Feeling New York: Classless urban geographies and affective capitalist reconciliation in Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick

Acknowledging the productive impulses of the affective turn, this paper examines the affective impacts of urban architecture conveyed by Horatio Alger in his novel Ragged Dick. Without any strict adherence to a particular school of thought, I draw instead on those concepts and theories that promise enriching for an analysis of a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman and its socio-spatial representation of New York's architecture, for instance Central Park and Wall Street. The results underline the flexibility of the affective nexus used in literary geographies, finding the metropolis not as a passive dramaturgical backdrop but as an active agent, whose structural composition works towards the integration of its literary subjects into the affective discourses of its historical period and literary genre. Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick directs this very agency towards the protagonist's integration into the hegemonic structures of sentimentality. In the story, this becomes visible in the mythical abilities of empathy to transcend class divisions and the reconciliatory appeal of the capitalist ideology. Ultimately, affect and emotionality are used to maintain and perform the proper feelings for certain architectural structures, manifesting themselves as a sentimental performance of systemic allegiance.     

Can Robert Adams Survive Moral Twin Earth?

Richard Boyd and Robert Adams have both developed semantic accounts of moral terms based on Hilary Putnam's causal regulation theory for natural kind terms, according to which the terms in question refer to the properties which predominantly causally regulated the terms. However, Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons have mounted an objection to Boyd's semantics—their Moral Twin Earth argument. If this argument is successful against Boyd then it might be thought that it should also be successful against Adams, given the similarity between their semantic accounts. I will argue in this essay that Adams's semantics is sufficiently different from Boyd's to enable him to survive Moral Twin Earth, but that he is vulnerable to a modified version of Moral Twin Earth that I describe.     

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.     

A politics of affect: Re/assembling relations of class and race at the museum

This article takes as its focus a politics of affect and its potentially transformative effects. Drawing on feminist new materialism and the process philosophy of Deleuze, I map moments in which this politics is enacted as school children encounter museum exhibits designed to address issues of class and race. Taking affect to be a matter of the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected, I attend to how the body's power of acting is increased or diminished through these encounters. Affect emerges as central to negotiations around issues relating to class and race, with some assemblages produced being particularly able to effect changes in capacities. Politics presents as a process of affective encounter through which dominant cultural norms of class and race can be contested and their exclusions ‘undone’. The argument is made that a politics of affect has the potential to unsettle normative power relations and address issues of social inequality and do so in an affirmative way. And, that attending to affect extends identity-based framings of class and race by bringing the constitutive role and contribution of the material, the micropolitical and the radically relational into view.     

Emotion regulation difficulties in anorexia nervosa: Relationship to self-perceived sensory sensitivity

Changes in sensation (e.g., prickly skin) are crucial constituents of emotional experience, and the intensity of perceived changes has been linked to emotional intensity and dysregulation. The current study examined the relationship between sensory sensitivity and emotion regulation among adults with anorexia nervosa (AN), a disorder characterised by disturbance in the experience of the body. Twenty-one individuals with AN, 20 individuals with AN who were weight–restored, and 23 typical controls completed self-report measures of sensory sensitivity and emotion regulation. AN participants reported heightened sensory sensitivity and greater difficulty regulating emotions relative to controls. Self-perceived sensory sensitivity was associated with greater emotion dysregulation. Weight-restored AN participants reported greater ability to regulate emotions than their currently underweight counterparts, despite heightened sensitivity. Findings suggest that hypersensitivity may be a persisting feature in AN, and that weight restoration may involve improved ability to cope with sensation.     

Emotion regulation through listening to music in everyday situations

Music is a stimulus capable of triggering an array of basic and complex emotions. We investigated whether and how individuals employ music to induce specific emotional states in everyday situations for the purpose of emotion regulation. Furthermore, we wanted to examine whether specific emotion-regulation styles influence music selection in specific situations. Participants indicated how likely it would be that they would want to listen to various pieces of music (which are known to elicit specific emotions) in various emotional situations. Data analyses by means of non-metric multidimensional scaling revealed a clear preference for pieces of music that were emotionally congruent with an emotional situation. In addition, we found that specific emotion-regulation styles might influence the selection of pieces of music characterised by specific emotions. Our findings demonstrate emotion-congruent music selection and highlight the important role of specific emotion-regulation styles in the selection of music in everyday situations.     

Neuroticism and Depression in Children: The Role of Cognitive Emotion Regulation Strategies

This study's general objective was to analyze whether different types of cognitive emotion regulation strategies (CERS), namely adaptive strategies—specifically positive refocusing and positive reappraisal—and maladaptive strategies—self-blame, catastrophizing, and rumination—mediated the neuroticism-depression relationship in children 9–12 years old, and whether gender and school transition moderated the relationships proposed. A self-reporting measure was administered to 315 children to evaluate said variables. The resulting data were analyzed using structural equations. The study verified that maladaptive CERS partially mediated neuroticism's relationship with depression, while adaptive CERS, though negatively associated with depression, did not show a mediating effect on this relationship. The results provide evidence of the mediating function of maladaptive CERS on the neuroticism-depression relationship. Gender and school transition did not moderate the relationships proposed. Because, by their very nature, these strategies are modifiable, these results constitute an important finding that can be transferred to the design and content of child mental health prevention and promotion programs.     

Emotion Regulation and Coping Strategies in Pedagogical Students with Different Attachment Styles

Abstract : Emotion regulation (ER) and coping strategies were compared in 242 pedagogical students from the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana, with different attachment styles: secure (51.3%), fearful (31.9%), preoccupied (14.2%), and dismissive (2.7%). The students’ ages ranged from 18 to 24 years ( M = 19.02; SD = .92), and the majority were female (95.0%). They completed three questionnaires assessing their attachment styles and their use of ER and coping strategies. It was determined that the students used the majority of ER and coping strategies sometimes. Somewhat different patterns in the use of ER and coping strategies were, however, present in each attachment‐based group. Significant differences between these groups appeared in their use of the ER strategies of social support, suppression, and comfort eating, and in the coping strategies of seeking social support and escaping or avoiding stressful situations.     

Cognitive Appraisal as a Predictor of Cognitive Emotion Regulation Choice

More attention has recently been focused on how a person may choose their emotion regulation strategies depending on the situation. The present research examined how people cognitively appraised a situation that they had actually encountered in their life and how this appraisal affected their subsequent cognitive emotion regulation strategies. Three hundred and twenty‐four participants were instructed to recall the most stressful situation in the last month, and to rate how they cognitively appraised the situation (threat, centrality, controllability, commitment, injustice/unfairness, expectedness, expectancy) and how they cognitively regulated their emotion (self‐blame, blaming others, acceptance, refocus on planning, positive refocusing, rumination, positive reappraisal, putting into perspective, catastrophizing). Multiple regression analysis revealed that even after control for other variables, such as age, sex, personality, the time when the situation occurred and the intensity of negative emotion, all criteria of cognitive appraisal except for expectedness predicted cognitive emotion regulation choice. Implications and limitations of this research are discussed.     

Social-Psychological Interventions for Intergroup Reconciliation: An Emotion Regulation Perspective

Intergroup reconciliation is a requirement for lasting peace in the context of intergroup conflicts. In this article, we offer an emotion regulation perspective on social-psychological interventions aimed at facilitating intergroup reconciliation. In the first section of the article, we conceptualize intergroup reconciliation as an emotion-regulation process involving positive affective change and offer a framework that integrates the emotion regulation and intergroup reconciliation literatures. In the sections that follow, we review social-psychological interventions that involve changes in beliefs and identity and assess their effects on specific intergroup emotions pertinent for intergroup reconciliation. More specifically, we focus our discussion on specific reconciliation-oriented intervention strategies and their relation to emotions pertinent for facilitating reconciliation, including intergroup hatred, anger, guilt, hope, and empathy. In the final section, we consider key implications and growth points for the field of intergroup reconciliation.