Experiencing affect through site-specific dance

Our embodied experiences of affect, feeling and emotion within the context of site-specific dance are the focus of this article. The specific sites of our dance are designed gardens and our performances are offered within the context of an arts festival. In performing within these gardens, we aim to complement and enhance the site through our embodiment. Both as dancers in, and as audience members of dance, we recognize that affect, feeling and emotion arise during special live performance events. We understand affect as a fluid and relational, collective experience that extends beyond our individual experiences as performers to being shared with and between particular audiences at particular times and places. However, it is often difficult to express these embodied, collective experiences. Drawing on a feminist and phenomenological approach, we offer vignettes of key moments in these performances to illustrate the affective practices in our work. These vignettes draw on moments when we felt we shared an experience with audiences, supported by written responses, recorded anecdotal comments from audience members, and discussions between performers. We conclude by reflecting on how we might offer our community an enhanced emotional experience of the gardens.     

Mr. Richie and the tourists

This paper tracks the affective intensity and emergent potential that is part of making contact with Richie, a local Creole villager from Walliceville, Belize. Tourists and expats are drawn to Richie and seduced by him, his colorful language and personality. My attention in this paper is directed to the spatialized force fields of contact between tourists, expats and local creole villagers, like Richie, by attending to the way these contact fields conjure forces of wild vitality that both agitate and fascinate social life in Belize. I focus on how Richie acts as a powerful representation of tropical “no worries” Creole life. But more than that, he carries a sensory charge, seducing tourists and expats into crazy moments of abandon, a “sensing beyond security” (Manning, 2007: 134–161), that exceeds the work of Caribbean tourist representations to become moments when forces are activated as impacts that provoke things, for better or for worse. I argue that such moments spawn worlds that build forms of attachment and become the vital fields of sensations that incite life as emergent forces coming into play in this postcolonial state of emergency taking shape as neo-liberal exception, on the edge of global empire, in Belize.     

Modelling audiovisual integration of affect from videos and music

Two experiments examined how affective values from visual and auditory modalities are integrated. Experiment 1 paired music and videos drawn from three levels of valence while holding arousal constant. Experiment 2 included a parallel combination of three levels of arousal while holding valence constant. In each experiment, participants rated their affective states after unimodal and multimodal presentations. Experiment 1 revealed a congruency effect in which stimulus combinations of the same extreme valence resulted in more extreme state ratings than component stimuli presented in isolation. An interaction between music and video valence reflected the greater influence of negative affect. Video valence was found to have a significantly greater effect on combined ratings than music valence. The pattern of data was explained by a five parameter differential weight averaging model that attributed greater weight to the visual modality and increased weight with decreasing values of valence. Experiment 2 revealed a congruency effect only for high arousal combinations and no interaction effects. This pattern was explained by a three parameter constant weight averaging model with greater weight for the auditory modality and a very low arousal value for the initial state. These results demonstrate key differences in audiovisual integration between valence and arousal.     

Measuring the flashbulb-like nature of memories for private events: the flashbulb memory checklist

What do we remember following an emotionally charged event? The assessment of memory characteristics for an emotional event represents one of the most challenging issues in the domain of autobiographical memory. Literature of flashbulb memories (FBMs) provides a crucial contribution on this issue: Following an emotional and unexpected public event, people remember not only central details of the episode, but also irrelevant, peripheral and idiosyncratic details of the reception context in which they learned of the news. The present study was set up to assess the factorial structure (samples 1 and 2) and convergent validity (sample 2) of an FBM checklist, an instrument designed to measure Flashbulb-like features of memories for emotional private events. Factorial analyses account for an oblique two-factor solution – FBM Specificity and Confidence – while correlational analyses support the convergent validity of this instrument. Practical implications are discussed, especially for the credibility assessment of witnesses of emotional events in forensic settings.     

Lifeboat politics in the Pacific: Affect and the ripples and shimmers of a migrant saturated future

Affect is explored in relation to the governance of irregular migrants and asylum seekers that turn such vulnerable individuals into a feared category. How are emotions as practices developed, fostered and enacted? The examples developed in the article focus on ‘illegal maritime arrivals’ (asylum seekers arriving by boat) and the emotionally charged response to them in Australia. The article argues that the state, far from embodying a detached and neutral arbiter utilising various steering mechanisms of care and due process, instead governs through fear and anxiety generated in relation to outsiders. The state draws on, and indeed creates, dispositions and feelings, generating a distinct politics of affect. The motif of the lifeboat is an example of a diversion from the anxieties and fears in everyday life; a metaphor for scarcity and a battle for survival. The asylum seeker as ‘illegal maritime arrival’ (boat person) is the exemplar of such a lifeboat politics in the Australian case.     

Staging atmospheres: Materiality,culture, and the texture of the in-between

The article introduces the special issue on staging atmospheres by surveying the philosophical, political and anthropological literature on atmosphere, and explores the relationship between atmosphere, material culture, subjectivity and affect. Atmosphere seems to occupy one of the classic localities of tensions between matter and the immaterial, the practical and the ideal, and subject and object. In the colloquial language there can, moreover, often seem to be something authentic or genuine about atmosphere, juxtaposing it to staging, which is implied to be something simulated or artificial. Nevertheless, people’s experience of the environment is sought manipulated in a variety of contexts, often without offering a less ‘true’ experience of a situation than if it had not been manipulated by people. In fact, orchestrations of space are often central to sociality, politics and aesthetics. This introduction seeks to outline how a number of scholars have addressed the relationship between staged atmospheres and experience, and thus highlight both the philosophical, social and political aspects of atmospheres.     

A good thing isn’t always a good thing: Dispositional attitudes predict non-normative judgments

A common belief in social sciences is that people like or dislike stimuli based on the properties possessed by those stimuli. Therefore, stimuli with many (few) positives should be universally liked (disliked). However, differences in opinion are common, and one source of disagreement may be personality. This research demonstrates that dispositional attitudes (an individual difference in the tendency to like/dislike stimuli), are associated with qualitative attitude differences (i.e., liking rather than disliking) for stimuli across important domains such as health, business, entertainment, and politics. Qualitative attitude differences frequently predict interpersonal conflict and diametrically opposed behavioral outcomes (e.g., voting for or against a candidate). Thus, these results have implications for understanding seemingly intractable differences found in nearly all social science fields.     

A matter of focus: Detailed memory in the intentional autobiographical recall of older and younger adults

The intricately interwoven role of detailed autobiographical memory in our daily lives and in our imaginative envisioning of the future is increasingly recognized. But how is the detail-rich nature of autobiographical memory best assessed and, in particular, how can possible aging-related differences in autobiographical memory specificity be most effectively evaluated? This study examined whether a modified interview, involving fewer and time-matched events for older and younger adults, yielded age-related outcomes similar to those that have been previously reported. As in earlier studies, modest age-related changes in the specificity of autobiographical recall were observed, yet the largest most robust effect for both age groups was the substantial proportion of specific details retrieved. Both age groups rated recent memories as significantly less important and as less emotional than more temporally distant events. Our findings counter conceptions of older adults’ autobiographical memories as invariably less episodically rich than those of younger adults.     

Fragile self-esteem and affective instability in posttraumatic stress disorder

Temporal fluctuations in self-esteem and affect are prominent features of several clinical conditions (e.g., depression), but there is an absence of empirical work examining their role in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Individuals who experience large fluctuations in self-evaluations and affect are considered more vulnerable to psychopathology than individuals able to adequately modulate their self-image and emotional responses. We examined the relevance of self-esteem and affective instability to PTSD. Veterans with and without PTSD completed 14 daily ratings of self-esteem, positive affect, negative affect, and gratitude. Compared to veterans without PTSD, veterans with PTSD exhibited more temporal fluctuations in self-esteem, negative affect, and gratitude, with a smaller effect for positive affect. For all veterans, self-esteem and negative affective instability was associated with diminished well-being. Except for self-esteem instability, most findings were substantially reduced after accounting for variance attributable to PTSD diagnoses and mean intensity levels over the 14-day monitoring period. These data suggest self-esteem instability is important in understanding the lives of veterans with and without PTSD.