Testosterone facilitates the sense of agency

Sense of agency (SoA) refers to feelings of being in control of one’s actions. Evidence suggests that SoA might contribute towards higher-order feelings of personal control – a key attribute of powerful individuals. Whether testosterone, a steroid hormone linked to power in dominance hierarchies, also influences the SoA is not yet established. In a repeated-measures design, 26 females participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial to test the effects of 0.5 mg testosterone on SoA, using an implicit measure based upon perceived shifts in time between a voluntary action and its outcome. Illusions of control, as operationalized by optimism in affective forecasting, were also assessed. Testosterone increased action binding but there was no significant effect on tone binding. Affective forecasting was found to be significantly more positive on testosterone. SoA and optimistic expectations are basic manifestations of power which may contribute to feelings of infallibility often associated with dominance and testosterone.     

More efficient,perhaps, but at what price? Pleasure and enjoyment responses to high-intensity interval exercise in low-active women with obesity

ObjectivesFewer than 1.5% of women with obesity in the USA are physically active at recommended levels. High-intensity interval exercise (HIIE) has been proposed as a possible solution to the problem of low activity, based on the dual promise of accelerating the accrual of benefits while reducing the time commitment. However, concerns have been raised about the appeal and sustainability of HIIE. The purpose of this study was to compare during-exercise affective valence and post-exercise enjoyment in response to a bout of HIIE and a longer, isocaloric bout of moderate-intensity continuous exercise (MICE).DesignWithin-subjects experiment.MethodsLow-active women with obesity (N = 24) completed one bout of HIIE (3-min warm-up, four 3-min intervals of recumbent cycling at 115% of Watts at the ventilatory threshold, four 2-min periods of active recovery at 85% of Watts at the ventilatory threshold, 5-min cool-down) and one bout of MICE (3-min warm-up, 25 min of recumbent cycling at 90% of Watts at the ventilatory threshold, 5-min cool-down) in counterbalanced order. The Feeling Scale (FS) was administered during exercise and the Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale (PACES) was administered after cool-down.ResultsDifferences were found for both FS (condition by time interaction: p < 0.001, η² = 0.27) and PACES (p = 0.04, d = −0.38), with both outcomes favoring MICE.ConclusionsThe lower pleasure and enjoyment associated with HIIE compared to MICE underscore the importance of considering not only physiological adaptations but also the appeal and sustainability of HIIE for low-active women with obesity.     

The effects of verbal instruction on affective and expectancy learning

The current research assessed the effects of verbal instruction on affective and expectancy learning during repeated contingency reversals (Experiment 1) and during extinction (Experiment 2) in a picture-picture paradigm. Affective and expectancy learning displayed contingency reversal and extinction, but changes were slower for affective learning. Instructions facilitated reversal and extinction of expectancy learning but did not impact on affective learning. These findings suggest a differential susceptibility of affective and expectancy learning to verbal instruction and question previous reports that verbal instructions can accelerate the extinction of non-prepared fear learning in humans.     

Poor emotion regulation ability mediates the link between depressive symptoms and affective bipolarity

People's relationship between positive and negative affect varies on a continuum from relatively independent to bipolar opposites, with stronger bipolar opposition being termed affective bipolarity. Experiencing more depressive symptoms is associated with increased bipolarity, but the processes underlying this relation are not yet understood. Here, we sought to replicate this link, and to examine the role of two potential mediating mechanisms: emotion regulation ability, and trait brooding. Drawing from the Dynamic Model of Affect, we hypothesised that (a) a poor ability to regulate negative emotion, and (b) the tendency to brood over one's depressed feelings would predict stronger affective bipolarity, and mediate the relationship between depressive symptoms and affective bipolarity. To measure affective bipolarity, we calculated within-person affect correlations using two weeks of experience sampling data from a community sample (n?=?100). Mediation analyses indicated that baseline assessments of an inability to regulate negative emotions in general, but not brooding specifically, mediated the relation between depressive symptoms and affective bipolarity. These findings highlight an initial mechanism through which depressive symptoms are associated with lower emotional complexity and flexibility.     

A generic and efficient emotion-driven approach toward personalized assessment and adaptation in serious games

Emotions have a major role in the player-game interaction. In serious games playing contexts, real-time assessment of the player’s emotional state is crucially important to enable an emotion-driven adaptation during gameplay. In addition, a personalized assessment and adaptation based on the player's characteristics remains a challenge for serious games designers. This paper presents a generic and efficient emotion-driven approach for personalized assessment and adaptation in serious games, in which two main methods and their algorithms are proposed. The first one is a method for assessing, in real time, the player's emotion taking into account the personality type and the playing style of the player. The second one is an emotion-driven personalized adaptation method based on Markov modeling of dependency between the serious game events and the change in the player's emotional state. Therefore, the proposed approach has been evaluated by playing an affective vs. non-affective version of a serious game that we have developed to illustrate the applicability of the above-mentioned methods. The overall results showed that owing to our approach, a serious game become able to enhance its adaptivity toward playing outcomes and improve its overall playability.     

“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.     

Building monuments,unleashing anger: The material disruption of contested memoryscapes

This paper explores the post-war memoryscapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina via (defaced and destroyed) monuments evidencing the habitual struggle to disrupt and reorder space, and reinterpret the traumatic past. Analysing a combination of digital and fieldwork data, I make a case for interpreting attacks on monuments as a civilian retaliatory agency, exerting spatial hegemony and substantiating resentful affective regimes (especially in relation to the most recently imposed legal ban on the denial of genocide in Srebrenica). In doing so, I consider how citizens’ “truths” are enacted by distorting loss and violence, while collective trauma persists. This paper further illustrates how peculiar remembrance practices modify the standard purpose and meanings of a monument, contextualizing monuments within a larger framework of post-conflict spaces.     

The backstage of urban ambiances: When atmospheres pervade everyday experience

This paper explores a new way of designing and experimenting with the city. How are we to conceptualize the changes in contemporary cities on the basis of their ambiances? What about the sensory and emotional production of urban territories? What is at stake when our aim is no longer to design space but also to install an atmosphere? In order to answer such questions, rather than offering a formal definition of what an ambiance may be, I intend to show from what it proceeds, on what it is based, what it produces and transforms in urban life. The focus is exploring five ambiance operating modes in the province of urban design: establishing the sensory as a field of action, composing with affective tonalities, giving consistency to urban situations, maintaining spaces over time and playing with imperceptible transformations. Each of these operating modes can account for how a physical environment manages to become a lived ambiance, how a world of built forms manages to become a world of sensory atmospheres. Starting with the sensory environment itself, I show how it is increasingly becoming a domain of design and research. Then I emphasize on the role of affect in everyday urban situations and daily social activities. Thirdly I explore the pervasive character of an ambiance and question its capacity to unify an experience. I continue by pointing out the temporal dynamic of an ambiance and the necessity to sustain a sense of continuity of the environment. Finally I emphasize on the importance of micro-phenomena in the quality and immersive power of an ambiance. These five operating modes of ambiance enables us to focus on the very ordinary sensory fabric of urban life and its issues.     

Reproducing affective norms with lexical co-occurrence statistics: Predicting valence,arousal, and dominance

Human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance are frequently used to study the cognitive mechanisms of emotional attention, word recognition, and numerous other phenomena in which emotions are hypothesized to play an important role. Collecting such norms from human raters is expensive and time consuming. As a result, affective norms are available for only a small number of English words, are not available for proper nouns in English, and are sparse in other languages. This paper investigated whether affective ratings can be predicted from length, contextual diversity, co-occurrences with words of known valence, and orthographic similarity to words of known valence, providing an algorithm for estimating affective ratings for larger and different datasets. Our bootstrapped ratings achieved correlations with human ratings on valence, arousal, and dominance that are on par with previously reported correlations across gender, age, education and language boundaries. We release these bootstrapped norms for 23,495 English words.     

Beyond neurophenomenology: A review of Colombetti's The Feeling Body

I review The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind by Giovanna Colombetti (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014, 288 pages, $40.00 hardcover). In this book Colombetti draws on the enactive theory of organismic embodiment and its key concept of sense-making in order to critically evaluate various aspects of mainstream affective science, including basic emotions and alternative constructionist approaches, as well as the cognitivist approach to emotion and appraisal theory. She defends and develops a dynamical systems approach to emotions and emphasizes the need for including more first-person methods of consciousness science in mainstream affective neuroscience. These are valuable contributions to affective science, and they also advance enactive theory. Colombetti's proposal goes further than standard neurophenomenology in that she appeals to the bodily basis of feeling, thereby requiring a new sort of neuro-physio-phenomenology. Even more radically, she allows that all living beings are essentially affective beings, even those without a nervous system, and that emotional forms could be co-constituted by more than one person.