intensities that produce a feeling of being right with the world, but also of the farming self as producer of commodity goods. Within the fraught political ecologies of a post-productivist uplands, and the growing influence of nature conservation in farming life, they animate a political belonging aimed at protecting access to natural resources. I demonstrate how the imbrication of animal behaviours, mobilities and bodies within this dynamic of belonging shapes how they are understood as legitimate or illegitimate presences within upland landscapes. Through this, I consider how the recently reintroduced sea eagle is engaged with by farmers as an exemplar of exogenous institutional intervention that marginalises an already precarious way of life.

Sites of intensity: leisure and emotions amid the necropolitics of asylum

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to highlight new insights on the social and political dimensions of emotions experienced within leisure through a specific focus on the everyday lives of people seeking asylum in the UK. In doing so, we draw on and expand inter-disciplinary perspectives that have underlined how the affective intensities and (in)capacities of bodies, and the conditions through which these emerge in everyday lives, are central in the workings of power. Leisure scholars have advanced important analyses on the politics of affects and emotions at the intersection of gendered, sexual and racialised axis of difference. Yet, the relevance of these perspectives has yet to be fully explored in articulating leisure, forced migration and the (necro)politics of asylum. Drawing on two ethnographic studies with people seeking asylum and their allies in Bristol and Leeds, UK, this paper contributes to address this gap by looking at two different leisure domains, music-making and football, as sites of intensity: not just discursive or symbolic, but lived, embodied and felt domains where the gradual wounding produced by the asylum regime is both made manifest and negotiated.

The intertwinement of speculative fictions and environmental activism: Towards a sensory sociology of climate fiction

In this article we tentatively plot the coordinates of a sensory sociology approach for empirically investigating how the popular culture genre of climate fiction operates affectively within environmental activism. We begin by theorising the genre of climate fiction as an affective potentiality capable of stimulating the imagination of hopeful climate futures and energising imaginactivism, that is the activist quest for the attainment of better climate alternatives. In this theorisation we draw on McKenzie Wark’s account of ecological speculative fiction, Elizabeth Grosz’s bioaesthetics and Bernard Stiegler’s ‘neganthropology’. We outline a range of speculative, inventive, utopian, atmospheric, enactive and sensory methodologies for the sociological study of climate fiction as an affective potentiality. By employing these methodologies, we argue, researchers will be better attuned to the affective intensities and atmosphere of anticipation, speculation and collective enactment of dreams of better climate futures that climate fiction is poised to catalyse in social settings of environmental activism.