Pensar lo material

Esta versión revisada y actualizada de un artículo publicado originalmente en inglés en 2010 constituye una introducción a las principales teorizaciones en lengua inglesa del afecto (entendido este término en el sentido que ha adquirido en los affect studies) y de la materialidad. Termina con unas reflexiones sobre cómo estas teorizaciones podrían ser aprovechadas por los investigadores en las humanidades.

“I Don’t Know if I Can Handle It All”: Students’ Affect During Remote Education in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted society in different areas. In education, several reports show the deleterious effects of the disease on the physical and mental health of students, family members, and teachers around the world. Also, in Brazil, affect studies indicate the prevalence of anxiety, stress, and depression among students. The present research, of a qualitative nature, explores what it means, under the lens of affect and from the student’s perspective, to experience remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic. An online questionnaire of 41 closed- and open-ended questions was given to 363 students from a public school in southeastern Brazil. This article analyzes the affective fields that emerged from the discursive textual analysis of the students’ responses (n = 100). Four affective fields were categorized: friends, classes, home, and teachers; intersecting emotions, attitudes, values, beliefs, and motivation. In general, students expressed more negative than positive affect but a positive disposition toward face-to-face classes. Boys focused their affect more on classes, while girls on teachers. The affective fields allow us to consider the friends–home–teachers tripod as fundamental to overcoming the phenomenon of affective fatigue that has been identified.

Brief exposure to social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Doom-scrolling has negative emotional consequences, but kindness-scrolling does not

People often seek out information as a means of coping with challenging situations. Attuning to negative information can be adaptive because it alerts people to the risks in their environment, thereby preparing them for similar threats in the future. But is this behaviour adaptive during a pandemic when bad news is ubiquitous? We examine the emotional consequences of exposure to brief snippets of COVID-related news via a Twitter feed (Study 1), or a YouTube reaction video (Study 2). Compared to a no-information exposure group, consumption of just 2–4 minutes of COVID-related news led to immediate and significant reductions in positive affect (Studies 1 and 2) and optimism (Study 2). Exposure to COVID-related kind acts did not have the same negative consequences, suggesting that not all social media exposure is detrimental for well-being. We discuss strategies to counteract the negative emotional consequences of exposure to negative news on social media.

Methods to Address Confounding and Other Biases in Meta-Analyses: Review and Recommendations

Meta-analyses contribute critically to cumulative science, but they can produce misleading conclusions if their constituent primary studies are biased, for example by unmeasured confounding in nonrandomized studies. We provide practical guidance on how meta-analysts can address confounding and other biases that affect studies’ internal validity, focusing primarily on sensitivity analyses that help quantify how biased the meta-analysis estimates might be. We review a number of sensitivity analysis methods to do so, especially recent developments that are straightforward to implement and interpret and that use somewhat less stringent statistical assumptions than do earlier methods. We give recommendations for how these newer methods could be applied in practice and illustrate using a previously published meta-analysis. Sensitivity analyses can provide informative quantitative summaries of evidence strength, and we suggest reporting them routinely in meta-analyses of potentially biased studies. This recommendation in no way diminishes the importance of defining study eligibility criteria that reduce bias and of characterizing studies’ risks of bias qualitatively. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 43 is April 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Reading for Senseation in Poetry

The article, as part of ongoing research, is a theoretical account of the workings of affect and affectivity in the process of reading poetry, closing with an illustrative reading. It takes heed of the criticism of the terminology employed in affect studies and the employability of affect in critical discourse as an operative category. The study shows that the difficulty in the applicability of affect in discursive situations lies in its nature – in its being at once experienceable, yet impalpable. As a consequence, the article proposes the need to relocate the perspective within the reading for affect as an empty term and foregrounds the ways in which concentrating on Deleuzian sensation and sense, rather than affect alone, allows it to become operative.

Methods to address confounding and other biases in meta-analyses: Review and recommendations

Meta-analyses contribute critically to cumulative science, but they can produce misleading conclusions if their constituent primary studies are biased, for example by unmeasured confounding in nonrandomized studies. We provide practical guidance on how meta-analysts can address confounding and other biases that affect studies' internal validity, focusing primarily on sensitivity analyses that help quantify how biased the meta-analysis estimates might be. We review a number of sensitivity analysis methods to do so, especially recent developments that are straightforward to implement and interpret and that use somewhat less stringent statistical assumptions than earlier methods. We give recommendations for how these methods could be applied in practice and illustrate using a previously published meta-analysis. Sensitivity analyses can provide informative quantitative summaries of evidence strength, and we suggest reporting them routinely in meta-analyses of potentially biased studies. This recommendation in no way diminishes the importance of defining study eligibility criteria that reduce bias and of characterizing studies’ risks of bias qualitatively.

Pain, Partum and Prayer: The Dis-ease of Motherhood in Early Modern English Literature

This paper is a close study of early modern women’s poetry on childbirth and the imminent circumstances of maternal and foetal/infantile mortality in seventeenth century England. In tracing the development of women’s post-partum mental health from the medieval to the early modern period, this paper argues for a serious investment in literature composed as memoirs, poetry, diaries and funeral sermons as a means of understanding the trajectories and lacunae in women’s mental health in the early modern period. This study also argues for including the religious experience into any consideration of women’s post-partum health and therapeutic interventions. Lastly, it shows how affect studies have proved the recuperative potential in literature of consolation and mourning so that women’s writing begins to get recognized for its interventionist potential rather than a fossilized historical treatment as it has often received.

The Creative and Cross-Functional Benefits of Wearing Hearts on Sleeves: Authentic Affect Climate, Information Elaboration, and Team Creativity

Team creative processes of generating and elaborating ideas tend to be laden with emotional expressions and communication. Yet, there is a noticeable lack of theory on how differences in teams’ management and support of affect expressions influence their ability to produce creative outcomes. We investigate why and when team authentic affect climates, which encourage members to share and respond to authentic affect, generate greater creativity compared with more constrained affect climates where members suppress or hide their genuine feelings. We propose that authentic affect climate enhances team creativity through greater information elaboration by the team and that these informational and creative benefits are more likely in functionally diverse teams. Results from three complementary studies—one multisource field study of management teams and two experiments—provide support for our predictions. In our experiments, we also examine the theorized affective mechanisms and find that authentic affect climate increases information elaboration and creativity through members’ affect expressions (Study 2) and empathic responses to each other’s expressed affect (Studies 2 and 3). We discuss the implications of our findings for the team creativity, diversity, and affect literatures.