Home Versus School Environments and their Influences on the Affective and Behavioral States of African American,Hispanic, and Caucasian Juvenile Offenders

We examined and compared the influence of home and school environments to the affective (anxiety and depression) and behavioral (impulsivity and compliance) states of 626 African American, Caucasian, and Hispanic adjudicated juvenile offenders. African Americans showed the strongest relationship between their home environment and compliance. Caucasian and Hispanic males exhibited increased home and school environment problems associated with affective states. Among females, African American and Caucasian females exhibited the strongest relationships between their home environment and behavioral states, whereas Caucasian and Hispanic males revealed increased school environment problems related to affective states with Hispanic males showing the strongest relationships. In addition, the school environment was more predictive of the affective and behavioral states of the adolescents, particularly females.     

Bodies out of place: Affective encounters with whiteness

This essay foregrounds the role of affect in felt experiences of whiteness by illustrating two accounts, one that took place on 25th May 2020 between Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper in Central Park, and an encounter from the authors previous study on Black educators’ experiences of working in white spaces. In doing so, this essay is an affective attunement to the ways that felt intensities inform our experience of power relations and ultimately constrain the capacities of bodies to act.     

Feeling states of people experiencing depression,anxiety, or comorbid depression and anxiety symptoms during a multi-day charity cycling ride: An ecological momentary assessment study

ObjectiveRegular exercise has substantial benefits for mental health. The way people feel during exercise impacts motivation. This study investigated whether experiencing depression, anxiety or comorbid depression and anxiety symptoms impacted feeling state responses throughout a charity cycling ride.DesignTo achieve this aim, we conducted an ecological momentary assessment study of feeling states (via Pleasant and Negative Affect Schedule items) across a multi-day cause-based cycling event.MethodMultivariate and univariate generalized linear mixed models was applied to test how affective and self-conscious emotional experiences changed across time and whether feeling state change differed between people experiencing depression, anxiety, or comorbid depression and anxiety symptoms.ResultsFor people experiencing depression symptoms, positive feelings decreased and negative feelings increased throughout the event. People experiencing anxiety symptoms had initially elevated negative feeling states that decreased across the event. For people experiencing comorbid depression and anxiety symptoms, changes in pride mirrored that of people experiencing only depression symptoms (decrease from initially high levels); whereas changes in guilt mirrored that of people experiencing only anxiety symptoms (initially high levels that decreased throughout event).ConclusionsThese findings demonstrate that depression and anxiety symptoms put people at risk for having negative affective and emotional experiences during exercise events and that these effects are further complicated when depression and anxiety symptoms co-occur. Exercise events and interventions must consider how to mitigate the potentially demotivating impacts that negative affective judgments can have on motivation for future exercise participation of people experiencing depression and/or anxiety symptoms.     

What You Feel Influences What You See: The Role of Affective Feelings in Resolving Binocular Rivalry

It seems obvious that what you see influences what you feel, but what if the opposite were also true? What if how you feel can shape your visual experience? In this experiment, we demonstrate that the affective state of a perceiver influences the contents of visual awareness. Participants received positive, negative, and neutral affect inductions and then completed a series of binocular rivalry trials in which a face (smiling, scowling, or neutral) was presented to one eye and a house to the other. The percepts “competed” for dominance in visual consciousness. We found, as predicted, that all faces (smiling, scowling, and neutral) were dominant for longer when perceivers experienced unpleasant affect compared to when they were in a neutral state (a social vigilance effect), although scowling faces increased their dominance when perceivers felt unpleasant (a relative negative congruence effect). Relatively speaking, smiling faces increased their dominance more when perceivers were experiencing pleasant affect (a positive congruence effect). These findings illustrate that the affective state of a perceiver serves as a context that influences the contents of consciousness.     

Manual rotation training improves direction-estimations in a virtual environmental space

This study investigated in a virtual environment, whether the training of a small-scale ability, i.e., manual or mental rotation, has an influence on the large-scale ability to estimate a direction. Ninety-six participants completed a direction estimation task as a pretest and then received either a manual rotation or a mental rotation training or played a nonspatial computer game. After that they completed the direction estimation task once again. The results showed that the direction estimation error decreased from the pre- to posttest only for the manual rotation training group. For that, the small-scale spatial ability was at least partially related to the large-scale ability, which supports the Partial Dissociation Model.     

I like the sound of your voice: Affective learning about vocal signals

This paper provides the first demonstration that the content of a talker’s speech is sufficient to imbue the acoustics of his voice with affective meaning. In two studies, participants listened to male talkers utter positive, negative, or neutral words. Next, participants completed a sequential evaluative priming task where a neutral word spoken by one of talkers was presented before each target word to be evaluated. We predicted, and found, that voices served as evaluative primes influencing the speed with which participants evaluated the target words. These two experiments demonstrate that the human voice can take on affective meaning merely based on the positive or negative value words it has spoken. Implications for affective processing, the pragmatics of communication, and person perception are discussed.     

Affective influences on thinking and behavior: Implications for clinical, applied and preventive psychology

What role do affective states play in everyday social behavior? This article presents an overview of recent research on the influence of affective states on the way people think and act in social situations, with a special emphasis on the applied and preventive implications of this work. We review psychodynamic, conditioning, and cognitive explanations of affective influences, and present an integrative theory, the affect infusion model (AIM; Forgas, 1995a). We then review recent evidence for affective influences on social memory, self- and other judgments, attitudes, strategic interaction, stereotyping, future forecasting and a range of other everyday psychological phenomena. We also consider the relevance of these findings for practitioners and professionals in applied areas such as health, counseling, clinical, educational, and organizational psychology.     

On being sad and evasive: Affective influences on verbal communication strategies in conflict situations

Does mood influence people’s tendency to engage in evasive, equivocal communication when facing conflict situations? Based on recent affect-cognition theories and research on verbal communication, this experiment predicted that negative mood should increase, and positive mood decrease the level of verbal evasiveness in conflict situations, and that high situational conflict should magnify these mood effects. Participants underwent a happy or sad audiovisual mood induction, and then produced verbal responses to low- and high-conflict situations using structured as well as open-ended responses. Results indicated that affect and conflict severity had an interactive influence on evasiveness and equivocation: negative affect produced significantly more evasiveness than positive affect, and these effects were greater in high than in low-conflict situations. These results are discussed in terms of the cognitive strategies that mediate mood effects on verbal communication. The implications of the findings for everyday communication situations, and for current affect-cognition theorizing are considered.     

Affective facilitation and inhibition of cultural influences on reasoning

Research in South Korea and the United States examined how affective states facilitate or inhibit culturally dominant styles of reasoning. According to the affect-as-information hypothesis, affective cues of mood influence judgements by serving as embodied information about the value of accessible inclinations and cognitions. Extending this line of research to culture, we hypothesised that positive affect should promote (and negative affect should inhibit) culturally normative reasoning. The results of two studies of causal reasoning supported this hypothesis. Positive and negative affect functioned like “go” and “stop” signals, respectively, for culturally typical reasoning styles. Thus, in happy (compared to sad) moods, Koreans engaged in more holistic reasoning, whereas Americans engaged in more analytic reasoning.     

Affective ontologies: Post-humanist perspectives on the self,feeling and intersubjectivity

At this particular historical juncture of the Anthropocene it is becoming increasingly clear that, as Val Plumwood puts it, the survival of our species depends upon how our relationships with earth others are reconfigured . Yet as the human is once again placed at the centre of our planetary life, this time as a geological agent, a growing body of scholarship has taken up the challenge of rethinking the human and its limits (see for example the special issue of the journal Angelaki 16(4), 2011). This special issue seeks to contribute to this body of work from the perspective of posthumanist explorations of affect, and thereby to open possibilities for articulating non-solipsistic and non-anthropocentric notions of the subject.     

Affective regulation of implicitly measured stereotypes and attitudes: Automatic and controlled processes

Three experiments indicate that affective cues regulate expression of implicitly measured stereotypes and attitudes. In Experiment 1, negative mood led to less stereotypic bias on the weapon-identification task [Payne, B. K. (2001). Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 181-192] than positive mood. In Experiment 2, negative mood led to less implicitly measured racial prejudice than positive mood. In Experiment 3, negative, relative to positive, mood decreased women’s implicitly measured preference for the arts over math. Process-dissociation analyses suggested that affect regulated automatic attitude and stereotype activation rather than controlled influences on attitude expression. The results show that mood can shape even rudimentary forms of cognition.     

Mood effects on eyewitness memory: Affective influences on susceptibility to misinformation

Does mood influence the accuracy of eyewitness recollections, and people’s susceptibility to misleading information in particular? Based on recent affect-cognition theories and research on eyewitness memory, three experiments predicted and found that positive affect promoted, and negative affect inhibited the incorporation of misleading information into eyewitness memories. This effect was obtained for both positive and negative events (Experiment 1), and for recorded as well as real-life incidents (Experiment 2). Participants had no meta-cognitive awareness of these mood effects, and affect-control instructions were ineffective in preventing them (Experiment 3). The cognitive mechanisms responsible for mood effects on eyewitness memories are discussed, and the implications of these findings for everyday memories, forensic practice and for current affect/cognition theorizing are considered.     

Affective influences on within-person changes in work performance as mediated by attentional focus

A great deal of research has investigated the performance consequences of affective experiences at work, but the mediating mechanisms that explain these consequences remain understudied. In this study, we used experience sampling method to examine within-person relationships between changes in affective states and episodic performance, as mediated by attentional allocation and regulation. Our findings show that within-person changes in negative affective states have a concurrent association with episodic performance as mediated by reduced attentional allocation and regulation, while positive affective states are associated with better performance, as mediated by enhanced attentional allocation and regulation. Our results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the performance and attentional consequences of affective states at work.     

Visual and Affective Multimodal Models of Word Meaning in Language and Mind

One of the main limitations of natural language-based approaches to meaning is that they do not incorporate multimodal representations the way humans do. In this study, we evaluate how well different kinds of models account for people's representations of both concrete and abstract concepts. The models we compare include unimodal distributional linguistic models as well as multimodal models which combine linguistic with perceptual or affective information. There are two types of linguistic models: those based on text corpora and those derived from word association data. We present two new studies and a reanalysis of a series of previous studies. The studies demonstrate that both visual and affective multimodal models better capture behavior that reflects human representations than unimodal linguistic models. The size of the multimodal advantage depends on the nature of semantic representations involved, and it is especially pronounced for basic-level concepts that belong to the same superordinate category. Additional visual and affective features improve the accuracy of linguistic models based on text corpora more than those based on word associations; this suggests systematic qualitative differences between what information is encoded in natural language versus what information is reflected in word associations. Altogether, our work presents new evidence that multimodal information is important for capturing both abstract and concrete words and that fully representing word meaning requires more than purely linguistic information. Implications for both embodied and distributional views of semantic representation are discussed.     

Affective consequences of optimism and pessimism in the face of failure: Evidence of a moderation by attribution

The present experiment set out to investigate the affective consequences of dispositional optimism and attribution in performance settings. Optimistic and pessimistic participants (N = 42 each) experienced failure at solving two cognitive tasks in an alleged team setting. The failure could either be attributed to themselves (internal condition) or a teammate (external condition). We found disordinal interactions of optimism and attribution on the feelings of success and feelings of failure. While the affective state of optimists deteriorated significantly if they attributed the failure internally compared to externally, pessimists were emotionally unaffected by the locus of attribution. Moreover, optimists experienced affective benefits compared to pessimists when they attributed the outcome externally. The reverse was true if they had attributed internally. Affective consequences of optimism and pessimism after failure therefore seem to differ depending on attributions. Furthermore, pessimists seemed to be unresponsive to the affective effects of attribution in our study. This insensitiveness implies differences in the cognitive processing of outcomes, a trait × cognition interaction that should be investigated further.     

In harmony or out of tune: Affective and emotional geographies of all-male choirs in London,UK

This article examines the growing popularity of weekly amateur choral singing for adult men, with a specific focus in London, UK. This paper moves away from discourses of social health and wellbeing to bring together critical studies of masculinity with emotional geographies of sound, to better understand the links between choirs as an affective space and the complex, symbolic relationship between men and their voices. Where research has shown that non-competitive group activity is central to men's sense of connection and provides a space for men to express emotions, friendship and intimacy, there is great potential to analyse how the role of sound (volume, vibrations) and use of choral voice work (softening, blending, harmonies) directly facilitates this connection. This paper remains cautious of presenting group singing as an automatic panacea to disconnection, exploring the exclusions for those who are ‘out of tune’ and (musically and socially) unable to harmonise with others.     

Affective and cognitive reactions to subliminal flicker from fluorescent lighting

This study renews the classical concept of subliminal perception (Peirce & Jastrow, 1884) by investigating the impact of subliminal flicker from fluorescent lighting on affect and cognitive performance. It was predicted that low compared to high frequency lighting (latter compared to former emits non-flickering light) would evoke larger changes in affective states and also impair cognitive performance. Subjects reported high rather than low frequency lighting to be more pleasant, which, in turn, enhanced their problem solving performance. This suggests that sensory processing can take place outside of conscious awareness resulting in conscious emotional consequences; indicating a role of affect in subliminal/implicit perception, and that positive affect may facilitate cognitive task performance.     

Swimming as an accretive practice in healthy blue space

Cultural geographers are increasingly interested in research on water and water-based practices as sites of study. Parallel literatures on therapeutic landscapes, especially emergent work on healthy blue space, have also begun to explore emotional geographies. This paper is an empirical study of outdoor swimming in Ireland with a specific focus on health and wellbeing. A key aim is to uncover evidence on how specific blue places and practices enable health. The idea of a continuum is utilised to link theory and practice and connect rather than divide affect, feeling and emotion. This is articulated through a set of embodied experiential practices that proposed swimming as a process of therapeutic accretion. Both personal and shared histories are used to identify the importance of both swimming practices and places to show how therapeutic accretions emerge to build healthy resilience. Additional insights suggest aspects of embodied health that are enhanced by outdoor swimming, especially in relation to bodies perceived to be inactive due to age, illness or disability. While the risks are not ignored, the need to better value outdoor swimming in cooler climates for public health is proposed, suggesting new directions for research on outdoor swimming to simultaneously capture active and passive embodied and emotional experiences within blue space.     

Affective priming of perceived environmental restorativeness

Research into the perceived restorativeness of environments tends to focus on the Kaplans' Attention Restoration Theory at the expense of the affective considerations of Ulrich's psychoevolutionary model. To better understand the role of emotion, this study used contextual text‐based primers (newspaper articles) to manipulate participants' affective state (positive or negative) prior to them rating different environments using the Restorative Components Scale. Sixty‐nine participants completed the web‐based study, being pseudo‐randomly allocated to the positive‐ or negative‐prime condition before rating three natural and three urban environments. Natural environments were rated as more restorative than urban, with negative‐priming giving higher mean ratings for all environments. This effect was overall statistically significant for two components (Being Away and Fascination), but only Fascination showed a significant interaction of affective‐prime and environment, a larger effect being seen for natural environments. Results are discussed in terms of current understanding of the interrelationship between attentional and affective processes.     

When happiness makes us selfish, but sadness makes us fair: Affective influences on interpersonal strategies in the dictator game

Does temporary mood influence how fair or selfish we are in interpersonal situations? These three experiments predicted and found that when people have the power to allocate scarce resources between themselves and others in the dictator game, positive mood increased selfishness, and sad mood produced greater fairness. In a public setting (Experiment 1), happy persons kept more raffle tickets to themselves when making allocations, and Experiment 2 confirmed this effect in the laboratory. Experiment 3 showed that mood effects on selfishness were strongest when the external norms for fairness were relaxed. The results are discussed in terms recent affect-cognition theories, suggesting that positive mood recruits more assimilative, internally focused processing, while negative affect promotes more externally oriented, accommodative processing and thus greater concern with social norms. The implications of the findings for everyday interpersonal decisions are considered.