Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence

Without a doubt, the precarity of an overseas Filipino worker's (OFW) life is augmented by the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily through the economic and political consequences that such public health crises engender. However, while primarily seen in terms of their economic and political dimensions, these consequences also affectively disrupt the life of OFWs. In this paper, I trace the various conflicting ways that OFWs, who were terminated from their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, have dealt with their emotions while still in their respective host countries, and, trying to find a way to return home. Drawing from Arlie Hochschild (1983) concept of emotional labor, I argue that the OFWs perform what I am provisionally calling the emotional labor of persistence. This type of emotion work, though tied to, and enabled by the precarious conditions in which the respondents live, is a resistive and agential kind of emotional labor. It allows the OFWs to endure precarity, and in the process, find ways to elude, confront, or question the modes of thinking and feeling in which they are constantly circumscribed by the demands of their overseas work and overall precarious situation.     

Emotional cartography as a window into children's well-being: Visualizing the felt geographies of place

More often than not, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) excludes emotion and qualitative analysis from studies of people-place relationships in favor of quantitative approaches. We employ emotional cartography as a form of qualitative GIS (qualGIS) to elevate emotions from the periphery to the center of dialogue about children's well-being. We highlight the ontological parallels between qualGIS, emotional cartography and children in society, and advance emotion maps as a way to visualize different spatial and emotional realities. In reflecting upon the felt geography of our own childhood places, we affirm the importance of children's emotional attachments to places as well as the centrality of ‘messy’ human experiences in GIS. To conclude, we discuss the implications of emotional cartography for researchers, planners and GIS, paying special attention to children's well-being amidst the current COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, this includes a call to ‘witness’ and to foster spatial empathy among those advocating for children.     

Intended emotions influence intentional binding with emotional faces: Larger binding for intended negative emotions

The effect of emotions on Intentional binding (IB) is equivocal. In addition, most studies on IB have not manipulated emotional content of intentions. This study investigates the effect of intended and outcome emotions using emotional faces (happy or disgust face in experiment 1 and a happy or angry face in experiment 3). To see whether the effects are due to priming, we used instructions with a happy-disgust pair in experiment 2 and happy-angry pair in experiment 4. Outcome emotional faces were not predictable. Results showed that intending a negative emotional face resulted in shorter action-outcome interval judgments compared to a happy face irrespective of the emotional content of the outcome face. This effect was absent in experiments 2 and 4 with instructed emotions. In addition to showing the importance of having explicit intentions, the results show that emotional content of our intentions does influence IB possibly due to prospective mechanisms.     

The emotional body and time perception

We examined the effects of emotional bodily expressions on the perception of time. Participants were shown bodily expressions of fear, happiness and sadness in a temporal bisection task featuring different stimulus duration ranges. Stimulus durations were judged to be longer for bodily expressions of fear than for those of sadness, whereas no significant difference was observed between sad and happy postures. In addition, the magnitude of the lengthening effect of fearful versus sad postures increased with duration range. These results suggest that the perception of fearful bodily expressions increases the level of arousal which, in turn, speeds up the internal clock system underlying the representation of time. The effect of bodily expressions on time perception is thus consistent with findings for other highly arousing emotional stimuli, such as emotional facial expressions.     

Specificity and detail in autobiographical memory: Same or different constructs?

Research on autobiographical memory has focused on whether memories are coded as specific (i.e., describe a single event that happened at a particular time and place). Although some theory and research suggests that the amount of detail in autobiographical memories reflects a similar underlying construct as memory specificity, past research has not investigated whether these variables converge. Therefore, the present study compared the proportion of specific memories and the amount of detail embedded in memory responses to cue words. Results demonstrated that memory detail and proportion of specific memories were not correlated with each other and showed different patterns of association with other conceptually relevant variables. When responses to neutral cue words were examined in multiple linear and logistic regression analyses, the proportion of specific memories uniquely predicted less depressive symptoms, low emotional avoidance, lower emotion reactivity, better executive control and lower rumination, whereas the amount of memory detail uniquely predicted the presence of depression diagnosis, as well as greater depressive symptoms, subjective stress, emotion reactivity and rumination. Findings suggest that the ability to retrieve specific memories and the tendency to retrieve detailed personal memories reflect different constructs that have different implications in the development of emotional distress.     

Attending to emotions is sharing of emotions – A multidisciplinary perspective to social attention and emotional sharing. Comment on Zahavi and Rochat (2015)

Attending to bodily expression of emotions plays an important role in the human social world. It provides subjects with valuable information, constructs opportunities to act, and importantly, as Daniel Stern pointed out, it is involved in the constitution of the direct experience of others. Whether mutual or one-sided, these direct experiences, in which the subject can share the perspectives and attitudes of other subjects, always comprise one person’s bodily expression of emotions that is available to another person. In this article I suggest that attending to other subjects’ expressed emotions involves a special (social) mode of attention and emotional sharing. This suggestion challenges Dan Zahavi’s view that confines the sharing of emotions solely to reciprocal experiences.     

L’auto-efficacité émotionnelle : un facteur à considérer pour expliquer la santé psychologique au travail

In recent years, psychological health problems at work (PHW) are rising and affect a considerable number of workers (Gilbert et al., 2011). The PHW refers to two separate but complementary states: psychological well-being (serenity, commitment and social harmony) and psychological distress in the workplace (anxiety, withdrawal and irritability) (Gilbert et al., 2011). Knowing that negative relationships have been studied between emotional self-efficacy (ESE) and various phenomena of psychological distress in the workplace, the aim is to verify how the ESE influences the PHW. The ESE is defined by people's belief in respect of seven emotional skills: the perception of emotions and that of others, the use of emotions, understanding emotions and that of others as well as the management of its emotions and that of others (Deschênes et al., 2011). A quote was used correlational with a sample 149 students older workers averaged 32.06 years (SD = 8.27). The scales of ESE (α = .91) Deschênes et al. (2011) and Gilbert et al. (2011) on well-being (α = .92) and psychological distress in the workplace (α = .94) are used to measure the concepts being studied. Results of regression analyzes confirm the research hypotheses.     

Développement et validation de l’échelle d’auto-efficacité émotionnelle chez les gestionnaires

This article presents the results of two studies designed to develop and validate the emotional self-efficacy scale (ESE). The emotional intelligence model of Mayer and Salovey (1997) and self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1997) are used in this study. The results of confirmatory analysis support the seven-factor structure: self-efficacy to perceive emotions in the self and others, self-efficacy to use emotion, self-efficacy to understand emotion in the self and others and self-efficacy to manage emotion in the self and others. In addition, results reveal that the ESE subscales display satisfactory internal consistency values. Furthermore, the construct validity is supported by correlations between the seven factors and between several variables associated with ESE (Big Five, the positive and negative affect and the alexithymia). Altogether, results provide preliminary support for the psychometric properties the ESE.     

Cycling outdoors facilitates external thoughts and endurance

ObjectivesThe aims of this study were twofold: (a) to compare the effects of indoor and outdoor environments on cycling endurance and thought dynamics, (b) to investigate a possible link between cycling endurance and the adherence to task-unrelated thoughts (TUT) in both environments. Design: An experimental, within-subject design with two-trial random assignment was used.MethodsParticipants (n = 13) cycled at constant power until volitional exhaustion while imposing TUT. They reported thought changes using self-selected key words that were subsequently classified based on task-relatedness (TUT, and task-related thoughts (TRT)) and direction (internal, external). Mean values of relative time spent in TUT and TRT categories were computed and compared for 5 equal time intervals. The association between cycling endurance and time spent at each thought-related category was analyzed.ResultsAnalyses revealed a decrease of TUT and an increase of TRT as a function of time (spent cycling) in both environments. Three qualitative thought phases emerged: an initially stable TUT phase was followed by a metastable phase characterized by shifts between TUT and TRT, and a final stable TRT phase appeared nearing exhaustion. Participants cycled longer outdoors than indoors M_outdoors = 12.54 min, SEM = 2.17 s, M_indoors = 11.35 min, SEM = 1.52 s (Z = −2.27, p < 0.05, d(95% CI) = 0.56 (−0.80, 3.07)), with a dominance of external thought categories. Cycling endurance seemed to be facilitated by TUT-E outdoors and TRT-I in both types of environments.ConclusionOutdoor environment resulted in improved cycling endurance and greater use of external thoughts (i.e., dissociative attentional strategy) relative to indoor environment. The effectiveness of thought categories seemed contingent upon their stability, which in turn depended on effort accumulation.