Reminiscing and the Passage of Years: Investigating the Role of Affective Autobiographical Memories in Passage of Time Judgments

Previous research has shown that judgments of the experienced velocity of recent years passing by vary depending on the number of autobiographical memories being activated in the moment of judging. While a body of evidence shows affect to have an impact on both prospective and retrospective judgments on the experience of time for short periods, the effect of valence of memories on the experience of the passage of long intervals has not been examined yet. Thus, we asked 282 people to retrieve five either emotionally positive or negative memories from the last 5years before judging the subjectively experienced passage of time of these years. However, positive and negative events differ in some ways beyond valence, e.g., the ascribed impact on the participants’ subsequent lives as well as the stability of ascribed affective intensity: The latter decreased over time for negative but not for positive memories while ascribed impact was markedly higher for positive memories. Results indicate no significant differences between the two conditions, even after controlling for the aforementioned differences. However, exploratory analyses show that participants rate time to have passed faster, the longer the activated memories dated back on average, a result that seems in line with contextual-change hypothesis.

Enshrining Terror for the Nation: Affect and Nationalism at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum (9/11 MM) employs affective rhetoric to enshrine the trauma of September 11 in support of U.S. nationalism. Applying Brian Massumi's understanding of affect as intensity, I examine how the site's rhetoric amplifies affect. The memorial pools and many signifiers of destruction magnify affective intensity through scale and repetition. The 9/11 MM continues its affective onslaught through an excessive number of shocking visuals and narrative details in its historical exhibition. The site’s affective intensity culminates in a non-linear and non-narrative memorial space of seemingly infinite individualized mourning. The article discusses the site's political and social impact by considering Nigel Thrift's idea of affect in the built environment as imbedded thought and Georg Böhme's theory of atmosphere, understood as the reciprocal relationship between affective urban space and its impact on people.

EXPRESS: Communication in the Gig Economy: Buying and Selling in Online Freelance Marketplaces

The proliferating gig economy relies on online freelance marketplaces, which support relatively anonymous interactions by text-based messages. Informational asymmetries thus arise that can lead to exchange uncertainties between buyers and freelancers. Conventional marketing thought recommends reducing such uncertainty. However, uncertainty reduction and uncertainty management theories indicate that buyers and freelancers might benefit more from balancing, rather than reducing, uncertainty, such as by strategically adhering to or deviating from common communication principles. With dyadic analyses of calls for bids and bids from a leading online freelance marketplace, this study reveals that buyers attract more bids from freelancers when they provide moderate degrees of task information and concreteness, avoid sharing personal information, and limit the affective intensity of their communication. Freelancers’ bid success and price premiums increase when they mimic the degree of task information and affective intensity exhibited by buyers. However, mimicking a lack of personal information and concreteness reduces freelancers’ success, so freelancers should always be more concrete and offer more personal information than buyers do. These contingent perspectives offer insights into buyer–seller communication in two-sided online marketplaces; they clarify that despite, or sometimes due to, communication uncertainty, both sides can achieve success in the online gig economy.

The effect of augmented reality versus traditional advertising: a comparison between neurophysiological and self-reported measures

Despite the growing application of augmented reality in advertising, there is limited understanding about how customers respond to their interaction with the augmented reality advertising and how it differs from a standard paper-based advertising. Augmented reality ads are immersive, interactive, and lifelike, which means they may help companies create an emotional connection with their customers. The authors test if customers would respond in terms of emotional and affective intensity differently to augmented reality versus standard paper-based advertising. The results of two laboratory studies that consider physiological measures of arousal (galvanic skin response), self-reported measure of affect intensity and willingness to pay show that the higher willingness to pay for customers exposed to augmented reality as opposed to standard paper-based ads is driven by the physiological arousal, but not by the self-reported affect intensity and that processing fluency possibly underlies consumer’s enhanced emotional responses toward AR. These results suggest that replacing traditional advertisements with augmented reality advertisements enhances customer physiological responses and willingness to pay, with possible implications on customer segmentation and marketing communication.

Emotive, evaluative, epistemic: A linguistic analysis of affectivity in news journalism

In this article, we introduce a linguistic approach to studying affectivity as a fundamental feature of news journalism. By reconceptualising affectivity beyond emotive storytelling, intentional stance-taking or evaluative expression, we propose a methodology that highlights how conventions related to mediating, modulating and managing affectivity permeate journalistic genres. Drawing from conversation analysis, Bakhtinian theory of language as dialogical and notion of affective meaning-making, we investigate how selected linguistic forms and structures – namely evidential and epistemic modals and lexical items signalling affective intensity (such as emotive and evaluative words and metaphorical expressions) – participate in affective meaning-making in news journalism. A scalable computational methodology is introduced to study multiple linguistic structures in conjunction. In investigating a case study – the news reporting and commentary on a highly charged, year-long political conflict between the right-wing conservative government and the trade unions in Finland (2015–2016) – the approach allows a focus on the ways in which affectivity operates in journalistic texts in response to both generic expectations of the audience and journalistic conventions. Our findings include identification of the intertwining of strategic rituals of objectivity and emotionality, recognition of metaphoricity as a key source of affectivity and detection of different news article types having their own conventions for managing affectivity. We also observe a connection between emotive and evaluative words and the grammatical constructions used to express degrees of certainty, which suggests these modal constructions play an important part in how affectivity informs journalistic texts.

Leading with heart: academic leadership during the COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every sphere of life. It has brought into sharp focus not only the critical role that leaders have to play in taking charge of their organisations and employees, but the complexity of that leadership role, too. The authors of this paper are both psychologists who occupy leadership positions in a university. The paper briefly explores the evolution of leadership theory, leadership in times of crises, generally, and leadership during the time of COVID-19. In addition, one of the authors offers a personal note on the leadership experience during COVID-19. What became clear during the reflections was that empathy, vulnerability, self-awareness and agility were some of the qualities needed during this crisis. In addition, the psychodynamic concept of containment appears very relevant in managing the affective intensity experienced by staff and students. Leaders were expected to not only fully understand the meaning of empathy and compassion, but to know how to sincerely demonstrate these qualities to staff and students alike. While these qualities should be expected of all leaders at all times, the pandemic brought them into sharper focus. We believe that we have benefitted from our training in psychology as these qualities of caring, empathy and self-awareness are embedded and sharpened in our training programmes.

On the politics of discomfort

This article engages the politics of discomfort as a critical but neglected dimension of feminist methodologies and research praxis. Discomfort is explored as a ‘sweaty concept’ that opens space for transformative praxis and the emergence of feminist forms of knowing, being and resisting. I theorise discomfort as an epistemic and interpretive resource and a lively actant in research encounters, fieldwork and analytic and theory-praxis spaces. Building on the work of Clare Hemmings and Sara Ahmed, I trace discomfort as an affective intensity that matters for opening up resistant and anti-colonial feminist research practices and modes of knowledge production. Starting, and staying, with discomfortis theorised as a form of resistance to the reiteration of comfortable and normative truths and ‘wilful ignorances’. Weaving together the work of postqualitative and postcolonial feminist theorists, the sticky praxis of discomfort is conceptualised as involving a number of research strategies, including: (1) engaging with ‘gut feelings’ and (2) embracing interpretive hesitancy. In moving beyond an idealisation of empathy as the central affective principle underlying feminist research praxis, this article explores the epistemic and political salience of discomfort as affective intensity, ‘sweaty concept’ and potentially transformative interpretive resource.

Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm seeks to contribute to a culturally and historically nuanced understanding of how emotions secure and ratify the truth of convictions. More than just pure affective intensity, enthusiasm is about something: a certainty, clarity, or truth. Neither as clearly negative as “fanaticism” nor as general as “passion,” “enthusiasm” specifically entails belief. For this reason, Enthusiasm takes its starting point in religion, the social arena in which the concept was first debated and to which the term still gestures. Empirically based in modern German Protestantism, where religious emotion is intensely cultivated but also subject to vigorous scrutiny, this book combines historical and ethnographic methods to show how enthusiasm has been negotiated and honed as a practice in Protestant denominations ranging from liberal to charismatic. The nexus of religion and emotion and how it relates to central concepts of modernity such as rationality, knowledge, interiority, and sincerity are key to understanding why moderns are so ambivalent about enthusiasm. Grounded in practice theory, Enthusiasm assumes that emotions are not an affective state we “have” but mind–body activations we “do,” having learned to perform them in culturally specific ways. This book shows that, when understood as an emotional practice, enthusiasm has different styles, inflected by historical traditions, social milieus, and knowledge (even ideologies) about emotions and how they work. Finally, Enthusiasm also provides insight into how this feeling works in secular humanism as well as in politics, and why it is so contested as a practice in any context.

Using self-report and skin conductance measures to evaluate theme park experiences

This study examines the impact of the key affective moments of a theme park experience on visitors’ post-trip evaluations measured immediately after their visits. One hundred and twenty-three participants visited a theme park while their real-time skin conductance and self-report data were collected. Results indicate that visitors’ pleasure levels (i.e. average, beginning, peak, and end) consistently correlate with satisfaction, which in turn, positively influences behavioural intention. In particular, visitors’ satisfaction levels are better aligned with the affective intensity at the end moment and the average emotion intensity of a theme park experience. Arousal, however, was not found to be a significant indicator of post-trip evaluation. The study extends literature on key moments and retrospective evaluation by illustrating how visitors rely on affective moments of a theme park experience to construct overall evaluations. The study concludes with practical implications and scope for future research.

Pour la méthode comparative en sémiotique: L'exemple des études sur le récit

Comparative research enriches semiotics and deepens its exchanges with other sciences. The work can also highlight inductive methods and socio-historically specific forms and practices, thereby helping to develop a general semiotics and a semiotics of cultures. This article compares the morphology by Vladimir Propp that inspired the Greimassian narrative schema to a small sample of narrative forms, then to Aristotle's Poetics and to a model of Hollywood films. Certain motifs and subgenres represent elementary schemas with two or three actants and functions that rely on role reversal and emotions. A half dozen subgenres can be differentiated by the different affects that they aim to elicit. Greek tragedy is to evoke intense emotional states, and reveals a close interdependence between characteristics of the hero, modulations of the critical action, and the emotive effect produced. In the films, the variation of the affective intensity constitutes a key element of the narrative rhythm, and two main sequences supply opposing and complementary axiologies. A conclusion suggests the value of bringing together the semiotics of the passions, recent research on the history of the emotions, and comparative studies of how different cultures express feelings.