Settling space and covering the nation: Some conceptual considerations in analysing affect and discourse

This article explores how affect and discourse intertwine. We analyse a corpus of newspaper editorials and comment pieces from 2013 to 2014 concerning Aotearoa New Zealand's national day investigating how affective-discursive practices are mobilised to ‘cover the nation’ and ‘settle space’. We identify pervasive formulations of ‘bitter Māori’ and ‘indifferent Kiwis’ and the canon of affective-discursive repertoires and subject positions routinely set up as part of continuing white settler (Pākehā) cultural projects. A second objective is to contribute to the development of theory and method in studies of affect. We argue against non-representational perspectives and for a practice viewpoint that can work with entanglements of semiosis and embodied affect. Concepts from social psychological studies of discourse are applied in preference to ‘structures of feeling’, ‘affect economies’, ‘emoscapes’ and ‘emotion styles’.     

Is Emotional Magnitude Spatialized? A Further Investigation

Accumulating evidence suggests that different magnitudes (e.g., number, size, and duration) are spatialized in the mind according to a common left–right metric, consistent with a generalized system for representing magnitude. A previous study conducted by two of us (Holmes & Lourenco, 2011 ) provided evidence that this metric extends to the processing of emotional magnitude, or the intensity of emotion expressed in faces. Recently, however, Pitt and Casasanto ( 2018 ) showed that the earlier effects may have been driven by a left–right mapping of mouth size rather than emotional magnitude, and they found no evidence for an emotional magnitude mapping when using words as stimuli. Here, we report two new experiments that further examine these conclusions. In Experiment 1, using face stimuli with mouths occluded, we replicate the original finding: Less emotional faces were associated with the left and more emotional faces with the right. However, we also find that people can reliably infer the sizes of the occluded mouths, and that these inferred mouth sizes can explain the observed left–right mapping. In Experiment 2, we show that comparative judgments of emotional words yield a left–right mapping of emotional magnitude not attributable to stimulus confounds. Based on these findings, we concur with Pitt and Casasanto that faces pose challenges for isolating the forces driving spatialization, but we suggest that emotional magnitude, when assessed using unconfounded stimuli in a sufficiently sensitive task, may indeed be spatialized as originally proposed. Suggestions for further research on the spatialization of emotional magnitude are discussed.     

Implicit learning: A way to improve visual search in spatial neglect?

Studies have shown that neglect patients are able to use stimulus regularities to orient faster toward the neglected side, without necessarily being aware of that information, or at the very least without being able to verbalize their knowledge. In order to better control for the involvement of explicit processes, the present study sought to test neglect patients’ ability to detect more complex associations between stimuli using tasks similar to those used in implicit learning studies. Our results demonstrate that neglect patients had difficulties implicitly learning complex associations, contrary to what we found with controls. The possible influence of attentional and working memory impairments are discussed.     

Neurobiological foundations of aesthetics and art

A theory of the neurobiological foundations of aesthetics and art is described. This has its roots in emotion, in which what is pleasant or unpleasant, a reward or punisher, is the result of an evolutionary process in which genes define the (pleasant or unpleasant) goals for action. To this is added the operation of the reasoning, syntactic, brain system which evolved to help solve difficult, multistep, problems, and the use of which is encouraged by pleasant feelings when elegant, simple, and hence aesthetic solutions are found that are advantageous because they are parsimonious, and follow Occam's Razor. The combination of these two systems, and the interactions between them, provide an approach to understanding aesthetics that is rooted in evolution and its effects on brain design and function.     

From “villages of longevity” to “villages of cancer”? The emotional geography of tourism development in Bama,China

Studies on residents' attitudes toward tourism development either assume that residents are unemotional “homo economics” or frame their emotions as forming rigid patterns. Following emotional approach, this study on Bama in China argues that residents' emotions toward tourism development and its environmental impacts are dynamic and ambivalent. Qualitative methods such as semi-structured interview and observation were used to collect data. The results show that during tourism development, interactions with outsiders encouraged the residents to realize the symbolic healing effects of their living environment and develop feelings of amazement and pride. However, continuous development had negative effects on the physical and symbolic environments, which induced complex emotional responses in the residents, including dislike, dissatisfaction, tolerance, anger, and fear. However, in this wealth-building stage, the residents’ ecological grief is compensated by economic growth and has not evolved to resisting actions against development. The emotional ambivalence between eagerness to economic prosperity and concern of ecological loss still exists in Bama and was enhanced in the shutdown of tourism caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Further research should explore whether, and how ecological concerns about a tourism location may override potential economic gains and encompass anti-development actions.     

Notes on attribution functions

Let be the knowledge space derived from an attribution function σ on Q. Under an assumption for σ, this paper gives some necessary and sufficient conditions such that is discriminative. It also discusses the resolubility of σ when Q is an infinite set. More precisely, this paper proves that σ is not resoluble if Q is uncountable, and gives a necessary and sufficient condition such that σ is resoluble when is -well-graded. By way of applications of these results, discriminativeness and resolubility are discussed around the merge of skill multimaps and the meshing of the delineated knowledge spaces.     

Partisan Provocation: The Role of Partisan News Use and Emotional Responses in Political Information Sharing in Social Media

Citizens increasingly rely on social media to consume and disseminate news and information about politics, but the factors that drive political information sharing on these sites are not well understood. This study focused on how online partisan news use influences political information sharing in part because of the distinct negative emotions it arouses in its audience. Using panel survey data collected during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, we found that use of proattitudinal partisan news online is associated with increased anger, but not anxiety, directed at the opposing party's presidential candidate and that anger subsequently facilitated information sharing about the election on social media. The results suggest partisan media may drive online information sharing by generating anger in its audience.     

Neural underpinnings of the relationships between sensation seeking and emotion regulation in adolescents

There is little neurological evidence linking sensation seeking and emotion regulation in adolescence, which is characterised as an emotionally fluctuant period. The present study examined the relationship between sensation seeking and emotion regulation in adolescents. Electroencephalograms were recorded from 22 high sensation-seeking adolescents (HSSs, M_age = 12.36) and 24 low sensation-seeking adolescents (LSSs, M_age = 12.84) during the reactivity and regulation-image task. Group differences in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) associated with the regulation of negative and neutral stimuli were analysed. The results showed that (a) the P2 of HSSs were larger than LSSs during emotion regulation; (b) in down-regulation conditions, the LPP in all time windows were smaller than no-regulation in LSSs. However, there was no significant difference in HSSs; (c) the LPP 300–600 and LPP 1000–1500 of down-regulation were smaller in LSSs than HSSs; (d) for LPP 600–1000, HSSs induced larger LPP than LSSs in the negative down-regulation and negative no-regulation conditions. The results provide neurological evidence that higher sensation seeking is related to the high reactivity to emotional stimuli and poor cognitive control during the regulation of emotions.     

The contradictions of islandness: The small island of St Helena and the emotions of transnationalism

This paper investigates the emotions of transnationalism, when coming from the small, remote British Overseas Territory of St Helena. This paper captures how St Helenian islanders migrate for new opportunities and to escape island monotony. Even though dispersed, the St Helenian islanders retain a strong sense of attachment and belonging to their island, often establishing emotional and material ties in two hemispheres. This paper thus captures the emotions of feeling torn and the contradictory emotions of islandness. This research draws from 68 in-depth interviews with St Helenian islanders between 2006 and 2008, following the return of British citizenship in 2002, but before the island had a functioning airport in 2017. This research captured the emotions of transnationalism when travel was expensive, complex and arduous, due to a fickle British national identity as well as the island's dependence on one single ship. At the point of publishing this research however, the UK was negotiating deals for Brexit and international air travel was limited due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. Mobility for this transnational small island community, thus remains uncertain and complicated, due to their post-colonial national identity and geographical isolation.