The goal-relevance of affective stimuli is dynamically represented in affective experience

Affect is a continuous and temporally dependent process that represents an individual's ongoing relationship with its environment. However, there is a lack of evidence on how factors defining the dynamic sensory environment modulate changes in momentary affective experience. Here, we show that goal-dependent relevance of stimuli is a key factor shaping momentary affect in a dynamic context. Participants ( N = 83) viewed sequentially presented images and reported their momentary affective experience after every fourth stimulus. Relevance was manipulated through an attentional task that rendered each image either task-relevant or task-irrelevant. Computational models were fitted to trial-by-trial affective responses to capture the key dynamic parameters explaining momentary affective experience. The findings from statistical analyses and computational models showed that momentary affective experience was shaped by the temporal integration of the affective impact of recently encountered stimuli, and that task-relevant stimuli, independent of stimulus affect, prompted larger changes in experienced pleasantness compared with task-irrelevant stimuli. These findings clearly show that dynamics of affective experience reflect goal-relevance of stimuli in our surroundings.

Politics of Time and Mourning in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene thesis makes it necessary for the social sciences to engage with temporality in novel ways. The Anthropocene highlights interconnections between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ non-linear temporal processes. However, accounts of humanity’s Anthropocene history often reproduce linear, progressive narratives of human development. This forecloses the possibilities that thinking with non-linear temporalities would offer to the political sciences. Engaging with the temporal complexity of the Anthropocene as a moment of rupture that highlights non-linearity allows to acknowledge more fully the affective impact of living on a disrupted planet. As a discourse about temporal rupture, the Anthropocene is a stocktaking of the already vast insecurities and losses brought about by exploitative relationships with earth and its inhabitants. In this form, the Anthropocene thesis highlights how material and social legacies of inequality and exploitation shape our present and delimit our imaginaries of the future. By including a reckoning of violent pasts into future practices, a productive politics of mourning could take shape.

Sound in the archive: Media materials as archives of narrative

This paper describes and evaluates research undertaken by the author at the State Library of Queensland, in the collection, cataloguing, and presentation of audiovisual materials—specifically, sound materials beyond oral history and performance. It suggests that strategies drawn from transcription can make the sounds of the past more evident in digitised catalogues, and thus can make those sounds themselves more accessible to the public. In doing so it offers a different affordance of the archive to public experience: not just information about the past, but the affective impact of the past.

The COVID-19 Crisis as a Teachable Moment for Lifestyle Change in Dutch Cardiovascular Disease Patients

Objective: When lifestyle changes are needed, life events or crises such as COVID-19 may function as “teachable moments”. This study aimed to explore whether the pandemic can provoke a teachable moment regarding lifestyle change in cardiovascular disease patients.Method: In this cross-sectional survey study, 830 cardiovascular disease patients reported their intentions to change lifestyle, instigated by the corona crisis, together with risk perception, affective impact, and changed self-concept, based on a “teachable moments” framework.Results: Between 8 and 28% of the sample reported increased intentions to optimize lifestyle behaviors, particularly related to general lifestyle (28%), physical activity (25%), and diet (21%). Multivariate regression analyses revealed that changed self-concept was associated with higher intentions to improve general lifestyle (B = 0.26; CI = 0.19–0.33), physical activity (B = 0.23; CI = 0.16–0.30), and smoking (B = 0.29; CI = 0.01–0.57). In addition, changed self-concept and affective impact were both significantly associated with higher intentions to improve diet (resp. B = 0.29; CI = 0.21–0.36 and B = 0.12; CI = 0.04–0.21) and to limit alcohol consumption (resp. B = 0.22; CI = 0.13–0.30 and B = 0.11; CI = 0.01–0.20). We did not find evidence for an important role of risk perception on behavior change intentions.Conclusion: The COVID-19 crisis evoked a potential teachable moment for lifestyle change in cardiovascular disease patients, driven by a change in a patient's self-concept and to a lesser extent by an affective impact of the COVID-19 crisis. These results suggest an important window of opportunity for healthcare professionals to utilize the pandemic to promote a healthy lifestyle to their patients.

The Transhumanist Creep

This contribution takes one of posthumanism’s most powerful conceptual distinctions – between posthumanist thought and its ill-famed doppelgaenger, transhumanism – as the starting point for a critique of posthumanist thinking in education. Pointing to moments in which both post- and transhumanism become harder to distinguish in educational theory and practice, it utilises the notion of the ‘creep phenomenon’ to describe how these seemingly opposite concepts and ways of thinking can become uncomfortably entangled in everyday practices of teaching and of marketing posthumanism. It thus makes a case for the need for empirical thick descriptions of practices in which theoretical posthumanist thought finds application and points to the unsought intersection and overlap between post- and transhumanist thought. Drawing on work on the cognitive and affective impact of literature, it suggests that literature pedagogy is one of the places where such convergences are explicitly reflected and that literature pedagogy as a form of applied literary and cultural studies provides helpful provocations and potential ameliorations of a prevalent practice-blindness in the field.

“Slow,” “Smart,” “Indie,” “Prestige,” “Elevated”: Discursive Struggle for Cultural Distinction

This chapter examines the successive critical attempts to name the emergent post-horror cycle as something other than the literal conjunction of art cinema and horror, including modifiers like “slow,” “smart,” “indie,” “prestige,” “elevated,” and finally “post.” The shortcomings in each of these naming attempts were driven as much by critics’ difficulties to put the films’ affective impact into words as by the increased speed and fragmentated authority of film criticism during the social-media era. Nevertheless, by looking at the individual meanings of these critical labels, the chapter traces an intersecting series of historical lineages (e.g. slow cinema, smart films, indie cinema) that have productively led into the stylistic and discursive construction of the post-horror corpus.

An Ontological Approach of the Cognitive and Affective Product Experience

The cognitive and affective design aims to attract consumers with products and new products that provide innovative experiences with the intense functional and “cognitive” impact such as ease of use, in addition to “affective” impact as the pleasure of consuming. However, it is difficult to anticipate the consumer's preferences and intentionality, because what happens inside his mind, brain, or subjective experience (wishes, needs, and preferences) is not accessible. This study's objective was to propose an ontological and multidisciplinary approach to the cognitive and affective product experience through an explanation framework and a conceptual model. The model was tested, and the preliminary results indicate that the proposal contributes positively to the advance of the explanation, evaluation and translation of the product experience.

SUPORTE ORGANIZACIONAL E ASSÉDIO MORAL NO TRABALHO: correlatos e diferenças entre funcionários da área de saúde e educação de um munícipio do Estado da Paraíba, Brasil.

This article aims to verify the relationship between organizational support and bullying in employees in different areas of the municipal public sector. With the new economic and social perspectives, it has accompanied, through the reports of worker functional requirements that may cause serious psychological damage, one of them is moral harassment, which interferes in the development and productivity in the organization-work-individual- relationship Cheers. This is a descriptive, exploratory and correlational study, with a quantitative approach with professionals in the municipality of Conceição-PB / Brazil. 288 employees participated in the area of health and education, 58% were men and 35% women, with an average of 41.56 years, economic income between 1 and 2 salaries and the average service time, 10.77 years. They answered the Perception of Organizational Support scale, the scale of perception of moral harassment in the world of work, the scale of Affective Impact of Moral Harassment at Work and sociodemographic data. The results revealed that the constructs used were reliable for the type of sample evaluated; with regard to the organizational support-bullying dyad, they will probably contribute to the inhibition of the phenomenon of harassment in the workplace.

The Effect of Co-Verbal Remote Touch on Electrodermal Activity and Emotional Response in Dyadic Discourse

This article explores the affective impact of remote touch when used in conjunction with video telecon. Committed couples were recruited to engage in semi-structured discussions after they watched a video clip that contained emotionally charged moments. They used paired touch input and output devices to send upper-arm squeezes to each other in real-time. Users were not told how to use the devices and were free to define the purpose of their use. We examined how remote touch was used and its impact on skin conductance and affective response. We observed 65 different touch intents, which were classified into broader categories. We employed a series of analyses within a framework of behavioral and experiential timescales. Our findings revealed that remote touches created a change in the overall psychological affective experience and skin conductance response. Only remote touches that were judged to be affective elicited significant changes in EDA measurements. Our study demonstrates the affective power of remote touch in video telecommunication, and that off-the-shelf wearable EDA sensing devices can detect such affective impacts. Our findings pave the way for new species of technologies with real-time feedback support for a range of communicative and special needs such as isolation, stress, and anxiety.