Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children's emotional geographies

In this paper I argue that a significant proportion of research on children's emotional geographies has been deployed to reinforce the importance of children's ‘voices’, their (independent) ‘agency’, and the various ways in which voice/agency maybe deemed ‘political’. Without wishing to dismiss or dispense with such approaches, I explore potential ways to go ‘beyond’ concerns with voice/agency/politics. Initially, I review studies of children's participation (and participatory methods), activism and everyday lives that mobilise emotion and affect in productive ways. I contrast such studies with important questions raised by a reinvigoration of interest in the need for children to be able to represent themselves. I then explore the possibilities raised by so-called ‘hybrid’ conceptions of childhood – which go beyond biosocial dualisms – to enable further strides beyond voice/agency. Drawing on examples from alternative education and contemporary attachment theories, I explore some potential implications for children's emotional geographies and relational geographies of age of what I term ‘more-than-social’ emotional relations. Yet I do not offer an unequivocal endorsement of these hybrid emotions. Thus, I end the paper by issuing some words of caution – both in terms of the critical questions raised by more-than-social emotional relations, specifically, and in terms of engendering broader debate about how and why scholars do (children's) emotional geographies.     

Atmospheres of street performance in Taipei: Affect and emotion as dynamic,simultaneous, more-than-representational experiences

Studies of street performance have highlighted its potential for creating vibrant and inclusive urban places, yet have largely neglected its atmospheric, affectual and emotional dimensions. Building on a growing body of work on atmospheres and dynamics of affect and emotion, I examine the formation of atmospheres by street performances in Taipei and its affectual and emotional resonance on space and people. I used an experimental more-than-representational methodology, including implementing a live survey questionnaire through the audience's smartphones during a performance. An atmosphere of street performance is generated through the lively interactions between the street performer, members of the audience, performance objects and the wider urban environment. Performance objects and the urban streetscape are vitalised as part of street performance, and have excessive potential in producing atmospheres. The spatio-temporal dimension of performance atmosphere is significant in generating memories and creating a therapeutic atmospheric space, experienced affectually and emotionally. I suggest that it would be helpful to see atmosphere and its affectual and emotional impact as dynamic, simultaneous experiences that people encounter as they are enmeshed within an atmosphere, such as in more-than-individual experiences or unexpected events. Within a changing atmosphere, there are multiple layers of affective and emotional outcomes, whether felt and emerging individually, and/or felt and emerging collectively.     

Gendered Reminiscence Practices and Self-Definition in Late Adolescence

The purpose of this study was to examine gender differences in the emotional construction of life-threatening events (LTEs) that were chosen as self-defining by late adolescents. European American college students (41 women, 25 men) whose average age was 19 were selected from a larger sample (n = 139) because they reported at least 1 LTE among 3 self-defining memories. Memory narratives were elicited with a questionnaire (Singer & Moffitt, 1991–1992) and coded for emotional position. As expected, tough, action-packed positions were more prevalent in men's narratives, and compassionate positions were more prevalent in women's narratives. Unexpectedly, narratives that emphasized one's own vulnerability (fear or sadness) were equally prevalent for men and women, and women's emotional discourse was more conditional upon type of event, i.e., deaths vs. assaults. Findings provide the most explicit evidence to date that some gendered reminiscence practices found in prior studies of children are reflected in late adolescents' self-defining reminiscences. Implications are also discussed for a more situated understanding of gendered reminiscence pratices and for theories of identity development.     

Can affective atmospheres justify megaprojects? A case study of the ‘Asia New Bay Area’ in Kaohsiung,Taiwan

This article examines how affective atmospheres are constituted and used to sustain regeneration megaprojects. I argue that certain affective atmospheres engendered in particular urban contexts are essential to facilitating transformation in contemporary urban areas. Through the convergence of affective encounters, spatial imaginations and common goals in performative ways, affective atmospheres are forged and circulated to legitimise political decisions and urban policies. Moving beyond the conventional approach to examining waterfront regeneration, this paper attempts to capture the inherent relationship between affective dynamics and spatial practices that characterises megaprojects and dominates public opinion.The key claim of this article is that regeneration projects are emotionally mediated and sustained on the foundations of affective atmospheres in which myriad affects underlying everyday life are assembled to enhance municipal power and direct pubic concerns. The presented case study shows that the Asia New Bay Area (ANBA) project activated an affective atmosphere in a context-specific way, in which affective sensations situated in place experiences are assembled to challenge the physical and political landscape. It demonstrates that unfolding the city's affective, emotional and atmospheric resonances is critical to grasping how the megaproject can be justified and, furthermore, the orientation and rationale of spatial practices. Finally it outlines pragmatic suggestions for policy reform that address regeneration megaprojects in socially meaningful ways.     

“Climatic-affective atmospheres”: A conceptual tool for affective scholarship in a changing climate

This paper engages with the concept of affective atmospheres which has gained prominence in affect studies and suggests that in this era of global climate change, we need to ‘acclimatise’ this term. Working with a range of empirical examples, I argue that we can understand the climatic and affective to be entangled processes that co-produce each other. Working with the conceptual affordances of affective atmospheres offers much potential for research investigating the emotional and affective dimensions of climate change, enabling considerations that go beyond the individualism and anthropocentrism of more conventional approaches. Additionally, attuning to the climatic dimensions of affective atmospheres lessens the representational baggage of this term by moving beyond a metaphorical use of ‘atmosphere’. The refined concept I propose, climatic-affective atmospheres, offers promising opportunities for contributing to more effective and ethical social responses to climate change, for example, by enabling attention to how climate change reconfigures, disrupts, shapes and directs humans, and how everyday human affective practices contribute to changing or stabilising climate.     

Photovoice,claiming visibility,and women's farming identities in Australia

Despite an abundance of research on and growing social recognition of women's contributions to farming around the world, in many countries women farmers and their experiences are still relatively invisible to society. Museums Victoria's Invisible Farmer Project, the largest ever study of Australian women on the land, attempted to give voice to women farmers largely through a curated Facebook page. Our research, carried out between 2016 and 2018, examined the posted photographs and text as photovoice, supplemented by qualitative interviews, to understand the farming identities of participating women. Our analysis shows how these photovoices can represent a claim to visibility as farmers and can illuminate how women experience their own farming identities in relation to the landscapes of their farms and their perspectives on farmwork. We highlight the importance of emotional connections and carework in the women's identities. This study contributes to scholarship on emotional geographies by emphasizing the centrality of emotion in how women participating with the Invisible Farming Project construct and experience their farming identities. The importance of this finding lies in how greater visibility of women's farming identities might re-frame social understanding of farming as a relational and not just productive endeavor.     

Young people's emotional geographies of citizenship participation: Spatial and relational insights

The inclusion of more ‘active’ citizenship concepts within citizenship curricula has been a pattern noted in many countries in recent years. Yet, rarely are young people's citizenship identities, and how these are shaped by emotional and relational experiences of being citizens in communities, considered in such curricula. In this paper, I explore the citizenship narratives of young people from two New Zealand high schools and examine how emotions formed a significant aspect of their citizenship perceptions and participation. These emotions were constituted in and through relations and non-relations with other young people at school, as well as with members of their local communities at various inter-locking spatial scales. Focusing on emotional geographies of citizenship participation offered insights into how young people were forming their citizenship identities at the intersection of their geographies of gender, race and class, and how these experiences shaped, motivated and sustained citizenship participation. The study highlights the complexity of young people's emotional experiences in relation to their citizenship identities and participation and the need to understand this affectivity in greater depth, especially within policy contexts.     

Spanish-Speaking Parent–Child Emotional Narratives and Children's Social Skills

We examined whether parents' content and style when discussing past positive and negative emotional experiences with their children were concurrently and predictively linked to prekindergarteners' social skills. Sixty-five low-income Spanish-speaking parent–child dyads discussed a past positive and negative emotional experience at the beginning of prekindergarten. Narratives were coded for parents' elaborative style and emotion resolution, cause, and attribution. Children's emotional and cognitive-processing words were also coded. Children's social problem-solving skills and prosocial behaviors were assessed at the beginning and at the end of prekindergarten. Concurrently, children's social problem-solving skills were related to parents' elaborative style when discussing positive emotional experiences and children's use of cognitive-processing words when discussing negative emotional experiences. Predictively, children whose parents offered resolutions when discussing negative emotional experiences at the beginning of prekindergarten had better social problem-solving skills at the end of prekindergarten. Parents who talked about causes or attributed emotions when discussing past emotional experiences did not necessarily have children with better social skills. Findings suggest that parents' scaffolding when discussing past positive and negative emotional experiences offers opportunities for prekindergarteners to develop social abilities crucial for school readiness.     

Combined Emotional Socialization Training and Family Accommodation Modification: Impact on Emotional Regulation and Anxiety Symptoms in Anxious Children

Past studies show that emotional socialization and family accommodation are involved in children's anxiety, but research has yet to investigate whether targeting emotional socialization training (EST), family accommodation modification (FAM), or EST and FAM in tandem can reduce anxiety in children. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a combination of EST and FAM on improving emotion regulation (ER) and reducing anxiety symptoms in anxious children. The sample consisted of 80 children with an anxiety disorder (M_age = 6.7, SD = 0.1) and their mothers. Mothers were randomly assigned to an EST (n = 17), FAM (n = 16), Combined (n = 17), or a waitlist control (WLC) (n = 16) groups. Mothers completed The Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC) and Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS) at pre-test, post-test, and at 6-month of follow-up. The results showed that the EST, FAM, and Combined groups were more effective than WLC in improving ER and reducing anxiety severity at post-test and follow-up. Among the intervention groups, children in the combined group showed greater reductions in the severity of anxiety symptoms and emotion dysregulation than the other two groups. Assisting parents to use strategies that encourage healthy emotion regulation and decrease family accommodation might help reduce the severity of children's anxiety symptoms.     

Emotional reactivity,self-control and children's hostile attributions over middle childhood

Hostile attribution bias, a child's tendency to interpret ambiguous social information as threatening or hostile, has been discussed as an important point in which social, emotional and cognitive information intersect. This study explores the natural changes that occur in children's hostile attributions across three grades during middle childhood and examines how emotional reactivity and self-control at third, fourth and fifth grade independently and interactively relate to these trajectories. Participants included 919 children whose mothers reported on their emotional reactivity, whose teachers reported on their self-control and who completed an attribution bias interview, all at grades 3, 4 and 5. Results revealed that among children with a greater tendency to make hostile attributions at third grade, lower self-control at third grade was associated with greater initial hostile attribution bias and less decline in biases over time. Additionally, greater emotional reactivity at fourth grade was associated with declines in these children's hostile attributions, but only when self-control was also higher at fourth grade.     

Differentiation of Self and Dyadic Adjustment in Couple Relationships: A Dyadic Analysis Using the Actor‐Partner Interdependence Model

Bowen's multigenerational theory provides an account of how the internalization of experiences within the family of origin promotes development of the ability to maintain a distinct self whilst also making intimate connections with others. Differentiated people can maintain their I‐position in intimate relationships. They can remain calm in conflictual relationships, resolve relational problems effectively, and reach compromises. Fusion with others, emotional cut‐off, and emotional reactivity instead are common reactions to relational stress in undifferentiated people. Emotional reactivity is the tendency to react to stressors with irrational and intense emotional arousal. Fusion with others is an excessive emotional involvement in significant relationships, whilst emotional cut‐off is the tendency to manage relationship anxiety through physical and emotional distance. This study is based on Bowen's theory, starting from the assumption that dyadic adjustment can be affected both by a member's differentiation of self (actor effect) and by his or her partner's differentiation of self (partner effect). We used the Actor‐Partner Interdependence Model to study the relationship between differentiation of self and dyadic adjustment in a convenience sample of 137 heterosexual Italian couples (nonindependent, dyadic data). The couples completed the Differentiation of Self Inventory and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale. Men's dyadic adjustment depended only on their personal I‐position, whereas women's dyadic adjustment was affected by their personal I‐position and emotional cut‐off as well as by their partner's I‐position and emotional cut‐off. The empirical and clinical implications of the results are discussed.     

The relation of young children's vicarious emotional responding to social competence,regulation, and emotionality

Abstract

The relation of preschool and kindergarten children's vicarious emotional responding to their social competence, regulation (attentional and coping styles), and emotionality (negative emotional intensity and dispositional negative affect) was examined. Vicarious responding was assessed by means of facial reactions to a film about a peer in a social conflict and children's reported negative affect to viewing peers' real-life negative emotion. Mothers and teachers reported on children's regulation and emotionality, social competence was assessed with sociometric nominations, teachers' reports, and observations of children's real-life anger reactions. Facial concerned attention during the film was associated with various measures of social competence, regulation, and low or moderate negative emotionality. Although negative vicarious emotional responding in real contexts was infrequently related to measures of interest, girls who reported intense negative vicarious emotional responses were relatively unregulated and low in social competence. Finally, with age, regulation of vicarious emotional responding was increasingly related to children's sociometric status and to girls' coping at school. Thus, as they get older, children's abilities to regulate emotions may take on increasing importance in others' evaluations of their social competencies.     

Friction in the interstices: Emotion and landscape in Stone Butch Blues

This article analyzes the role of emotion in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues. Widely understood as one of the first modern transgender novels, Stone Butch Blues depicts the bodily changes of its protagonist, Jess Goldberg, from living as a “he–she,” to passing as male, to living as neither male nor female. This article analyzes how Jess's body, identity, and feelings shape and are shaped by the spaces ze encounters throughout the novel. Finding that Jess experiences emotions as bodily boundaries and metaphorical geographies, I draw from the work of Sara Ahmed to argue that Jess's decision at the novel's end not to pass as female or male is a choice to push back at the gendered norms of hir world through a body and politics shaped by emotion. Turning to contemporary trans* – transgender, transsexual, and trans – movements for social change, I argue that Jess's politics of bodily and emotional abrasion can help in the development of a trans* politics of emotion.     

Pandémie de COVID-19 : attachement,anxiété, régulation émotionnelle et stratégies de coping chez les enfants d’âge scolaire

IntroductionAn impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the emotions and behaviors of children has been found in several studies. However, this impact is not found in all studies. Attachment could be linked to different reactions and levels of anxiety.ObjectiveThe main aim of this study was to analyze the links between children's insecure attachment and variables related to anxiety, emotional and behavioral management of children during the pandemic.MethodStudy participants (n = 83 parents and their child aged 6 to 12) completed anonymously online questionnaires assessing attachment insecurity, state-anxiety, coping strategies and emotional regulation. They also answered socio-demographic questions related to their context of life and experience of the pandemic.ResultsState-anxiety is significantly related to children's emotional dysregulation but not to emotion-oriented coping strategy. Significant links were observed between attachment insecurity on the one hand, and children's state-anxiety, emotion-oriented coping strategy and children's emotional dysregulation on the other hand. Emotional dysregulation mediates the link between disorganized attachment and state anxiety.ConclusionThe links between attachment insecurity and children's state-anxiety on the one hand, and the emotion-oriented coping strategy on the other hand highlight the importance of taking individual and interactional factors into account in children's socio-emotional manifestations during the COVID-19 pandemic.     

Going with your gut: How William James' theory of emotions brings insights to risk perception and decision making research

The basic premise of William James' theory of emotions – that bodily changes lead to emotional feelings – ignited debate about the relative importance of bodily processes and cognitive appraisals in determining emotions. Similarly, theories of risk perception have been expanding to include emotional and physiological processes along with cognitive processes. Taking a closer look at The Principles of Psychology, this article examines how James' propositions support and extend current research on risk perception and decision making. Specifically, James (1) described emotional feelings and their related cognitions in ways similar to current dual processing models; (2) defended the proposition that emotions and their expressions serve useful and adaptive functions; (3) suggested that anticipating an emotion can trigger that emotion due to associations learned from past experiences; and (4) highlighted individual differences in emotional experiences that map on well with individual differences in risk-related decision making.     

The emotional geographies of the ‘livingdying’

This paper engages with Madge's (2016; 2018) notion of the ‘livingdying’ through an analysis of three recent autobiographies of death and dying. Dying: A Memoir by Australian author, Cory Taylor (2016), In Gratitude by British writer, Jenny Diski (2016), and The Bright Hour by American memoirist, Nina Riggs (2017), provide insight into the sometimes contradictory emotional responses to the different spaces traversed by the ‘livingdying’. We identify how the emotions of fear and anxiety, sadness and grief, anger and frustration, and isolation and loneliness infuse the liminal spaces that the ‘livingdying’ occupy. In doing so we highlight how the normative dualism of ‘the living’ and ‘the dying’ shapes emotional vulnerabilities. Finally, hoping to further advance Madge's (2016; 2018) provocation to acknowledge, account for and honour the intrinsic entanglement of living and dying and life and death, we propose a reframing of her notion of ‘livingdying’ that includes the ‘ordinary’ living, that is, those not dealing with a terminal illness.     

The Interplay of Subsymbolic and Symbolic Processess in Psychoanalytic Treatment: Commentary on Paper by Steven H. Knoblauch

Bucci's model of emotional communication, developed in the context of her theory of multiple coding and the referential process, is applied to Knoblauch's microanalytic report of his experience of the patient and himself and their interactions during a single session of an ongoing treatment. The referential process is a bidirectional function connecting the diverse sensory, somatic, and motoric representations of the subsymbolic system with imagery and words. The process operates partially and to varying degrees within both participants; in the case presented here, the dissociation among systems is severe, and emotional communication within the dyad occurs at first primarily in subsymbolic, bodily forms. Where gaps in the referential process exist for the patient, the analyst's own experience and associations operate to evoke new connections for her; we see this process in moment-by-moment glimpses of the analyst's experience and his interactions with the patient. Gaps in the reader's knowledge, and possibly the analyst's knowledge, of the patient are discussed.     

Observational learning of attitudes: A behavioral analysis

Analyzes observational learning of attitudes within the classical conditioning paradigm after reviewing the relevant theoretical formulations and empirical evidence. In this analysis an attitude is conceived of as a habit between an attitudinal stimulus and an attitudinal response, the attitudinal response being an internal emotional response. Thus vicarious emotional arousal is the basis of observational learning of attitudes. A model's positive or negative emotional behavior should normally lead to an arousal of a similar emotion in an observer because of the latter's conditioning history. Given that the model's emotional behavior is in the context of a particular stimulus situation, this stimulus situation should be able to elicit the relevant emotion in the observer through higher-order conditioning. Thus the specific stimulus situation, or another similar stimulus situation, comes to be a positive or negative attitudinal object for the observer, depending on the nature of the model's emotional response.