Affect, emotion, and ecocriticism

Our relationships to the environments that surround, sustain, and sometimes threaten us are fraught with emotion. And since, as neurologist Antonio Damasio has shown, cognition is directly linked to emotion, and emotion is linked to the feelings of the body, our physical environment influences not only how we feel, but also what we think. Importantly, this also holds true when we interact with artistic representations of such environments, as we find them in literature, film, and other media. For this reason, our emotions can take a rollercoaster ride when we read a book or watch a film. Typically, such emotions are evoked as we empathize with characters while also inhabiting emotionally the storyworlds that surround these characters and interact with them in various ways. Given this crucial interlinkage between environment, emotion, and environmental narrative in the widest sense, it is unsurprising that, from its inception, the study of literature and the environment has been interested in how ecologically oriented texts represent and provoke emotions in relation to the natural world. More recently, ecocritical scholars have started to develop a more sustained theoretical approach to exploring how affect and emotion function in environmentally oriented texts of all kinds. In this article, I will attempt to trace this development over time, briefly highlighting some of the most important texts and theoretical concepts in affective ecocriticism.Nuestra relación con los entornos que nos rodean, sustentan y, a veces, amenazan, están llenos de emoción. Y ya que, tal y como el neurólogo Antonio Damasio ha demostrado, la cognición está directamente vinculada a la emoción, y la emoción a las sensaciones del cuerpo, nuestro entorno físico influye no sólo en cómo nos sentimos, sino también en lo que pensamos. De forma importante, esto es también cierto cuando interactuamos con las representaciones artísticas de esos entornos, tal y como las encontramos en literatura, cine, y otros medios. Por esta razón, nuestras emociones son como una montaña rusa cuando leemos un libro o vemos una película. Típicamente, esas emociones se evocan cuando empatizamos con los personajes mientras también vivimos emocionalmente en los mundos que rodean a estos personajes, con los que interactúan de distintas maneras. Dado este vínculo crucial entre entorno, emoción y narración medioambiental en el sentido más amplio, no es sorprendente que, desde su origen, el estudio de la literatura y el medio ambiente se haya interesado en cómo los textos con sesgo ecológico representan y provocan emociones en relación con el mundo natural. Más recientemente, académicos ecocríticos han empezado a desarrollar un enfoque teórico más continuo para explorar cómo funcionan el afecto y la emoción en todo tipo de textos con contenido ecológico. En este artículo, trataré de delinear este desarrollo a lo largo del tiempo, destacando brevemente algunos de los textos y de los conceptos teóricos más importantes en la ecocrítica afectiva

Mediatization of Emotion on Social Media: Forms and Norms in Digital Mourning Practices

This article provides the theoretical background for this Special Issue which explores the mediatization of emotion on social media as attested in different digital mourning practices. The overview discusses the affective and emotional turn alongside the mediatic turn in relation to key trends and foci in the study of affect/emotion. Our discussion points to a shift in conceptualizations of affect/emotion from mediated to mediatized practice, embedded in other social practices and subject to media and social media logics, affordances, and frames, which are worthy of empirical investigation. The article also presents key insights offered in the four articles of this Special Issue and foregrounds current and future directions in the study of mediatization, emotional sharing, and digital mourning practices

Engineering affect: emotion regulation, the internet, and the techno-social niche

Philosophical work exploring the relation between cognition and the Internet is now an active area of research. Some adopt an externalist framework, arguing that the Internet should be seen as environmental scaffolding that drives and shapes cognition. However, despite growing interest in this topic, little attention has been paid to how the Internet influences our affective life — our moods, emotions, and our ability to regulate these and other feeling states. We argue that the Internet scaffolds not only cognition but also affect. Using various case studies, we consider some ways that we are increasingly dependent on our Internet-enabled “techno-social niches” to regulate the contours of our own affective life and participate in the affective lives of others. We argue further that, unlike many of the other environmental resources we use to regulate affect, the Internet has distinct properties that introduce new dimensions of complexity to these regulative processes. First, it is radically social in a way many of these other resources are not. Second, it is a radically distributed and decentralized resource; no one individual or agent is responsible for the Internet’s content or its affective impact on users. Accordingly, while the Internet can profoundly augment and enrich our affective life and deepen our connection with others, there is also a distinctive kind of affective precarity built into our online endeavors as well

Emotion and Meaning-Making: Affordances in the Classroom

It is well known that emotion plays a significant role in the learning process. In this study, we describe affect/emotion incidents as part of students’ personal knowledge construction efforts in three sixth grade classrooms. These affect/emotion responses are identified by word choice, topic, punctuation, or description. The role of each classroom as it served as an affordance for affect/emotion knowledge construction efforts is also discussed. We posit that the role of dialog and activity choice, which traditionally lie within the hands of the teacher, serve as the primary affordances through which students are provided opportunity to use affect/emotion responses in their classroom learning

Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner

Ted Geier reviews Completely Affecting: The Cinematics of Environmental Concern and Real Change, edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner

Critical Affective Literacies in/for Applied Linguistics

In this paper, the authors propose that attention to affect/emotion be given greater prominence in applied linguistics following a theoretical and pedagogical framework delineated as critical affective literacy (CAL) by Anwaruddin (2016). Following the IICOLA conference theme of emotions in multidisciplinary studies, the authors outline the interdisciplinary influences (e.g., philosophy, memory studies, semiotics/multimodality, citizenship education, etc.) that underpin key CAL principles and their understanding of affect/emotion in applied linguistics. In support, the authors discuss the potency of affect and emotionality of texts by way of duoethnography (Norris & Sawyer, 2012, 2017), a research methodology they have utilized in exploring affective/emotional dimensions of language in educational domains (e.g., English for Academic Purposes and Language Teacher Education) and as part of broader socio-political deliberation (i.e., critical citizenship pedagogies). The authors detail specific features of duoethnographic research methodology (e.g., participant transparency and juxtaposition, epistemological and ideological risk-taking) that contribute to CAL principles and aspirations. The authors also identify several implications of their work for the development of CAL in applied linguistics followed by brief descriptions of curricular and pedagogical innovations where affect/emotion have been integral to the pedagogical and literacy strategies described

Merging SenticNet and WordNet-Affect emotion lists for sentiment analysis

SenticNet is currently one of the most comprehensive freely available semantic resources for opinion mining. However, it only provides numerical polarity scores, while more detailed sentiment-related information for its concepts is often desirable. Another important resource for opinion mining and sentiment analysis is WordNet-Affect, which in turn lacks quantitative information. We report a work on automatically merging these two resources by assigning emotion labels to more than 2700 concepts

Using Nuances of Emotion to Identify Personality

Past work on personality detection has shown that frequency of lexical categories such as first person pronouns, past tense verbs, and sentiment words have significant correlations with personality traits. In this paper, for the first time, we show that fine affect (emotion) categories such as that of excitement, guilt, yearning, and admiration are significant indicators of personality. Additionally, we perform experiments to show that the gains provided by the fine affect categories are not obtained by using coarse affect categories alone or with specificity features alone. We employ these features in five SVM classifiers for detecting five personality traits through essays. We find that the use of fine emotion features leads to statistically significant improvement over a competitive baseline, whereas the use of coarse affect and specificity features does not.Comment: In Proceedings of the ICWSM Workshop on Computational Personality Recognition, July 2013, Boston, US

Affect, emotion and similar concepts

O autor começa por comentar a dificuldade de delimitação semântica entre os conceitos de afecto, emoção, sentimento, estado de ânimo, humor, paixões e aparentados, dificuldade esta que se agrava quando os termos são traduzidos em línguas diferentes. Centra-se depois no conceito de emoção, que tem beneficiado de investigação recente, e da sua distinção do humor, um termo que fundamenta a psicopatologia das perturbações bipolares. Muito mais complexo se revela o conceito de afecto, que tem uma dimensão interpessoal e que se pode elaborar a partir das recentes descobertas dos “neurónios- -espelho” e da “Teoria da Mente”

Bodies, Representations, Situations, Practices: qualitative research on affect, emotion and feeling

We introduce this special issue of Qualitative Research in Psychology by discussing four themes which, in our view, characterise the collective significance of the papers in this special issue. Even in highlighting these thematic similarities, however, we point to important differences in their manifestation across different papers. In discussing bodies, we highlight an underexplored distinction between the body as ground of experience and the body as the enabler of experience. We also draw attention to three issues relating to (linguistic) representations of feelings, emotions and affect: the problem of ineffability; the role of naming feeling; and how to methodologically and analytically account for differences in the ways that feelings are talked about and named. Regarding situatedness in space and time, we note at least four analytical positions, which frame and reveal different aspects of affective phenomena. Finally, with respect to affective practices we identify two quite different approaches that, whilst sharing some characteristics, are different enough to warrant further specification when researchers deploy this term. Whilst welcoming the apparent trend away from purely language-based methods, we also offer some suggestions for how researchers can move further down this path. Nonetheless qualitative research on feeling, affect and emotion is in fine fettle. As the contributions attest, the time is ripe for this special issue of Qualitative Research in Psychology