Emotional Turn Research Articles

Continuous tracking of the emotion temperature

The speech emotion recognition has a huge potential in human computer interaction applications in fields such as psychology, psychiatry and affective computing technology. The great majority of research works on speech emotion recognition have been made based on record repositories consisting of short sentences recorded under laboratory conditions. In this work, we researched the use of the Emotional Temperature strategy for continuous tracking in long-term samples of speech in which there are emotional changes during the speech. Emotional Temperature uses a few prosodic and paralinguistic features set obtained from a temporal segmentation of the speech signal. The simplicity and limitation of the set, previously validated under laboratory conditions, make it appropriate to be used under real conditions, where the spontaneous speech is continuous and the emotions are expressed in certain moments of the dialogue, given emotional turns. This strategy is robust, offers low computational cost, ability to detect emotional changes and improves the performance of a segmentation based on linguistic aspects. The German Corpus EMO-DB (Berlin Database of Emotional Speech), the English Corpus LDC (Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts database), the Polish Emotional Speech Database and RECOLA (Remote Collaborative and Affective Interactions) database are used to validate the system of continuous tracking from emotional speech. Two experimentation conditions are analyzed, dependence and independence on language and gender, using acted and spontaneous speech respectively. In acted conditions, the approach obtained accuracies of 67–97% while under spontaneous conditions, compared to annotation performed by human judges, accuracies of 41–50% were obtained. In comparison with previous studies in continuous emotion recognition, the approach improves the existing results with an accuracy of 9% higher on average. Therefore, this approach has a good performance with low complexity to develop real-time applications or continuous tracking emotional speech applications.

‘My Husband is Interested in War Generally’: gender, family history and the emotional legacies of total war

ABSTRACTIn the autumn of 2014, as Britain embarked on four years of activities to commemorate and mark the centenary of the First World War, the Mass Observation project asked its panellists to reflect on their feelings about the war. Over 180 people responded, writing about their family involvement in the war, about their thoughts and feelings on Remembrance Sunday 2014, and about popular representations of the war in the early twenty-first century. This article examines some of these responses, considering the extent to which gender and age shaped not only the panellists’ stated relationship to the centenary of the war, but also the language with which they expressed this relationship. It draws on ideas from the ‘emotional turn’ in historical studies to argue that older women, who often had a personal memory of the lived legacies of the war, drew on a particularly expressive repertoire to convey both an empathy with the men and women whose lives were shaped by the First World War, and to argue for a particular moral position with regard to warfare. These empathetic responses, which the article argues have much in common with family histories of the war, should be taken seriously by historians who examine the cultural memory of the war and who are often keen to dismiss the widespread sense of the war as a tragic blunder.

Historia de la discapacidad e historia de las emociones: reflexiones sobre Gran Bretaña en el siglo XVIII

Tanto la Historia de la Discapacidad como la Historia de las Emociones han crecido de manera significativa como campos de investigación. Sin embargo, a pesar de compartir intereses comunes en relación a la salud, el bienestar y la diferencia ha habido poca interacción entre los investigadores que han trabajado en dichas áreas. Este artículo sugiere, usando como estudio de caso la Gran Bretaña del siglo XVIII, la manera en la que el “giro emocional” de la historia puede arrojar luz sobre la discapacidad en el pasado. En esa época distintas teorías sobre las “pasiones”, los “sentimientos” y los “afectos” fueron usadas para describir las causas de las deficiencias o para proporcionar respuestas adecuadas a las mismas. Aunque éste fue un periodo en el que la discapacidad era normalmente vista como una “desgracia” o como un estado que producía “lástima”, una lectura detallada de un conjunto variado de fuentes que incluye desde textos médicos a periódicos y revistas revela que el grado de “infelicidad” asociado a la discapacidad dependía del momento, el contexto y el significado simbólico de ciertas deficiencias.

The Concept of Friendshipp in Late 18th Early 19th Century Russia: Social Cohesion Reconsidered

The paper examines social differences within the concept of ‘friendship’ in late 18th – early 19th century Russia in order to ‘reassemble’ friendship as a social phenomenon in this period. Ubiquitously, the voluminous correspondence of the Russian aristocracy is interpreted as “friendly” disregarding any social dimension and ignoring the social station of the correspondents. The 18th century was a critical period in Russia being an age of radical modernization. New social and cultural models were appropriated and, as a result of westernization, the Latin tradition was assimilated too. In early modern Europe, the concept of ‘friendship’ was applied to allegedly equal relationships, as the words cliens, patronus, clientela were not in use any more, but clients were described as amici, or friends by their patrons. The paper analyzes the correspondence of several Russian aristocrats with their clients – social inferiors. The grandees refer to these relations as ‘friendly’ and call them friendship or amitie (bien sincere or parfait) emphasizing their value for them. From the letters of their correspondents, it comes to light that the social inferiors tended to be wary and not to use these notions assessing their relationships, thus remaining in the conceptual framework of the patron-client relationships. Under the impact of the ‘emotional turn’ of early sentimentalism, the concept of friendship, like that of social cohesion, was used by the grandees as a means to reinterpret the relationships of dominance in the patron-client relations as voluntary and predicated on selfless devotion whereas their clients preferred to avoid sensitivity still resorting to more traditional and apprehensible flattery and obsequiousness

Nexus of Emotional and Development Geographies

AbstractRecently, the nexus of international development and emotion has received increasing attention from diverse sectors. While scholars from postcolonial, post‐structural, and feminist perspectives have long called for increased attention to emotions and the more‐than‐rational, more recent pieces such as the World Bank's World Development Report 2015 on Mind, Society, and Behavior have also taken up the refrain that “emotions matter” in development. Whether viewed as motivating factors, explanatory devices, or phenomena to be harnessed and manipulated, emotions are emerging as a key piece in development theory and practice. This paper critically analyzes the ways in which the nexus of emotion and development has been conceptualized from various perspectives. In particular, it raises questions related to geographies of power and control and highlights the implications of this emotional turn for both the theory and practice of development.

The emotional turn in higher education: a psychoanalytic contribution

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to contemporary debates about the significance of emotions within Higher Education. Using a psychoanalytic lens we analyse the ways in which experiences of anxiety and tension are essential for learning. The anxiety associated with learning can stimulate meaningful and reflexive outcomes but ‘learning inaction’ [Vince, R. 2014. ‘What Do HRD Scholars and Practitioners Need to Know About Power, Emotion, and HRD?’ Human Resource Development Quarterly 25: 409–420] is also possible. In adopting a psychoanalytical lens we assert the agency of both learners and teachers in scholarly relationships and we draw attention to the emotions of educators as well as students. This has important implications for teacher education and academic formation activities.

Emotions in motion. How feelings are considered in the scope of migration sociological studies

The subject of this article deals with the manner in which emotions have so far been considered in sociological migration studies. Existing works focus primarily on emotions in a pathological or therapeutic way, so it has to be stated, that the often postulated emotional turn in social sciences has not yet fully reached the area of migration. So the valuable analytical potential of a perspective based on the sociology of emotions is not completely exploited because that would imply focusing on the general functions of emotions in contexts of migration. This article introduces interesting works which already deal with the carrying concepts of emotion work and emotional transnationality and suggests guidelines on how to broaden these analytical views in a non-pathological direction.

The stories of supervision: creative writing in a critical space

ABSTRACTSupervising PhD candidates is a story in itself. Like a novel or screenplay, there are protagonists and antagonists, emotional transformations, dramatic twists and turns, and nearly always rising tension – especially in the domain of creative practice, where methodologies and research artefacts are still debated and contested. Voiceover narration comes into play, too, from both the candidate (‘Does my supervisor know what I'm trying to do?’) and the supervisor (‘Does my candidate really think this is research?’). And hopefully there is always a happy ending – or at least happy subject to minor revisions. There is a growing body of literature about PhD supervision. Here we seek to expand on this work by drawing specific attention to the supervision of the Creative Writing PhD in the contemporary academy in the Australian and British contexts, and in a form that befits this vibrant research discipline. In this paper, then, we make connections between theory and practice by presenting a series of fictionalised vignettes drawn from our collective experiences of supervising candidates. By being playful ourselves, we offer a creative-critical exploration of the creative practice research space that illuminates some of the challenges and opportunities for supervising in the discipline.

Eros in the Field? Bourdieu's Double Account of Socialized Desire

In his later works, Bourdieu draws extensively on psychoanalytic approaches in accounting for his concept of socialized subjectivity as bound to the social world by an intense affective grip. This emotional turn holds potential for further developing Bourdieu's account of subjectivity as a formation of socialized desire. However, in accounting for this socialized desire, Bourdieu relapses into a dualism of subjective and objective structures, incompatible with the Merleau-Pontyian roots of his practice theory. Tracing this problem to the antagonism between desire and culture in the psychoanalytic accounts that Bourdieu draws on, I propose that the psychoanalytic scholar Hans Loewald's account of Eros may enable a move beyond this impasse, offering a promising conceptual basis for taking further the account of socialized subjectivity and socialized desire in Bourdieu's practice theory.

Supporting mindful planners in a mindless system: limitations to the emotional turn in planning practice

Despite widespread acknowledgment within planning scholarship that emotion – both present in knowledge and a form of knowledge – is integral to lived experience and the judgement of planners, it is often sidelined within planning practice. The extent to which mainstream planning has been able or willing to accommodate emotions remains constrained and the emotions of planners and the public remain an unacknowledged but pervasive presence. Antonio Ferreira recently highlighted in this journal the importance of attending to emotions at the level of the individual planner through the concept of mindfulness. We argue this approach must be complemented by an acknowledgement of the structural and institutional limitations of including emotions in planning practice. Drawing from the emotional geographies literature to describe a social-spatial conceptualisation of emotion, we highlight ontological and practical tensions associated with the achievement of the ‘emotional turn’ and advance a more purposeful engagement with emotion in mainstream planning practice.

New approach in quantification of emotional intensity from the speech signal: emotional temperature

The automatic speech emotion recognition has a huge potential in applications of fields such as psychology, psychiatry and the affective computing technology. The spontaneous speech is continuous, where the emotions are expressed in certain moments of the dialogue, given emotional turns. Therefore, it is necessary that the real-time applications are capable of detecting changes in the speaker's affective state. In this paper, we emphasize on recognizing activation from speech using a few feature set obtained from a temporal segmentation of the speech signal of different language like German, English and Polish. The feature set includes two prosodic features and four paralinguistic features related to the pitch and spectral energy balance. This segmentation and feature set are suitable for real-time emotion applications because they allow detect changes in the emotional state with very low processing times. The German Corpus EMO-DB (Berlin Database of Emotional Speech), the English Corpus LDC (Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts database) and the Polish Emotional Speech Database are used to train the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier and for gender-dependent activation recognition. The results are analyzed for each speech emotion with gender-dependent separately and obtained accuracies of 94.9%, 88.32% and 90% for EMO-DB, LDC and Polish databases respectively. This new approach provides a comparable performance with lower complexity than other approaches for real-time applications, thus making it an appealing alternative, may assist in the future development of automatic speech emotion recognition systems with continuous tracking.

Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, editors. Doing Emotions History.

The History of Emotions book series, which had begun in 1994 at New York University Press, had to discontinue in 1999 because not enough manuscripts were being received. In 2014 three new history of emotions series all published their first books. The work under review inaugurates the University of Illinois series, edited by Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns. There are also series at Oxford and Palgrave with Ute Frevert/Thomas Dixon and David Lemmings/William M. Reddy as respective co-editors. Clearly, if there is such a thing as an “emotional turn” or “affective turn,” these are the signs of its institutionalization. Doing Emotions History is not a conference volume but rather a set of commissioned texts meant to map out the field and to serve as a guide for further research. Apart from an introduction and a brief afterword by the editors, it contains a first part with two theoretically inclined pieces by, respectively, Stearns (on the question of modernity and emotions) and Matt (on methods and sources); a second part with non-Western (or not entirely Western) chapters by Norman Kutcher (on China) and Mark D. Steinberg (on Eurasia, especially Russia); a third part, entitled “Probing Specific Emotions,” with chapters on joy by Darrin M. McMahon (why have negative feelings dominated the history of emotions?) and love by Pamela Epstein (based on nineteenth-century U.S. matrimonial advertisements); and a final part with chapters on “Religion and Emotions” by John Corrigan, emotions and nationalism in the cases of the American Revolution and the War of 1812 by Americanist Nicole Eustace, and on emotions and the media by Brenton J. Malin.

Introduction

This editorial theorizes the emotional entanglements that constitute spaces of fieldwork. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's notion of sticky and circulating emotions, we develop the concept of emotional entanglements as a way to engage with the methodological implications of the emotional turn in geographic research. Beyond providing empirical evidence for research on emotional geographies, we argue that an attention to emotions in fieldwork has the potential to reinvigorate feminist practices of reflexivity and positionality. In addition, a critical engagement with emotions can offer novel epistemological techniques for studying the politics of knowledge production and the landscapes of power in which we, as researchers, are embedded. As the papers of this themed section demonstrate, analysis of emotional entanglements in research pose critical questions with regard to power relations, research ethics and the well-being of research participants and researchers alike. They also make visible how the power relations of sexism, racism, capitalism, nationalism and imperialism permeate and constitute the emotional spaces of the field. We use the notion of emotional entanglements as a way to situate the five articles of the themed section and to highlight the contribution of each paper to debates about the emotional field.

Appetite for Discovery: Sense and Sentiment in the Early Modern World

Lucien Febvre’s 1941 call for historians to recover the histoire des sentiments is now routinely evoked by scholars in the wake of the recent “emotional turn” in the historical discipline. Historians would regain their “appetite for discovery” (goût à l’exploration) once they delved into the deepest recesses of the discipline, where history meets psychology, Febvre predicted. His plea followed the aims of a generation of scholars working in the early twentieth century—Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias among them—who sought to recapture the affective lives of the past. Yet the history of sense and sentiment perhaps owes its greatest debt to Febvre and his colleagues in the Annales School, who, via the study of mentalités and private life, made the study of emotions a serious object of historical inquiry. Some four decades passed before Febvre’s challenge was taken up with any rigor. In the 1980s, the work of Peter and Carol Z. Stearns sought to chart the emotional standards and co des of past societies—something they termed “emotionology.” Since then, over the past three decades the history of emotions has been pioneered by scholars such as Barbara H. Rosenwein and William Reddy in seminal works that introduced us to now classic interpretative frameworks such as “emotional communities” and “emotives.” This burgeoning of interest in the history of emotions has now also found expression in a number of institutional research centers and publication series devoted to the subject.

Concluding Thoughts

Fifteen plus years into the ‘emotional turn’ in the study of contentious politics, the question is no longer ‘do emotions matter’ but rather ‘do emotions evernotmatter?’ Or, stated positively, can we grasp the phenomena that we group together under the name of collective political action without paying attention to feelings, emotions, affect? As others have argued, the factors that social movement scholars deem important for mobilisation – e.g. political opportunities, organisations, frames – have force precisely because of the feelings that they elicit, stir up, amplify, or dampen. We turn towards emotion, then, in order to understand the workings of the key concepts in the field. In addition, we need to explore feelings because they often are a primary catalyst or hindrance to political mobilisation, attenuating the role of other factors. Then there are the many other aspects of collective political action, beyond the question of mobilisation per se, where emotions play important roles, from ideological struggles to alliance formation to activist rituals to collective identity formation to community building. So, again, are emotions ever unimportant, are they ever a simply trivial aspect of what happens in and around contentious politics? Historians of emotion might take the argument further. If, as Rosenwein argues, ‘emotions are about things judged important to us’,2if emotions are indications of what matters, of what is valued and devalued, how can scholars interested inanyaspect of social lifenotconsider emotions?

“Everyone was Pounding on Us”: Front Porch Politics and the American Farm Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s

AbstractThis essay analyzes agricultural politics and activism in the United States during the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Although journalists and social scientists studied farm activism at the time, historians have neglected it. As this article demonstrates, however, the farm crisis is valuable for analyzing why ordinary Americans mobilized as citizens and activists in a period of economic dislocation. Informed by the recent “emotional turn” in social movement studies, the essay frames farm organizing as an archetypal example of “front porch politics”. Mostly, farmers organized out of a sense of being wronged; the resulting sense of injustice fueled a rural uprising.

Com/passionate Protests: Fighting the Deportation of Asylum Seekers

Despite disadvantageous conditions, various forms of protest by ordinary citizens have emerged in Austria to stop the expulsion of asylum seekers. How can protest activities in favor of refugees be explained? Empirically, this article relies on a protest event analysis (PEA) of media articles and an emotion analysis (EA) of protest material. Following the emotional turn, this study emphasizes that personal ties and closely related affective emotions—friendship and solidarity—between deportees and protesters account for the most relevant resources of protest. Moreover, activists strategically use reactive/moral emotions—fear, outrage, and shame—to mobilize broader support. Protesters are mostly recruited from the personal environment of the potential deportees, and the most salient argument expressed against deportation is that well-integrated people deserve to remain in the country. The article concludes that social ties and emotions are useful in explaining not only the emergence and spread of protests but also certain limitations inherent in them with regard to policy change.

Identifying and treating adult survivors of sexual assault.

About 18% of women and 3% of men report being a victim of sexual assault, but fewer than one-third of victims seek immediate medical attention or psychological counseling. Over time, victims may experience physical and emotional reactions and turn to primary care providers, who should be prepared to identify survivors of sexual assault and provide thoughtful referrals for long-term follow-up.

In Search of the Emotional reasonability of the Social: A Reflection on the Emotional Turn in Social Theories

In Search of the Emotional reasonability of the Social: A Reflection on the Emotional Turn in Social Theories

‘Houdt ons voor geen sentimenteele knapen!’ - Natuur en emoties in Brieven, geschreven op eene wandeling door een gedeelte van Duitschland en Holland, in den zomer van 1809

the six authors – all students or recent graduates – had made a walking tour of several weeks through the German countries. Their search for the beauties of nature explains their preference for the walking stick over the horse carriage. The travel report offers an emotional description of nature and landscape. Following historians of the ‘emotional turn’ in the belief that emotions are – at least in part – social and cultural constructions, I reconstruct the ‘cultural requirements’ of this intense and often physical experience of nature. I argue that emotional depictions in the travel report are closely connected to the contemporary ideal of Bildung, of which ‘emotional refinement’ was an important component. Knowledge of contemporary poetry, literature, painting, and aesthetics was an absolute precondition for the proper emotional experience of nature, at least for the elitist ‘emotional community’ to which the travelling students belonged.