Emotional interactions and an ethics of care: Caring relations in families affected by HIV and AIDS

In the context of global processes of economic restructuring, the HIV and AIDS epidemic and socio-cultural constructions of care, many women and young people in low-income households have been drawn into caring roles within the family. Drawing on the literature on an ethics of care, emotional geographies and embodiment, this paper examines the emotional dynamics of the caring process in families affected by HIV and AIDS. Based on the perspectives of both ‘caregivers’ and ‘care-receivers’ from research undertaken in Namibia, Tanzania and the UK, we examine the everyday practices of care that women and young people are engaged in and explore how emotions are performed and managed in caring relationships. Our research suggests caregivers play a crucial role in providing emotional support and reassurance to people with HIV, which in turn often affects caregivers' emotional and physical wellbeing. Within environments where emotional expression is restricted and HIV is heavily stigmatised, caregivers and care-receivers seek to regulate their emotions in order to protect family members from the emotional impacts of a chronic, life-limiting illness. However, whilst caregiving and receiving may lead to close emotional connections and a high level of responsiveness, the intensity of intimate caring relationships, isolation and lack of access to adequate resources can cause tensions and contradictory feelings that may be difficult to manage. These conflicts can severely constrain carers' ability to provide the ‘good care’ that integrates the key ethical phases in Tronto's (1993) ideal of the caring process.     

Good boys,gang members,asylum gained and lost: The devastating reflections of a bureaucrat-ethnographer

State institutions and their acts of indifference, valorization, and violence operate through relationships, emotions, legal framings, and people. Engaging feminist geographic interventions, in this article we center state employees and their quotidian, affective relationships to asylum-seekers and the asylum process. We show how these actors embody state migration control through their daily practices. And we highlight the insights of former employees undertaking reflexive feminist research into their past working life. Drawing on the memories of one such “bureaucrat-ethnographer” (Valdivia), and our shared feminist engagement together, we outline three key insights for research on state migration practice. First, that the training state employees undergo aims to develop objective, neutral, and emotion-free decision-making, yet it relies on highly affective and biased state assumptions about asylum-seekers and their motivations. Second, while this training fosters simplified understandings of the causes and impacts of violence, a feminist geographic lens makes visible its complexly power-laden machinations. Last, we assert that state employees face distinct emotional pressures as they deal with devastation: the state's, their own, and that of asylum claimants. Valuing the insights of bureaucrats who become, or are at once, undertaking critical research disrupts intellectual divisions and hierarchies and complicates our understanding of the migration control practices of the state.     

Can the subaltern feel? An ethnography of migration,subalternity, and emotion

Drawing on biographical and migratory experiences gathered from Chinese marriage-migrants in Taiwan, this paper investigates the link between migration, subalternity and emotion. We examine how emotions are socially, temporarily and situationally constructed by migrant women, positioned in a condition of vulnerability during migration. Conceptually, we advance that emotions can be turned into resources, practices and competences that sustain migrants' social, economic and cultural positioning in the society of arrival. Through the identification of three empirically-rooted states of emotions – imaginative, implosive and mutual – we claim that, in a context of social contempt, familial exclusion and economic marginalisation, migrants' individual and collective performance of emotions contributes to ‘undo’ a condition of subalternity. Such states are purposely experimental and incomplete. Whilst they are as temporary and mutable as migrant women's emotional experiences and practices, this paper proposes that they could serve as a methodological and analytical tool for future research on migration and emotion.     

For Shame: Feminism,Breastfeeding Advocacy,and Maternal Guilt

In this paper, we provide a new framework for understanding infant‐feeding‐related maternal guilt and shame, placing these in the context of feminist theoretical and psychological accounts of the emotions of self‐assessment. Whereas breastfeeding advocacy has been critiqued for its perceived role in inducing maternal guilt, we argue that the emotion women often feel surrounding infant feeding may be better conceptualized as shame in its tendency to involve a negative self‐assessment—a failure to achieve an idealized notion of good motherhood. Further, we suggest, both formula‐feeding and breastfeeding mothers experience shame: the former report feeling that they fail to live up to ideals of womanhood and motherhood, and the latter transgress cultural expectations regarding feminine modesty. The problem, then, is the degree to which mothers are vulnerable to shame generally, regardless of infant feeding practices. As an emotion that is less adaptive and potentially more damaging than guilt, shame ought to be the focus of resistance for both feminists and breastfeeding advocates, who need to work in conjunction with women to oppose this shame by assisting them in constructing their own ideals of good motherhood that incorporate a sense of self‐concern.     

Genetic and adoptive motherhood: Stress,marital relationship,and child care support

In this paper we characterize adoptive and genetic motherhood with or without stress indicators. Participants were 86 mothers (36 adoptive, 50 genetic) with children from 0 to 12 years old. They answered questions about focal child and mother profile, marital relationship, child care support and the Lipp's Stress Symptoms Inventory for Adults. Results showed that mothers in both groups reported child care support, but there was more participation of nonrelatives in the care of adoptive children and relatives in the care of genetic children. There was greater marital stability and less conflict with the arrival of the child in the adoptive families and predominance of stress indicators in genetic mothers. We concluded that, although there are differences between adoptive and genetic motherhood, these do not imply advantages for one versus the other. Moreover, marital stability related to the adoption process and sociodemographic characteristics of adoptive mothers may have contributed to lower prevalence of stress.     

Getting Emotional About Explanations: Social Explanations and Social Explanatory Styles as Bases of Prosocial Emotions and Intergroup Attitudes

We are interested in the bases of social emotions such as compassion and hostility. Our analysis centers on social explanations, or people’s answers to the question: Why does the target behave that way or experience those outcomes? Below, we review classic approaches to social explanation and then review work linking explanations to emotions. Finally, we focus on work from our lab that connects explanations to prosocial emotions and intergroup attitudes, including compassion for the disadvantaged and reduced vengefulness toward the violent. A crucial contribution of our work is to illuminate complex connections between explanations and emotions: A given explanation has different socio‐emotional implications depending on the explainer’s motives. Finally, we review our work suggesting that individuals have social explanatory styles, and that particular styles are predictive of dispositional compassion. A key implication of our work is that social explanations are another basis of prosociality, in addition to factors such as empathy and moral principles.     

Reframing emotion in education through lenses of <Emphasis Type="Italic">parrhesia</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">care of the self</Emphasis>

In this article, we critique two theoretical positions that analyze the place of emotions in education: the psychological strand and the cultural feminist strand. First of all, it is shown how a social control of emotions in education is reflected in the combination of psychological and cultural feminist discourses that function to govern one’s self effectively and efficiently. These discourses perpetuate an assumed divide between the rational and the emotional, and reinforce the existing power hierarchies and the status quo of stereotypes about the role of emotion in education. Then we use the Foucauldian notions of parrhesia and care of the self to suggest alternative ways of thinking about emotions in education. Instead of campaigning for one side or the other of the rational/emotional divide, we suggest that it may be more interesting and fruitful to examine the particular ways discourses of emotion in education construct their own brand of parrhesia.

Neo-tribalism,epistemic cultures,and the emotions of scientific knowledge construction

Maffesoli's (1996) metaphor of the neo-tribe is useful for analyzing the emotions and spatial dynamics of group life. However, the idea of neo-tribes is not explicitly designed for making sense of the work of scientists in laboratories. To supplement Maffesoli and further understand the group dynamics of scientific knowledge construction, we draw from Knorr-Cetina's (1999) concept of epistemic cultures to highlight the ritualistic character of lab science. By showing how Maffesoli and Knorr-Cetina can supplement one another, we create an encounter between the sociology of emotions and the sociology of science to demonstrate the centrality of emotions in laboratory life. In-depth interviews and on-site laboratory observations with physicists, earth scientists, biologists and chemists form the empirical basis of this study. Commenting on the ritualistic nature of scientific lab work, as well as the emotional experiences of scientists, we analyze the role of emotions in scientists' work. We introduce the concept of value-proxemic emotions to account for the role of specific emotions in binding members to the group. We also examine the emotional experience of the creation and maintenance of group and lab boundaries, which we conceptualize as inter- and intra- tribal cooperation and conflict. Our analysis suggests that emotions are a crucial component of knowledge construction and group life in laboratory work.     

The emotional self: Embodiment,reflexivity, and emotion regulation

Current dominant trends in the biological and psychological sciences tend to put emphasis on the role of the brain, cognition, and consciousness in realising emotional states and attempting to regulate them. In this article, I suggest an alternative approach with the idea that emotions emerge within social relations and give meaning and value to the situations in which we are located. Humans are understood as embodied emotional selves for who thought and emotion are intertwined. However, individuals can get caught in obsessive and compulsive thinking and feeling traps where the self loses touch with its emotions, and because of this also loses contact with the social situation and the ability to skilfully navigate it. In such circumstances, the self gets overwhelmed by emotion and loses its poise in the social setting. I consider Buddhist meditation as a technique through which people can develop a more reflexive emotional self, where reflexivity is not about control of emotion but owning one's feelings and being able to respond more sensitively and skilfully in various situations.     

Space for emotion in the spaces of activism

This paper explores the role of emotions in activism. Although, increasingly, researchers have examined what emotions inspire or deter different forms of political and social movement activism, this paper takes a new direction by considering what spaces, practices and emotional stances are necessary to sustain individual and collective resistance in the long-term. We argue that we need to sustain activism through emotional reflexivity, building sustaining spaces to create space for emotion in activism. Using empirical examples from different forms of autonomous (anti-capitalist) activism in Britain, the role and importance of emotions to the sustainability of activism is explored. In particular, we consider the role of different spaces in sustaining activists through the cycles of protest, what spaces of activism can be opened up by a closer attention to emotions, and how the spaces in which protest and other activist practices take place shape the emotional and affective engagements of participants. As autonomous forms of activism attempt to prefiguratively enact new post-capitalist social relations in the here and now, we suggest there is still some way to go in changing affective relationships within many of these groups.     

Patterns of cognitive appraisal in emotion

There has long been interest in describing emotional experience in terms of underlying dimensions, but traditionally only two dimensions, pleasantness and arousal, have been reliably found. The reasons for these findings are reviewed, and integrating this review with two recent theories of emotions (Roseman, 1984; Scherer, 1982), we propose eight cognitive appraisal dimensions to differentiate emotional experience. In an investigation of this model, subjects recalled past experiences associated with each of 15 emotions, and rated them along the proposed dimensions. Six orthogonal dimensions, pleasantness, anticipated effort, certainty, attentional activity, self-other responsibility/control, and situational control, were recovered, and the emotions varied systematically along each of these dimensions, indicating a strong relation between the appraisal of one's circumstances and one's emotional state. The patterns of appraisal for the different emotions, and the role of each of the dimensions in differentiating emotional experience are discussed.     

Happiness,pleasures, and emotions

In The Pursuit of Unhappiness, Daniel Haybron has defended an emotional state theory of happiness, according to which happiness consists in a broadly positive balance of emotions, moods, and mood propensities. In this paper, I argue that Haybron’s theory should be modified in two ways. First, contra Haybron, I argue that sensory pleasures should be regarded as constituents of happiness, alongside emotions and moods. I do this by showing that sensory pleasures are sufficiently similar to emotions for them to be included within the class of happiness-constituting states. Second, I argue that a plausible theory of happiness should not include mood propensities, since their inclusion is either counterintuitive or unnecessary.     

What You are Feeling and Why: Two Distinct Types of Emotional Clarity

Individual difference approaches have typically treated emotional clarity (i.e., one’s understanding of one’s own emotions) as a unitary construct. Based on strong theoretical reasons, in this study we explored two related aspects of emotional clarity in a student sample. The first, type awareness, refers to the extent to which people typically can identify and distinguish the types of emotions they experience. The second, source awareness, refers to the extent to which people typically know the causes of their emotions. We psychometrically distinguished self-report items of source and type awareness. Items measuring type awareness were obtained from traditional measures of the construct, clarity of emotions. As no existing measures assess individual differences in source awareness, we developed a set of items with strong face validity. Our results provide initial evidence that one can measure source and type awareness separately.     

Emotional awareness,gender, and peculiar body-related beliefs

Research has broadly established that emotional disturbances are associated with body image disturbances. This is the first study to examine links between facets of emotional awareness and peculiar body-related beliefs (PBB), or beliefs about an imagined or slight defect in one's appearance or bodily functioning. In a sample of college students (n=216), we found that low emotional clarity (the extent to which the type and source of emotions are understood) was associated with higher PBB in both women and men, and the relation between emotional clarity and PBB was further moderated by attention to emotions (the extent to which emotions are attended to) and gender. Men with low attention to emotions and women with high attention to emotions both experienced higher levels of PBB if they also reported low levels of emotional clarity. This interactive effect was not attributable to shared variance with body mass index, neuroticism or affect intensity.     

应对与积极情绪研究:意义应对、积极情绪应对、情绪表露和情绪粒度

研究者们发现了应激状态下积极情绪与消极情绪共生的现象,这对于缓解压力提高应对效能有重要意义,积极情绪的研究成为应激和应对领域一个新的方向。为进一步明晰应对过程中积极情绪发生的特点、机制以及它们之间的关系,以应对过程中积极情绪发生的不同阶段为基点,探讨意义指向应对(应对失败之后),积极情绪指向应对(应对初始阶段),以及积极情绪的拓展建构(应对行为之前,并进一步探讨了情绪表露和情绪粒度两个与积极情绪密切相关的因素)。以后研究的重点主要有以下几点:应激源类型的划分,意义指向应对、积极情绪指向应对以及情绪表露和情绪粒度的进一步研究,并积极关注临床实践。     

Transference and katharsis,Freud to Aristotle

Aristotle's theory of tragic katharsis is the most ancient and debated theory of the effect of the theatrical experience on the audience. It affirms that tragedy effects the katharsis of fear and pity, engaging readers with the controversy whether by katharsis Aristotle meant purification of the emotions (i.e. their perfection within the mind) or purification of the mind from the emotions (i.e. their abreaction from the mind). In this paper I will explore how Freud's theory of transference can suggest a new interpretation of Aristotle's tragic katharsis. Transference allows for the representation and expression of repressed emotions through the re‐enactment of past relational dynamics. Although this process is essential to the psychoanalytic method, it is the subsequent analytic endeavour which allows for the “working through” of repressed emotions, bringing into effect the transference cure. I argue that the dynamic between emotional arousal in re‐enactment and emotional distancing in analysis offers an effective parallel of the dynamic between katharsis of fear and katharsis of pity in Aristotle's theory. Such interpretation of tragic katharsis suggests that the theatrical effect in audiences may be an opportunity for self‐analysis and the ‘working through’ of unconscious psychic dynamics.     

Trauma,Emotions, and Memory in World Politics: The Case of the European Union's Foreign Policy in the Middle East Conflict

This article focuses on the impact of emotions on the European Union (EU)'s international identity and agency in the context of the memory of trauma. Emotions are understood as performances through which an actor expresses itself to others while constructing its identity, creating its agency, and potentially affecting the social order. It is argued that the memory of trauma is translated into EU foreign policy practice through emotional performances of EU representatives. Empirically, we explore this impact in relation to the EU's engagement in the Israel‐Palestinian prolonged conflict that has many underlying emotions linked with past traumatic experiences. By doing so, we aim to instigate a discussion between the emotions literature in International Relations and the European Union studies literature to nuance understanding of the politics of emotions that increasingly constrain what kind of a global actor the EU actually is or can become.     

Messing with the emotions of the other exploring ambiguous youth-adult relations in a residential care institution

This article provides insights into the lived ambivalence, between support and control that arises in care work. It does so through an analysis of the spatialised entanglements of emotions, age and formal position in intergenerational encounters at a residence for young people suffering from social and mental distress. By identifying the dominant norms associated with the roles of ‘resident’ and ‘professional in the social space of the residence’, Warming explores what may, drawing on Haraway, be termed popular, oppositional and inappropriate practices and the emotions and power relations linked to them. The analysis reveals how the three types of practices – all framed by neoliberal youth policies and psy-knowledge about age, (ab)normal personalities and ‘professionalism’ as spatialised in the institutional organisation of work and the physical space as well as rules, norms, and routines - represent very diverse ways of navigating. Moreover it demonstrates, how ‘messing with other people's emotions' and trying to change their behavior is regarded as manipulation if it challenges norms or power relations rooted in spatially anchored perceptions of appropriate practices, but as empowerment if it chimes with norms that correspond to the roles and intersecting binary constructions of childish/young/insane client – adult professional.     

A relational recasting of the principles of emotional competence

ABSTRACT

Carolyn Saarni’s theory of emotional competence has made a central contribution by directing attention to some important functions of emotion in social interaction. Her work is permeated with examples of how emotions function within both successful and unsuccessful social interactions and relationships. An examination of her stated principles of emotional competence suggest in places a perspective that is primarily intrapsychic in nature, harking back to the early roots of emotion theory and research. In this piece, we note where Saarni has advanced implications of a relational theory of emotion for understanding emotional competence. In addition, we reframe some of Saarni’s principles to make them more consistent with current relational approaches to emotion. Finally, we offer additions and extensions that we believe are compatible with the general direction of her thinking before her untimely death.     

Belonging,desire, and queer Iranian diasporic politics

Recent approaches to the study of queer migration politics and diaspora hold significant potential in advancing the study of the geographies of migration. Most notably, they can help illuminate the impossible positions that migrants often occupy; challenge diasporic norms governing cultural authenticity; destabilize conventional understandings of gender, nation, and home; and situate diasporic experiences within present and future possibilities for new ways of expressing intimacy and kinship beyond the limited scope of nationality and citizenship. In this paper, I will argue for a queer intervention on migration studies that critically expands geographic approaches to migration by denaturalizing and complicating approaches to understanding the emotional diasporic experiences of belonging and home. I will think through the usefulness of such approaches in my own ongoing research on debates concerning Iranian diasporic identities and communities in Iranian diasporic cinema. In analyzing two recent films, I argue for the tremendous creative potential of diasporic filmmaking in imagining complex spaces of home and belonging that otherwise seem impossible. Ultimately, I see queer approaches to migration politics and diaspora as having significant creative, critical, and positive potential to understanding how migrants placed in impossible situations create new lives for themselves.