Physiological Responses to a Haunted-House Threat Experience: Distinct Tonic and Phasic Effects

Threats elicit physiological responses, the frequency and intensity of which have implications for survival. Ethical and practical limitations on human laboratory manipulations present barriers to studying immersive threat. Furthermore, few investigations have examined group effects and concordance with subjective emotional experiences to threat. The current preregistered study measured electrodermal activity in 156 adults while they participated in small groups in a 30-min haunted-house experience involving various immersive threats. Results revealed positive associations between (a) friends and tonic arousal, (b) unexpected attacks and phasic activity (frequency and amplitude), (c) subjective fear and phasic frequency, and (d) dissociable sensitization effects linked to baseline orienting response. Findings demonstrate the relevance of (a) social dynamics (friends vs. strangers) for tonic arousal and (b) subjective fear and threat predictability for phasic arousal.

“… the thought that I could flip and die today made me feel anxious”: A study of the experienced emotions of novice white-water kayakers

Learning to white-water kayak often takes place in a stressful environment. This challenges participants’ experiences of the activity, causes emotional responses, and can affect their learning. The purpose of this study is to explore participants’ experienced emotions during an educational white-water kayaking programme. Fifty-eight outdoor students from New Zealand participated. The participants responded to a bespoke questionnaire exploring fleeting somatic arousal and emotion on five different occasions during a kayaking day. Participants’ emotions changed during the activity. Excitement was significantly higher than anxiety across the day. Anxiety was highest before starting the activity. No significant difference was found between the male and female participants’ emotions. A thematic analysis resulted in five themes describing the participants’ emotional experiences. Findings are discussed and related to theory and previous research. These findings present new insights regarding in-the-moment emotional perspectives during a white-water kayaking course for novices.

‘Focusing and Unfocusing’—Cognitive, Evaluative, and Emotional Dynamics in the Relationship with Human Embryos among ART Beneficiaries

This article uses data gathered from a study conducted in Portugal to examine the (plural and composite) conceptions that doctors, embryologists, and beneficiaries of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) have of the in vitro human embryo. Taking the sociology of engagements, developed by Thévenot, as its theoretical lens, the article draws on a total of 69 interviews with ART patients to analyse the plurality of fluid meanings produced about this biological entity, whose status is neither static nor universal. ART beneficiaries are likely to produce plural conceptions of the lab-generated embryo within the framework of different regimes of engagement, understood as cognitive and evaluative formats. These various pragmatic regimes, in turn, entail distinct emotional investments. When speaking about their relationship with embryos, beneficiaries therefore express plural emotional experiences, which are articulated using terms such as affection, love, detachment, loss, frustration, hope, mourning, and anguish. Using the theoretical framework of the sociology of engagements, we propose an approach that enables us to produce a detailed record of the connections between the cognitive, evaluative, and emotional dimensions in beneficiaries’ relationship with—and decision-making processes about—the embryos, accounting for the plasticity of emotional states linked to the (re)configuration of attributed meanings.

The Study of Emotional Effects of Digitalised Work: The Case of Higher Education in the Sustainable Development

This paper reports on the experiences of working with new digital tools along with the experience of new remote work. We explore the emotional experiences of working from home during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic and their implications. There were two groups of respondents participating in the study, those who had experience working remotely before the pandemic [digital natives] and those who started working remotely during the pandemic [digital immigrants]. The results show that emotional experiences while working from home do not differ depending on the profession, age, gender, length of experience and from previous remote work. This suggests that the digital natives had to deal with the same emotions as the digital immigrants. The study found that independent external changes determine the growth of competence in employees, in this particular case, to work remotely. Working in conditions that are difficult for everyone obliges employees to cooperate, even across company boundaries, and increases each other’s competencies. In such situations, the management is required to be emotionally involved and closer to the employee.

Affect Control Theories: A Double Special Issue in Honor of David R. Heise

We introduce this two-part special issue that celebrates David Heise and his pathbreaking theories: affect control theory (ACT), affect control theory of the self (ACTS), and affect control theory of institutions (ACTI). These interlocking, multi-level, mathematically based theories explain a range of social processes, including impression formation, social interaction, trait and mood attributions, emotional experiences, emotion management, and identity adoption, and they do so in multiple languages and cultures. The 15 articles in this two-part issue test, apply, and develop the theories in new and innovative ways. After briefly summarizing each theory and Bayesian affect control theory (BayesACT), we highlight the key findings from each of the articles that follow.

Dreams of Flight

In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.

Korean Clinical Nurses’ Emotional Experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the emotions experienced by Korean clinical nurses during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and to understand their essential meaning in depth.Methods: A qualitative study was performed using individual in-depth interviews and data were collected from 12 nurses in clinical practice from June 2020 to December 2020. Data were analyzed using the Colaizzi’s phenomenological method.Results: The following three categories were derived: ‘shock of the unprecedented new infectious disease’, ‘hardships caused by the never-ending struggle’, and ‘hope in the midst of hardship’.Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, it was confirmed that there is a need to prepare an appropriate compensation system and emotional support strategies for nurses in the traumatic event of a pandemic. In addition, it is necessary to develop a recovery from trauma and emotional management program to reduce the negative emotional experiences and strengthen the positive emotional experiences.

Emotional Confrontation and Public Deliberation on Paid Sex. The Struggle between Disgust and Shame.

In this paper, we address affective and motivational aspects in relation to the controversy, which can be articulated around a mediatised public issue. We are interested in how emotions are a part of the experience and definition of a phenomenon that is seen as intolerable and forwhich intervention is demanded and the strategic appeal to an affective repertoire in reaching aposition on the issue. We analyse the systems of meaning and emotions mobilised in the currentcontroversy about prostitution and trafficking of persons for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The goal here is to grasp how the perspectives involved employ emotional strategies in which basic affective dispositions and transitory emotions intersect, and how this affects deliberation on the issue. Discourses and stories, as well as defining and framing the emotions of the actors in the controversy furnish emotional experiences to their publics, encouraging them to incorporatecertain rules of feeling that form part of the moral and ideological perspectives promoted. Methodologically, we use an ethnographic approach to follow the conflict and a socio-semioticdiscourse analysis. Our case study covers two linked viral campaigns in social networks (Hola Putero and Hola Abolicionista). The goal is to reflect on the way in which setting and affectivestrategies hinder resolution of the issue.