‘You beat ‘em,we feed ‘em!’: Enfolding laughter and pride

In this article I use the affective politics of laughter as an entry point into broadening understandings of the political potentiality of the everyday geographies of pride, centralizing in my analysis a safe house for women involved in street level sex work. I look to the ways in which the encounters between laughter and pride in this space expose its inextricability from bodily vitality and survival, feelings of collective belonging, and structural realities and inequalities. Using Gilles Deleuze's concept of the fold to structure my analysis, I use laughter as a lens to advance an understanding of pride that emphasizes its entanglement with collective affect and its immanent multiplicity as it is embodied through everyday encounters with difference. I emphasize the affective component of laughter's foldings as a means to think through the way vibrational pulls, pushes, tenors and tones work to move bodies toward or away from collectives, spaces, politics, ideas, relationships and ways of living. Exploring pride through the affective politics of laughter is a way to advance understandings of pride as emerging always in relation to collectives, histories, and spaces, rather than as an individual trait. Such a reframing has implications for understanding affective politics as a resource for social justice projects.     

The ethical potential of sound in public space: Migrant pan flute music and its potential to create moments of conviviality in a ‘failed’ public square

In this paper we examine the notion that music in public space could be understood in terms of ethical potential, where new sensibilities for thinking, feeling, seeing and being with others might be imagined and practiced. We do this by considering how musical performances by migrants impact on inclusive forms of place (re-)making, affective enactments of public space and emotional accounts of belonging and ‘the other’. The paper draws on an ethnographic exploration of South American pan flute musicians, performing music at Sergels torg, a central square in Stockholm, Sweden. Through fieldwork with a combination of qualitative techniques, including observation, interviews and sensory methods such as photography, video and recorded ‘sound walks’ we trace the affective aspects of encounters with busking and the impact of music on place. We highlight the ethical potential of music in the experience of urban moments and its capacity to reconfigure space. We find that encounters with sound can produce new spaces of conviviality and inclusion; it can soothe, animate and soften urban spaces. However, a positive encounter with difference through sound depends on a favourable social, physical and temporal context, and because busking serves to make marginalised voices heard (both literally and metaphorically), it can be experienced as troubling for precisely this reason. Thus, we need to take into account the full complexity of the dynamics between sound and place, in considering this relationship as a novel window to the ethical potential of the urban encounter.     

Consciousness about own and others' affects: a study of the validity of a revised version of the Affect Consciousness Interview

This study presents a modified version of the affect consciousness interview ( Monsen, Eilertsen, Melgård & Ödegård, 1996 ), intended to capture the individual's affective consciousness. The aim of the modified version – The Affect Consciousness Interview – Revised (ACI‐R) – is to measure consciousness about own and others’ affects. Three groups of patients (with eating disorder, relational and social problems or stress‐related problems), and one non‐clinical group were included in the study (N= 95). The results indicated that it was possible to achieve adequate interrater reliability, that the scores correlated meaningfully with other measures of mental functioning, and that the interview discriminated between different clinical groups and non‐clinical participants. In conclusion, the results of this study suggest that the ACI‐R is a promising instrument and that it should be explored further in order to study the organization of self‐experiences and the ability to be emotionally present in interactions with others.     

Mode and tempo relative contributions to “happy-sad” judgements in equitone melodies

Judgement of emotion conveyed by music is determined notably by mode (major-minor) and tempo (fast-slow). This suggestion was examined using the same set of equitone melodies, in two experiments. Melodies were presented to nonmusicians who were required to judge whether the melodies sounded “happy” or “sad” on a 10-point scale. In order to assess the specific and relative contributions of mode and tempo to these emotional judgements, the melodies were manipulated so that the only verying characteristic was either the mode or the tempo in two “isolated” conditions. In two further conditions, mode and tempo manipulations were combined so that mode and tempo either converged towards the same emotion (Convergent condition) or suggested opposite emotions (Divergent condition). The results confirm that both mode and tempo determine the “happy-sad” judgements in isolation, with the tempo being more salient, even when tempo salience was adjusted. The findings further support the view that, in music, structural features that are emotionally meaningful are easy to isolate, and that music is an effective and reliable medium to study emotions.     

Are our emotional feelings relational? A neurophilosophical investigation of the James–Lange theory

The James–Lange theory considers emotional feelings as perceptions of physiological body changes. This approach has recently resurfaced and modified in both neuroscientific and philosophical concepts of embodiment of emotional feelings. In addition to the body, the role of the environment in emotional feeling needs to be considered. I here claim that the environment has not merely an indirect and thus instrumental role on emotional feelings via the body and its sensorimotor and vegetative functions. Instead, the environment may have a direct and non-instrumental, i.e., constitutional role in emotional feelings; this implies that the environment itself in the gestalt of the person–environment relation is constitutive of emotional feeling rather than the bodily representation of the environment. Since the person–environment relation is crucial in this approach, I call it the relational concept of emotional feeling. After introducing the relational concept of emotional feeling, the present paper investigates the neurophilosophical question whether current neuroimaging data on human emotion processing and anatomical connectivity are empirically better compatible with the “relational” or the “embodied” concept of emotional feeling. These data lend support to the empirical assumption that neural activity in subcortical and cortical midline regions code the relationship between intero- and exteroceptive stimuli in a relational mode, i.e. their actual balance, rather than in a translational mode, i.e., by translating extero- into interoceptive stimulus changes. Such intero-exteroceptive relational mode of neural coding may have implications for the characterization of emotional feeling with regard to phenomenal consciousness and intentionality. I therefore conclude that the here advanced relational concept of emotional feeling may be considered neurophilosophically more plausible and better compatible with current neuroscientific data than the embodied concept as presupposed in the James–Lange theory and its modern neuroscientific and philosophical versions.

Are fluctuations in personality states more than fluctuations in affect?

People fluctuate in their behavior as they go about their daily lives, but little is known about the processes underlying these fluctuations. In two ecological momentary assessment studies (Ns = 124, 415), we examined the extent to which negative and positive affect accounted for the within-person variance in Big Five states. Participants were prompted six times a day over six days (Study 1) or four times a day over two weeks (Study 2) to report their recent thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Multilevel modeling results indicated that negative and positive affect account for most, but not all, of the within-person variance in personality states. Importantly, situation variables predicted variance in some personality states even after accounting for fluctuations in affect, indicating that fluctuations in personality states may be more than fluctuations in state affect.     

The effect of embodying the elderly on time perception

The present study investigated the perception of stimulus durations represented by elderly faces or by young faces. In a temporal bisection task, participants classified intermediate durations as more similar to a short or a long reference duration. The results showed that the durations represented by elderly faces were less often classified as “long” than the durations represented by young faces. According to internal clock models of time perception, this shortening effect is due to a slowing down of the speed of the internal clock during the perception of elderly faces. Analyses also revealed an interaction between sex of face and sex of participant such that this shortening effect occurred only when the participants share the same sex than the stimulus faces. As discussed, this finding is quite consistent with embodied cognition approaches to information processing, but alternatives accounts are also considered.     

What is embodiment? A psychometric approach

What is it like to have a body? The present study takes a psychometric approach to this question. We collected structured introspective reports of the rubber hand illusion, to systematically investigate the structure of bodily self-consciousness. Participants observed a rubber hand that was stroked either synchronously or asynchronously with their own hand and then made proprioceptive judgments of the location of their own hand and used Likert scales to rate their agreement or disagreement with 27 statements relating to their subjective experience of the illusion. Principal components analysis of this data revealed four major components of the experience across conditions, which we interpret as: embodiment of rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, and affect. In the asynchronous condition, an additional fifth component, deafference, was found. Secondary analysis of the embodiment of runner hand component revealed three subcomponents in both conditions: ownership, location, and agency. The ownership and location components were independent significant predictors of proprioceptive biases induced by the illusion. These results suggest that psychometric tools may provide a rich method for studying the structure of conscious experience, and point the way towards an empirically rigorous phenomenology.