Exploring emotions as social phenomena among Canadian varsity athletes

ObjectivesAthletes are constantly engaging with teammates, coaches, and opponents, and rather than treating emotions as manifested in the individual as is often the case, psychological analyses need to treat emotions as social and relational. The purpose of this research was to explore athletes' accounts of emotions as social phenomena in sport using qualitative inquiry methods.MethodFourteen Canadian varsity athletes (7 males, 7 females, age range: 18–26 years) from a variety of sports participated in two semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed using inductive coding, categorization, micro-analysis, and abduction (Mayan, 2009; Strauss & Corbin, 1998).ResultsAthletes reported individual and shared stressors that led to individual, group-based, and collective emotions, and they also reported emotional conflict when they simultaneously experienced individual and group-based or collective emotions. Emotional expressions were perceived to impact team functioning and performance, communicated team values, served affiliative functions among teammates, and prompted communal coping to deal with stressors as a team. Factors which appeared to influence athletes' emotions included athlete identity, teammate relationships, leaders and coaches, and social norms for emotion expression.ConclusionsOur study extends previous research by examining emotions as social phenomena among athletes from a variety of sports, and by elaborating on the role of athletes' social identity with regard to their emotional experiences in sport.     

Innovation,illegitimacy, and individualism

Abstract

Simonton has reported an interesting set of findings concerning the relationship between creativity and what he terms social pathology. To speak of social or political pathology is to use a metaphor, the meaning of which would seem to be almost completely relative. For example, democracy is a pathological state for one who believes in the divine right of kings, but the latter belief seems delusional to one who holds democratic principles. Thus, creativity is related to certain social phenomena, but it is not clear if we should classify these phenomena as pathological. In my own research on British history, I have found that an egotistic and asocial emphasis in poetry consistently cooccurs with high rates of scientific and technological innovation, illegitimate births, and industrial productivity. In one way or another all of these phenomena have to do with individualism and independence or nonconformity. Whether such epochs of lessened social solidarity should be called pathological or healthy seems to be a matter of taste rather than fact. The gist of Simonton's explanations of how social factors influence the amount of creativity is reasonable, but some apparent flaws in the details of these explanations are pointed out in this commentary.     

‘Beyond the oedipal complex’: Freud and lacan revisited

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to explore the position that the mother occupies in both Freud's and Lacan's accounts of oedipalization. Both authors' work will be addressed with reference to contemporary feminist critiques of their accounts. The aim will be to query the belief that the mother must be repudiated in order for the child to move into culture. It will be suggested that both Lacan's and Freud's accounts may ironically perpetuate both the ‘interminable’ nature of analysis and a relationship with the maternal in which the mother will continue to haunt, beckon and terrify until some attempt is made at reparation.     

Real self-respect and its social bases

Abstract

Many theories of social justice maintain that concern for the social bases of self-respect grounds demanding requirements of political and economic equality, as self-respect is supposed to be dependent on continuous just recognition by others. This paper argues that such views miss an important feature of self-respect, which accounts for much of its value: self-respect is a capacity for self-orientation that is robust under adversity. This does not mean that there are no social bases of self-respect that such theories ought to incorporate. It means that they are different: they consist of the motivational and epistemic resources needed to develop and maintain such robustness.     

Ecological Neuroscience: From Reduction to Proliferation of Our Resources

Abstract

In one common view, human activity is explained by neural processes, because these implement psychological functions that underlie overt behavior. In the ecological approach, such accounts are taken to be nonexplanatory, because they reify the phenomena they wish to explain. We argue that ecological psychology offers an antidote to such reification with concepts such as resonance, attunement, and anticipation, if they are considered as relational, world-involving activities. Our main claim is that we can understand our scientific explanations of neural phenomena as itself an attunement to sociomaterial practices. This allows us to understand neuroscientific processes as conditions that enable a resonating organism-environment system. In this view, neuroscientific and psychological phenomena are usually found in widely different sociomaterial practices. But we can occasionally achieve coordination between those practices. Establishing that a dependence of a psychological phenomenon on neural events holds is an achievement of a novel practice that we developed and to which we resonate. Thus the more we want to understand what happens inside the nervous system, the more we also need to scrutinize the sociomaterial environment in which we do so.     

Embarrassment: Actual vs. typical cases,classical vs. prototypical representations

Abstract

Theories of embarrassment were investigated by having subjects either recall an occasion when they were embarrassed or describe their idea of a typical instance of embarrassment. Subjects then rated their account on a questionnaire designed to measure five theoretical approaches to embarrassment: dramaturgic theory, social anxiety theory, and three decreased self-esteem theories. Patterns of means and of covariation for actual embarrassment best supported the dramaturgic theory. In contrast, subjects' accounts of typical embarrassment contained elements of all five theories. The written accounts were analysed to produce a prototype of embarrassment, which consisted mostly of elements of the dramaturgic and social anxiety theories. We propose that the concept of embarrassment is necessarily linked to dramaturgic difficulties, whereas it is contingently linked to social anxiety and decreased self-esteem.     

Collective Affordances

Abstract

This article develops an ecological framework for understanding collective action. This is contrasted with approaches familiar from the collective intentionality debate, which treat individuals (with collective intentions) as fundamental units of collective action. Instead, we turn to social ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory and argue that they provide a promising framework for understanding collectives as the central unit in collective action. However, we submit that these approaches do not yet appreciate enough the relevance of social identities for collective action. To analyze this aspect, we build on key insights from social identity theory and synthesize it with embodied and ecological accounts of perception and action. This results in the proposal of two new types of affordances. For an individual who enacts her “embodied social identity” of being a member of a particular collective, there can be what we call embodied social identity affordances. Moreover, when several individuals dynamically interact with each other against the background of their embodied social identities, this might lead to the emergence of a collective, which we understand as a dynamically constituted and ecologically situated perception-action system consisting of several individuals enacting relevant embodied social identity affordances. Building on previous work in social ecological psychology, we suggest that there can be genuine collective affordances, that is, affordances whose subject is not an individual, but a collective.     

Societal creativity: Problems with pathology

Abstract

This commentary on Simonton's “Political Pathology and Societal Creativity” argues that although the article offers a comprehensive and illuminating account of possible connections between societal creativity and political phenomena, viewing such connections in terms of a relationship between creativity and political pathology is problematic. The notion of political pathology presupposes some notion of political health, yet no standard of political health is offered by Simonton, nor are we given any criteria for determining whether certain social phenomena are pathological. Ultimately the notion of what constitutes a healthy society rests upon views about the nature of society which depend on a political philosophy. The danger in talk of political pathology lies in defining political health in terms of a particular political ideology, thereby making a value judgment regarding political ideals hidden in the guise of a strictly empirical claim.     

A biphasic relational approach to the evolution of human consciousness

Background/objectiveHuman consciousness is arguably unique, and its features are hard to explain. Continuous and discrete accounts of consciousness are commonly viewed as incompatible, but both have limitations. Continuous accounts cannot readily account for what appears to be unique about human consciousness; discrete accounts have a hard time explaining how human consciousness could have evolved. The present position paper shows how both continuous and discontinuously elements can be combined.MethodA biphasic model is constructed by unifying complex systems theory, the evolution of symbolic reasoning as a relational extension of human cooperation, and evolutionary science. The application of this approach to modern views of consciousness is then explored.ResultsOur analysis suggests that human consciousness may be viewed as a discontinuous event, that emerged from continuous foundations. This biphasic account contains processes that can be targeted clinically. For example, developmentally delayed children with problems in consciousness may be helped by targeting the processes the present account suggests are important at different levels of complexity.ConclusionsThis biphasic relational approach fits with the evolutionary record and with data on human cognitive development. It may be useful in guiding clinical intervention.     

The Role of Social Context in Religion

SUMMARY

A vast research literature examines how religion has been defined and assessed, the inter-relationships of these measures, and their associations with psychological and social well being in later life. This article considers the advantages and disadvantages of various measurement strategies, with particular emphasis on the importance of diverse social contexts in defining, measuring and interpreting religious phenomena. The concept of social context is discussed as being pivotal for how religion is defined and for appreciating the various mechanisms and pathways through which religion is thought to affect well being.     

An editorial statement

Phenomena that are unanticipated or based on something unanticipated are often neglected by sociologists. ‘Astonishment’ is selected for analysis as one of the phenomena that are frequently based on unanticipated events. Especially when unanticipated events occur together with certain other social factors, astonishment is a likely reaction. Astonishment is further analysed in terms of some basic elements of social action: The reaction may be a means (especially of social control), it may be a conscious end in action, and it may be a condition in action.     

Education biases perception of social robots

IntroductionRecent research on human–robot interactions (HRI) emphasizes a role of user's attitudes in perceiving robot's with different robot embodiments of varying levels of human likenesses. However, other human factors such as educational background may also help understanding of what conditions contribute to enhance social perception of robot's features.ObjectivesThis study aimed to determine how people's attitudes towards and familiarization with robots influence social perception of particular features of robots.MethodFirst, we measured attitudes towards robots among undergraduate students with diverse educational background (engineering vs. psychology). Then, participants were presented with short movies showing the behaviour of three robots with different levels of sociability. Finally, participants evaluated the characteristics of these robots on a scale.ResultsPeople more familiar with social robots and with more positive attitudes towards them evaluate robots with human traits more highly.ConclusionHuman perception of social robots resembles social phenomena related to human perception of other people.     

Memory Bias in Recovered Clinical Depressives

Abstract

Emotions can be regarded as the manifestations of a system that realises multiple concerns and operates in an uncertain environment. Taking the concern realisation function as a starting point, it is argued that the major phenomena of emotion follow from considerations of what properties a subsystem implementing that function should have. The major phenomena are: the existence of the feelings of pleasure and pain, the importance of cognitive or appraisal variables, the presence of innate, pre-programmed behaviours as well as of complex constructed plans for achieving emotion goals, and the occurrence of behavioural interruption, disturbance and impulse-like priority of emotional goals. The system properties underlying these phenomena are facilities for relevance detection of events with regard to the multiple concerns, availability of relevance signals that can be recognised by the action system, and facilities for control precedence, or flexible goal priority ordering and shift.

A computer program, ACRES, is described that is built upon the specifications provided by this emotion theory. It operates in an operator-machine interaction involving the task of executing a knowledge manipulation task (the knowledge domain happens to be about emotions). ACRES responds emotionally when one of his concerns (e.g. errorless input, being kept busy, receiving varied input, not being killed) is touched upon. Responses are social signals, shifts in resource allocations to the operator, interruption of current task-directed processing, and refusal to accept instructions. His flow of behaviour shows much of the preference-based predictability, response interference, goalshifts, and social signalling of human and animal emotional behaviour.     

Tensions of Accountability: Scientists,Technicians and the Ethical Life of Data Production in Astronomy

ABSTRACT

Laboratory ethnographies have emphasized the importance of trust and accountability among scientists and technicians when working in co-presence. But what happens to their relations when data production is outsourced, widely separating scientists and technicians? In contemporary astronomy, observing has largely become a service that observatory staff members do for researchers. This has increased the efficiency of telescope use while also resulting in arrangements prone to some researchers’ dissatisfaction and a raised visibility of technicians’ work. Attending ethnographically to situated evaluations reveals that some data-using researchers and data-producing technicians typify each other as moral figures: staff observers come to be seen as objects of blame and scientists as excessively demanding users. Wherever data travel, the quality and quantity of data can serve as ethical affordances for assigning blame to staff technicians. By contrast, the moral figure of the excessively demanding data user does not travel beyond the observatory, and the social accountability of interactions that visiting astronomers experience in the observatory’s control room is confined to its situated enactment. As scientist–technician interactions have become discontinuous and fraught, moral figures and ethical accounts thus travel unevenly in the landscape of data production, and the importance of social interactions remains often unrecognized.     

Social Behaviors as Determined by Different Arrangements of Social Consequences: Diffusion of Responsibility Effects With Competition

Abstract

According to a recently proposed synthesis, social loafing, social facilitation, and deindividuation can be viewed as different ways of arranging social consequences (B. Guerin, 1999). The effects of such arrangements have been measured in past research as productive output (social loafing and social facilitation) or as antinormative behaviors (deindividuation), but all 3 effects are manipulable by changing individual identifiability, evaluation, social identity, task difficulty, and presence in a group. The synthesis also predicted that these same variables would apply to other measures and other arrangements of social consequences. To this end, in the present 2 experiments, the author varied the arrangements for consequence diffusion in a competition situation by varying small and large competing groups and measured productive output and antinormative behaviors simultaneously. The 2 experiments showed social-consequence effects in competition situations with college students, giving further support for the social-consequence synthesis and the idea that the verbal naming of phenomena in social psychology is arbitrary.     

High-level Enactive and Embodied Cognition in Expert Sport Performance

Abstract

Mental representation has long been central to standard accounts of action and cognition generally, and in the context of sport. We argue for an enactive and embodied account that rejects the idea that representation is necessary for cognition, and posit instead that cognition arises, or is enacted, in certain types of interactions between organisms and their environment. More specifically, we argue that enactive theories explain some kinds of high-level cognition, those that underlie some of the best performances in sport and similar practices (dance, martial arts), better than representational accounts. Flow and mushin (mindfully fluid awareness) are explained enactively to this end. This results in a mutually beneficial analysis where enactivism offers theoretical and practical advantages as an explanation of high performance in sports, while the latter validates enactivism.     

Wittgenstein on the duration and timing of mental phenomena: episodes,understanding and rule-following

ABSTRACT

Wittgenstein’s later works are full of questions about the timing and duration of mental phenomena. These questions are often awkward ones, and Wittgenstein seems to take their awkwardness to be philosophically revealing, but if we ask what it is that these questions reveal then different interpretations are possible. This paper suggests that there are at least six different ways in which the timing of mental phenomena can be awkward. By identifying these we can give sense to some of Wittgenstein’s more cryptic remarks, and doing this enables us to clarify some obscure elements in his picture of the mind, including the distinction between sensations and feelings, and his account of the rational status of those processes out of which rule-following is built.     

Fate,Fiction and the Future

Abstract

Some fictions, it seems, represent the future as closed, in the sense that some future-tensed propositions are true in those fictions. Yet it is surprisingly difficult to accommodate this plausible thesis within an account of truth in fiction. A number of putative examples of closed fictional futures are discussed (Macbeth, Oedipus, Time and the Conways, The Time Machine) and the problems encountered in reconciling them with various accounts of truth in fiction (David Lewis', Gregory Currie's, Alex Byrne's) elaborated. Connections are drawn between metaphysical views on time and theories of fiction, and an attempt is made to show how the tenseless theory of time (roughly, the denial that time flows) can illuminate accounts of fictional truth, and in particular the issue of how there can be true beliefs about what will happen in a fiction.     

Internalism, (Super)fragile Reasons,and the Conditional Fallacy

Abstract

David Sobel (2001) objects to Bernard Williams's internalism, the view that an agent has a reason to perform an action only if she has some motive that will be served by performing that action. Sobel is an unusual challenger in that he endorses neo-Humean subjectivism, ‘the view that it is the agent's subjective motivational set that makes it the case that an agent does or does not have a reason to φ’ (219). Sobel's objection in fact arises from this very commitment. Internalism, he says, is incompatible with the best subjectivist accounts of reasons for action—accounts that suggest that there are what he calls fragile reasons and perhaps also superfragile ones, both of which allegedly provide for counterexamples to internalism. I argue that such reasons do not in fact threaten internalism. I then briefly explore whether internalism is vulnerable to a related charge—that it commits the conditional fallacy.     

Predicting Deviant Behavior by Neutralization: Myths and Findings

ABSTRACT

Neutralization theory states that deviant behavior is determined by the use of accounts rather than by an individual's acceptance of a social norm. A critical review of neutralization theory shows that (a) neutralization is only a weak predictor of norm-contradictive behavior, (b) high norm-acceptance seems to amplify the neutralization-behavior effect but might not be a prerequisite, and (c) in contrast to Minor's hardening process assumption, prior norm violation should increase impact of neutralization on behavior rather than decrease it. Future directions of neutralization research are suggested, based on a situational analysis of the neutralization process.