Emotional Encounters Research Articles

Predicting distress-induced eating with self-reports: Mission impossible or a piece of cake?

Comments on the original article, "Assessing yourself as an emotional eater: Mission impossible?" by C. Evers, D. T. D. de Ridder, and M. A. Adriaanse (see record 2009-20990-009). Results of a functional MRI study (Bohon, Stice, & Spoor, 2009) contradict the assertion that it is "impossible" to self-assess emotional eating because the self-report emotional eating scale of the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ-em) predicted important individual differences in reward response during negative moods. Evers et al advance their argument in the context of results of four experiments where self-reported "emotional eaters" (DEBQ-em) did not eat more food during emotional encounters as compared to control conditions or "no emotional eaters." However, the core characteristic of emotional eaters is not that they eat so much during distress (though binge eaters may do), but that they do not show the typical stress response of eating less (the typical stress response being loss of appetite because of physiological effects that mimic satiety) (Gold & Chrousos, 2002). Accordingly, the moderator effect of emotional eating during distress would be that. "No emotional eaters" eat less and "emotional eaters" eat the same or more compared to control conditions. Close inspection of the results of Evers et al reveals that their "no emotional eaters" did not show the typical stress response of eating less. This opens the possibility that the null findings of Evers et al may be simply explained by misclassification of "no emotional eaters" versus "emotional eaters" because of their use of median splits (a procedure notorious for possible misclassification of subjects into distinct groups). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

A Novel Window on the Academy: Commentary byLiesa Stamm, Contributing Editor

In this issue Kimberly Nehls introduces us to a different way of learning about students’ college experiences and how these experiences shape their lives (Nehls, 2009). Nehls’s review of J. Courtney Smith’s novel Commencement demonstrates the insights into higher education that fiction can provide. As an anthropologist, I have found that novels represent a valuable form of ethnography, descriptions of cultural beliefs and practices. While scholarly studies of culture offer ethnographic descriptions in the analytic categories created by anthropologists or other scholars, novels take us into the lived experience of a culture through the interactions of individuals with their social world and through their thoughts, meanings, and understandings. Novels also depict well the emotional encounters and reactions associated with situations of daily life, an aspect of human experience that constraints of scholarly work generally cannot impart. One of the rewards of our current globalized existence is the easy availability of a vast amount of literature by novelists around the world, which take us into the minutia that comprise people’s lives, their struggles, aspirations, successes and disappointments, as well as the cultural frameworks through which they operate. Some recent examples of this world literature include Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, which is set in northern India on the Indian side of the Himalayas and is the 2006 winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize; and Malaysian Tan Twang Eng’s The Gift of Rain (2008).

Assessing yourself as an emotional eater: Mission impossible?

The extent to which individuals are emotional eaters has typically been assessed by people's self-reported desire to eat when they experience negative emotions. Elevated scores on these emotional eater scales have been associated with eating pathology and obesity. However, evidence that individuals scoring high on these scales truly increase their food intake during emotional encounters is inconclusive. The current studies tested whether emotional eater scales capture the proposed tendency to eat when feeling emotional. In four experiments with different emotion induction procedures, female participants were randomly assigned to negative emotion or control conditions. In the control conditions positive or no emotions were induced. Next, food consumption was assessed by bogus taste tests. Emotional eater status, emotional experience, and actual consumption of different food types. Individuals describing themselves as emotional eaters did not increase food intake during emotional encounters as compared to control conditions or individuals not judging themselves as emotional eaters. The results suggest that self-reported emotional eaters do not increase food intake during emotional encounters in the laboratory. Implications of these findings are discussed, including the idea that it may be complex to adequately assess one's own emotional eating behavior.

Monstrous Births and Medical Networks: Debates over Forensic Evidence, Generation Theory, and Obstetrical Authority in France, ca. 1780-1815

In France between 1780 and 1815, doctors opened a broad correspondence with medical faculties and public officials about foetal anomalies ("monstrosities"). Institutional and legal reforms forced doctors to encounter monstrous births with greater frequency, and they responded by developing new ideas about heredity and embryology to explain malformations to public officials. Though doctors achieved consensus on pathogenesis, they struggled to apply these ideas in forensic cases, especially with doubtful sex. Medical networks simultaneously allowed doctors to explore obstetrical techniques, as licensing regulations forced practitioners into emotional encounters with child anomalies. Doctors thus developed a new ethics for treating monstrosities, viewing them as pathological specimens, forensic objects, and obstetrical tragedies.

The Interests of the Passions

The Interests of the Passions J. M. Opal (bio) Nicole Eustace . Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 613 pp. Appendix, illustrations, notes, acknowledgements, and index. $45.00. This is an enormously important book that uses eighteenth-century Pennsylvania as a case study of emotional politics in colonial and revolutionary America. Unlike many studies of affect, feeling, and sentiment in the human past, Passion is the Gale not only seeks to compliment prevailing themes of political, social, or economic history but also to place emotion and "spirit" at the core of those understandings. Among the best reasons to do so, Eustace points out, is that eighteenth-century Americans would have recognized this approach as their own. Drawing from a treasure trove of printed, archival, and visual sources, she shows that colonial Pennsylvanians were deeply invested in the governance and portrayal of emotion and passion, indeed that they saw themselves within the fine distinctions of honorable resentment and unthinking rage, dutiful mourning and petulant sorrow, authentic love and passing affection. "The signals of dominance and deference encoded in the regulation of emotional expression," she writes, "were extremely subtle but nonetheless real and recognizable to eighteenth-century actors" (p. 78). By explaining how clergymen, widows, statesmen, slaves, Indians, and revolutionaries betrayed their feelings and why their emotions mattered to the nation's genesis, Eustace offers something truly original and profoundly relevant. In essence, this is an intellectual and cultural history of the broadest variety—not a study of professional thinkers and formalized creeds but of the interplay between available ideas and various audiences. During the course of nine chapters, some focused on seminal events and others devoted to signature passions, Eustace offers keen readings of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Tom Paine's Common Sense. She also peers into the personal correspondence of Philadelphia couples, the choreographed diplomacy between whites and Indians, and the brutal commerce between slave-owners and their human chattels. She manages to cover this wide range of texts and actors by embracing the organic interdependence of the personal and political and by applying new technologies of finding and [End Page 500] decoding historical sources. The cumulative result is a fresh understanding of "the reordering of Anglo-American life" during the Revolution (p. 15). Eustace bases her study in a strategy of "collapsing distinctions between the personal and the political" (p. 6). This approach, she argues, not only throws light on her elusive quarry but also approximates an eighteenth-century cosmology in which modern categories of power and behavior held little meaning. The personal was assumed to be political in that world, which was poised along the well-studied frontier between communitarian and individualistic mentalités. This does not mean that Eustace would have us conflate emotional encounters within households with those unfolding between nations or empires. Rather, she invites us to explore the political and diplomatic implications that emotional displays and exchanges carried in eighteenth-century milieus.1 The book opens with a study of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, which was published in 1733 and available in Philadelphia by 1735. Long overshadowed in many historiographies by Bernard de Mandeville's more cynical Fable of the Bees, Pope's book-length poem clearly resonated in the colonial metropolis. It also offended the conventional wisdom of Christianity and moral philosophy by announcing that the passions were universal, irrepressible, and not all that bad. Reason may be the chart of the human soul, Pope noted, but "Passion is the gale." Moral philosophers could debate the excellence or depravity of Man, he averred, but the truth was simpler: "Man's as perfect as he ought." In letters and commonplace books from the 1740s and 1750s, Eustace finds repeated and direct references to these and other lines of the poem. At length, they began to appear without attribution, so that phrases approving human passions and excusing human nature became ambient voices. But if more and more Pennsylvanians were ready to approve passion's gale and shrug with Pope that "whatever is is right," they also assumed...

Where the Interaction Is

This article presents three ethnographic tales of interactions with living room media to help recreate the experience of significant moments in time, of affective encounters at the interface in which there is a collision or confusion of situated and virtual worlds. It draws on a year-long video ethnography of the practice and performance of everyday interactions with living room media. By studying situated activity and the lived practice of (new) media, rather than taking an exclusive focus on the virtual as a detached space, this ethnographic work demonstrates how the situated and mediated clash, or are crafted into complex emotional encounters during everyday living room life.

Nietzsche's Goethe: In Sickness and in Health

This article re-evaluates Nietzsche's view of Goethe by analysing the function and significance of the term 'Goethe' in Nietzsche's writings. While Nietzsche's attitude to Goethe is indisputably complex, it is argued here that the image of Goethe presented in Nietzsche's writings is the exception which proves the rule that his engagements with historical figures are characterized by deliberate ambivalence or by violent shifts in attitude. While Nietzsche's view of Goethe is not wholly uncritical, the double-edgedness which marks Nietzsche's intellectual (and emotional) encounters with other outstanding figures in Western culture is largely absent from his engagement with Goethe. Throughout Nietzsche's writings, Goethe is associated in invariably positive ways with diagnoses of cultural health and sickness, notably with Nietzsche's assessments of Greek antiquity, 'Erziehung', Classicism and Romanticism, Christianity, Wagner, decadence, the 'German question', Napoleon, 'Lebensbejahung', and the symbolic figure of Dionysos. Increasingly and obsessively, however, Goethe comes to be linked in Nietzsche's mind with exemplary physical and mental health, to the extent that he presents Goethe as both a promise of the posited 'Übermensch' and as an idealized self-projection or self-affirmation.

Experiential and emotional encounters of women planners in Africa

Women planners in Africa do not constitute a critical mass: their numbers remain negligible and their output unrecognised, while mentors and role models still tend to be male. Women's experiences are undervalued, and their knowledge is often excluded in policy, project planning, and implementation. This article arises not from systematic academic research but from confessional, reflective, pilot research based on personal experience and the experiences reported by 25 women planners between 1999 and 2004. It deliberately seeks to break the monotony of drawing from survey results which are often detached from experiential and emotional encounters. Using anecdotal material from Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, it examines the training and professional environment of the ‘planneress’; and discusses the emotions, expectations, and experiences of female planners in everyday encounters.

“Why Is This Happening to Me?:” The Attributional Make-Up of Negative Emotions Experienced in Emotional Support Encounters

Weiner's (2000) attributional model of intrapersonal motivations suggests that attributions influence not only people's emotional experiences, but also their behavioral responses to the events that caused these emotions. The current study investigates the causal dimensions (i.e., stability, controllability, locus) of five emotions (i.e., sadness, helplessness, hurt, fear, anger) people commonly experience when they are distressed and in need of emotional support. Participants (N = 258) were asked to identify an upsetting event and subsequently talk about it with a confederate helper in a five-minute conversation. After the conversation, participants completed attribution and emotion indices scales. The events discussed were coded into nine categories (e.g., death of a relative, college performance/job problems, break-ups). Results suggested that the five emotions possess a unique attributional make-up and are uniquely tied to specific events that were discussed by participants. Implications of the results are discussed in the context of providing emotional support to people who experience distress.

Emotional Contagion in the Online Environment: Investigating the Dynamics and Implications of Emotional Encounters in Mixed-Motive Situations in the Electronic Context

This paper explores the effects of individual emotional encounters in mixed motive situations on each individual outcomes, dyadic outcomes, and attitudes in an electronic communication context. Results of the experiment show that positive emotions expressed online tended to lead to greater emotional contagion than did negative emotions, and can be beneficial for a future relationship, while negative emotions online tended to exert influence over individual gains. Specifically, our data indicates that those participants who negotiated with an emotionally negative other obtained lower individual outcomes than did their counterparts, while those negative counterparts had the biggest share of the pie among all conditions. Implications for theory and research are discussed.

Joining the conspiracy? negotiating ethics and emotions in researching (around) AIDS in southern africa

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is an emotive subject, particularly in southern Africa. Among those who have been directly affected by the disease, or who perceive themselves to be personally at risk, talking about AIDS inevitably arouses strong emotions—amongst them fear, distress, loss and anger. Conventionally, human geography research has avoided engagement with such emotions. Although the ideal of the detached observer has been roundly critiqued, the emphasis in methodological literature on ‘doing no harm’ has led even qualitative researchers to avoid difficult emotional encounters. Nonetheless, research is inevitably shaped by emotions, not least those of the researchers themselves. In this paper, we examine the role of emotions in the research process through our experiences of researching the lives of young AIDS migrants in Malawi and Lesotho. We explore how the context of the research gave rise to the production of particular emotions, and how, in response, we shaped the research, presenting a research agenda focused more on migration than AIDS. This example reveals a tension between universalised ethics expressed through ethical research guidelines that demand informed consent, and ethics of care, sensitive to emotional context. It also demonstrates how dualistic distinctions between reason and emotion, justice and care, global and local are unhelpful in interpreting the ethics of research practice.

Critical Geography and the Real World in First-Year Writing Classrooms

ecently, during a media analysis unit in my first-year writing class, we discussed the influence of the media on college alcohol consumption. Students chimed in about recent portrayals of college life from television and the movies. Animal House, the American Pie movies, and the Will Ferrell film Old School all came up, but only one student offered a personal experience to contrast or problematize the topic at hand. I was astonished. These were (mostly) first-year college students talking about the experiences of first-year college students, but doing so from a distinctly objective point of view. Their own experiences did not seem to inform the discussion. They were willing to consider the topic at hand and discuss it but refused to shift their gaze towards their own experiences and to explore how their lives might be influenced by the images and narratives of college fed to them by the media and the culture around them. They examined the text of culture from a distance, ignoring their existence and participation in that text. This split between the academic and the “real” was particularly noticeable during another classroom discussion. While our class was having a lively debate about an extremely graphic and physically imposing anti-abortion display that an off-campus group had set up in a central location on campus, one student suggested that the display was important and necessary to allow students to begin to confront difficult debates. As he put it, it would prepare them for later on when he and his fellow students would need to negotiate “real” life. The implication in the student’s statement was that campus life and, more importantly, the debates about women’s choice, personal freedom, the public use of space, free speech, and, even, the emotional encounters and conversations raised by this politically charged demonstration were in fact not real. For this student, anything that occurred in the physical terrain of campus was a mere fiction, a simulation of a world lived beyond the physical and temporal boundaries of the campus, a warm-up for the reality that arrives with the job market and student loan payments. Too often, it feels as if students consider the view from the classroom as if it were some detached god-eye peering out onto the world with an isolated, allseeing omniscience. This omniscient view separates the observer (the classroom) and the observed (the world and culture) and suggests that the world of the classroom is not connected with the world they live in. This distance makes the classroom (and, more broadly, life at the university) simply the practice round that precedes the “real world.” It is this idea of the real world that I wish to explore. It is alarming how students (and often teachers as well) persistently rely on language that juxtaposes the classroom with the real world. Typically, this language use takes the form of off-hand remarks in casual conversation, and, therefore, we rarely consider how R

Editorial

Editorial

The persistence of ritual in nursing practice

As nursing attempts to become a research based profession, ritual has become stigmatized and associated with thoughtless repetition. Articles condemning ritualistic practice are frequently seen in nursing journals. Despite this condemnation, ritualistic practice appears to persist. This paper examines the origins and purpose of ritual, giving reasons for the negative association. It explores the role of ritual within western culture and nursing. This paper then draws on anthropological method to analyze the purpose of ritual within nursing and suggests reasons for its persistence. The paper concludes that there are cultural influences that promote a technical, rational approach to the study of the human condition. This worldview with its emphasis on cognition devalues the important emotional aspects of humanity by associating them with the primitive. The examination of factors which contribute to the persistence of ritual in nursing concludes that nursing work involves emotional encounters and breaches of the taboo aspects of culture. Rituals serve to normalize these transgressions. It helps the nurse and patient deal with emotions generated by these, the breaches of taboo, by re-labelling situations as caring rather than transgressing. Because they serve these emotional and social functions, rituals endure.Rationale for the article: my interest in ritual was re-awakened on reading Parker's (1999) article entitled Reason or ritual. It stimulated me to reflect on three questions: firstly, why do rituals persist when the nursing literature condemns them? Secondly, does ritual serve a purpose that ensures its survival in the face of criticism? Thirdly, why do the disciplines of nursing and anthropology perceive ritual in such different ways?This paper takes an anthropological approach to ritual, drawing on secondary anthropological and nursing data, in an attempt to answer the questions outlined above.

Working with emotion: issues for the researcher in fieldwork and teamwork

This paper addresses the role of emotion in the qualitative research process and in particular, the effects of emotional experiences on the researcher. Drawing briefly on the literature, we show the importance of emotion for understanding the research process. Whilst this literature acknowledges the emotional risk for research respondents, there is little evidence providing in-depth understanding of the emotions of the researcher. We consider theoretically and empirically, the significance of emotion throughout the duration of a research project. Using our own personal experiences in the field, we present a range of emotional encounters that qualitative researchers may face. We offer suggestions for research teams who wish to develop strategies for 'managing' emotion and effectively utilizing 'emotionally-sensed knowledge'. We conclude that unless emotion in research is acknowledged, not only will researchers be left vulnerable, but also our understandings of the social world will remain impoverished. The...

Working with emotion: Issues for the researcher in fieldwork and teamwork

This paper addresses the role of emotion in the qualitative research process and in particular, the effects of emotional experiences on the researcher. Drawing briefly on the literature, we show the importance of emotion for understanding the research process. Whilst this literature acknowledges the emotional risk for research respondents, there is little evidence providing in-depth understanding of the emotions of the researcher. We consider theoretically and empirically, the significance of emotion throughout the duration of a research project. Using our own personal experiences in the field, we present a range of emotional encounters that qualitative researchers may face. We offer suggestions for research teams who wish to develop strategies for 'managing' emotion and effectively utilizing 'emotionally-sensed knowledge'. We conclude that unless emotion in research is acknowledged, not only will researchers be left vulnerable, but also our understandings of the social world will remain impoverished. The challenge therefore is how to construct meaning and develop understanding and knowledge in an academic environment that, on the whole, trains researchers to be rational and objective, and 'extract out' emotion.

A sentimental patient.

Today's Zeitgeist dictates that physicians not only care for their patients, but also care deeply about them. According to a recent article in a prominent journal, “patients who are given good medical treatment are often upset or angry when they feel that their doctors do not care about them personally.” It may well be that the Zeitgeist says more about how we feel as potential patients than what we actually expect of physicians. Nonetheless, this Zeitgeist poses an important problem for the physician who cares for a sentimental patient. “Sentimental” here describes a contrived exaggeration of the emotional availability of physicians. Despite the impossibility of articulating precisely how much emotional engagement clinical encounters demand, sentimental patients expect too much of their caregivers.

Research on doctor/patient relationship in a general hospital setting.

Studies on doctor/patient relationship should take into account their mutual influences, and the setting where it takes place. The classical curative schema does not include, generally, the patient’s feedback. Moreover, a third inanimate member (instrument, drug) is interposed in great part of the communication, although sometimes it is not technically necessary but serves to avoid anxiety provoking emotional encounters. General and particular factors of the studied relationship in a general hospital are described, and some principles of Berne’s Transactional Analysis and the results of their application on the doctor/patient dynamics are presented.

In the Green Fields of Kilburn: Reflections on a Quantitative Study of Irish Migrants in North London

This paper considers some of the emotional encounters experienced by the researcher while carrying out a study of Irish migrants in London. Although quantitative research takes little cognisance of the emotional impact of research, this paper suggests some of the ways in which a standardised, closed-ended questionnaire may provoke emotional responses in both the researcher and the researched. The emotional landscape of the research is intimately connected with the physical landscape in which the research is being carried out. Researching Irish migrants in areas such as Kilburn requires a consideration of the complex and dynamic spaces in which an Irish translocal community has been materially constructed and symbolically invented. Kilburn is not simply a backdrop to the research; it forms part of the emotional terrain which has to be negotiated in doing this research.