The difference between emotion and affect

In this brief comment on a target article by Koelsch et al., I argue that emotions are more sensitive to context than other affective states

Performative Methodologies: Geographies of Emotion and Affect in Digital Storytelling Workshops

This thesis advocates digital storytelling as a geographical methodology to understand how emotion and affect are produced. Digital storytelling is a flexible and workshopped methodology that captures experimental, creative and imaginative performances of emotion and affect. Through digital storytelling geographers may build understandings of how emotion and affect are experienced individually and collectively. I use 11 digital storytelling workshops, with more than 100 participants, as the primary sites for my research. The workshops were conducted in the United States and New Zealand and were modelled on the practice established by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, United States. It is argued that digital storytelling workshops co-create emotion, affect, people and place. Individual and group interviews, reflexive autobiographical journal writing, and digital storytelling workshop training, participation, and observing are used to access emotion and affect in digital storytelling workshops. A combination of qualitative research methods and critical social theories are used to highlight embodied, emotional and affectual geographies. Three findings frame my discussion. First, digital storytelling workshops are performative spaces for the staging and circulation of emotion and affect. The concepts of infrastructure, improvisation, and intimacy are critical for understanding the dynamic nature of emotion and affect in digital storytelling workshops. Second, a focus on relationality allows for an examination of psychotherapeutic practice and the transformative capacity of digital storytelling workshops. Workshop spaces are understood as ‘connective mediums’ in which a third position – the gap between the flow of emotions and the representation of that experience - is possible. Third, voice in digital storytelling is a political process of speaking and listening. A focus on voice permits an exploration of the acoustic politics of emotion and affect at individual and collective spatial scales. Digital storytelling workshops facilitate processes of seeing, hearing and experiencing emotion and affect as a way of interpreting the geographical worlds of research participants. The Center for Digital Storytelling’s model incorporates a commitment to social justice that honours and values emotional knowledge. As a practice-based research methodology digital storytelling requires researchers to be reflexive and negotiate their multiply layered ethical positionings. As geographers continue to experiment with innovative ways of conducting research, the messiness of digital storytelling can contribute to methodological debates about the ‘doing’ of emotion and affect in geographical research

Gendered spaces and practice,relationality, emotion and affect at the Marian shrine of Ta Pinu, Gozo, Malta

In this chapter the case study of Ta’ Pinu, Gozo, a site of pilgrimage for Marian devotion and the national shrine of Malta, is analysed as a gendered assemblage and an example of the intersection of gender and religion, with attention to the spatial and power relations associated with these flows and processes. Islands have functioned as places of spiritual retreat and subsequent pilgrimage throughout the history of the Christian faith, the liminal character of their coastal landscapes and environments creating particular intertwinings of experience and spiritual practice; yet, whilst this experiential nexus may be extraordinary for visitors, it is the everyday context of daily life for inhabitants (see Maddrell 2011, 2013, Maddrell and della Dora 2013, Maddrell et al 2015, Maddrell and Scriven (forthcoming)). Here my attention is turned to the island of Gozo in Malta, analysing the Roman Catholic shrine of Ta’ Pinu, in order to offer a spatial perspective on gender and religion within this specific context and arena. Whilst the journeys to this island shrine can have significance, drawing on feminist theories of embodiment, my focus here is less on the journey per se and more on the spaces and practices of religious performance and related geographies of spiritual encounter, emotion and affect, with particular attention to the gendered dimensions of these practices at Ta’ Pinu. This will be set within the wider context of an overarching analysis of faith practices as embodied in everyday spaces and practices, reflecting a need for more scholarly attention to examining those pilgrimages which are embedded in everyday practice rather than a stand-alone extraordinary event (Maddrell 2013). It is hoped that this meshing of perspectives and themes will yield fresh understanding of the specific place-time dynamics of gender and religion at Ta’ Pinu, and in turn contribute to a spiritually-inflected understanding of gendered discourses and practices. Before turning to the core discussion, Marian veneration as a form of pilgrimage practice and the history of the Ta’ Pinu shrine are briefly outlined, and fieldwork methodologies explained

Factors of Emotion and Affect in Designing Interactive Virtual Characters

The Arts: 1st Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)This paper represents a review of literature concerning factors of affective interactive virtual character design. Affect and it's related concepts are defined followed by a detail of work being conducted in relevant areas such as design, animation, robotics. The intent of this review as to inform the author on overlapping concepts in fields related to affective design in order to apply these concepts interactive character development.A three-year embargo was granted for this item

Mood, emotion, and affect in group performance: an experiential exercise

One path to the successful transference of knowledge is through linking concepts to students’ experience. To provide this connection, we used an experiential methodology to design an exercise called mood, emotion, and affect in group performance. This exercise provides learners with an opportunity to experience, in addition to hearing and reading about, the effects of positive and negative dispositions on a group task. We describe the design and mechanics of the exercise with practical reflections from the use of the exercise in many different environments. The paper ends with end-of-the semester student comments and instructor reflections

Emphatic agents to reduce user frustration: The effects of varying agent characteristics

There is now growing interest in the development of computer systems which respond to users’ emotion and affect. We report three small scale studies (with a total of 42 participants) which investigate the extent to which affective agents, using strategies derived from human-human interaction, can reduce user frustration within human-computer interaction. The results confirm the previous findings of Klein et al (2002) that such interventions can be effective. We also obtained results that suggest that embodied agents can be more effective at reducing frustration than non-embodied agents, and that female embodied agents may be more effective than male embodied agents. These results are discussed in light of the existing research literature

Parental socialization of emotion and affect recognition in school-aged children.

In the present study, parental socialization of emotions was examined in relation to children\u27s ability to identify affect. Two hypotheses were examined, with the first positing that variance in children\u27s affect recognition could be explained by examining parents\u27 self-report of acceptance of their children\u27s emotions and the second positing that variance in children\u27s affect recognition could be explained by examining parents\u27 self-report of expressiveness in the family. Thirty children ages 5- to 10-years-old identified emotions depicted in emotion-eliciting vignettes and in computer-displayed photographs of facial expressions. Vignette responses were measured for accuracy, while verbal responses on the computer portion of the task were measured for both accuracy and response time. Primary caregivers completed questionnaires eliciting demographic information, parental approach to children\u27s emotions and parental expression of emotion in the family. Multivariate Analyses of Covariance controlling for child age and gender were utilized to examine each hypothesis. The findings indicated that while higher rates of DA might be associated with higher error response rates for anger vignette recognition, high DA was associated with lower error response rates for happy and sad facial affect recognition. There was a trend toward significance for higher rates of NSEF to be associated with lower disgust facial affect error percentage rates. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed in context of the limitations of the current study and suggestions are made for future research.Dept. of Psychology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .A33. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-01, page: 0321. Adviser: Julie Hakim-Larson. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

It's nothing, I'm fine: Acknowledging emotion and affect in archival practice

Presented at Archives Association of Ontario annual conference. Thunder Bay, Ontario. 13 May 2016

From Affective Science to Psychiatric Disorder: Ontology as Semantic Bridge

Advances in emotion and affective science have yet to translate routinely into psychiatric research and practice. This is unfortunate since emotion and affect are fundamental components of many psychiatric conditions. Rectifying this lack of interdisciplinary integration could thus be a potential avenue for improving psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. In this contribution, we propose and discuss an ontological framework for explicitly capturing the complex interrelations between affective entities and psychiatric disorders, in order to facilitate mapping and integration between affective science and psychiatric diagnostics. We build on and enhance the categorisation of emotion, affect and mood within the previously developed Emotion Ontology, and that of psychiatric disorders in the Mental Disease Ontology. This effort further draws on developments in formal ontology regarding the distinction between normal and abnormal in order to formalize the interconnections. This operational semantic framework is relevant for applications including clarifying psychiatric diagnostic categories, clinical information systems, and the integration and translation of research results across disciplines

AffectEcho: Speaker Independent and Language-Agnostic Emotion and Affect Transfer for Speech Synthesis

Affect is an emotional characteristic encompassing valence, arousal, and intensity, and is a crucial attribute for enabling authentic conversations. While existing text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-speech systems rely on strength embedding vectors and global style tokens to capture emotions, these models represent emotions as a component of style or represent them in discrete categories. We propose AffectEcho, an emotion translation model, that uses a Vector Quantized codebook to model emotions within a quantized space featuring five levels of affect intensity to capture complex nuances and subtle differences in the same emotion. The quantized emotional embeddings are implicitly derived from spoken speech samples, eliminating the need for one-hot vectors or explicit strength embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in controlling the emotions of generated speech while preserving identity, style, and emotional cadence unique to each speaker. We showcase the language-independent emotion modeling capability of the quantized emotional embeddings learned from a bilingual (English and Chinese) speech corpus with an emotion transfer task from a reference speech to a target speech. We achieve state-of-art results on both qualitative and quantitative metrics