EMOTIONAL REGULATION ON NEGATIVE AFFECT AND AGGRESSION: A REVIEW

The frustration-aggression theorists generally posit aggression based on the influence of negative emotion or affect. Recently, investigation on the principles that influence the tendencies for aggressive responses play out in the mediating pathway, with the context that negative affect may or may not directly lead to aggression. Within the exploration at modifying the frustration-aggression concept, emotional regulation is an identified mechanism that buffers aggression resulting from negative emotional experiences. In turn, this has challenged the traditional frustration-aggression theory that indicates frustration (negative affect) does not always lead to aggression, in the case where the intense emotion from the relevant external situation has a chance to be modulated. However, little studies have documented the role of emotional regulation on negative affect and aggression. Therefore, this paper presents the nature of negative affect and emotional regulation strategies on aggression, while relating their pathway based on the contemporary General Aggression Model (GAM). We utilised the Google Scholar as the database in locating the relevant articles, with the terms focused on “Emotional Regulation” AND “Negative Affect” OR “Negative Mood” OR “Negative Emotion” AND “Aggression”. Reviews on the past studies that have investigated the role of emotional regulation on the relationship between aspects of negative affect and aggression are also discussed. Emotional regulation has been consistently identified as an important mechanism that mediates the effect on negative emotional state on aggressive behaviours. Future studies are suggested to further investigate the inherent strategies of emotional regulation and taps into different forms of negative affect, besides anger, on aggression.

“Look At It Carefully Now”: Athenian Tragedy And The “Talking Cure”

It is often suggested that the Greek tragedians present clinically credible pictures of mental disturbance. For instance, some modern interpreters have compared the process by which Cadmus brings Agave back to sanity in Euripides’ Bacchae with modern psychotherapy. But a reading of medical writers’ views on the psychological dimension of medicine offers little evidence for believing that these scenes reflect the practices of late fifth-century Athenian doctors, for whom verbal cures are associated with older traditions of non-rational thought, and thus are scorned in favor of more “scientific cures” based on diet or medication. This paper will argue that Athenian tragedians, working from older traditions that advocated verbal cures for some mental ailments, do understand the potential psychological effects that their work can have on audiences, since tragedy requires psychological interaction with its audience in order to be effective. From a close reading of select scenes in Euripidean tragedy, this paper suggests that the experiences of the characters who experience suffering in Euripides’ Heracles and Bacchae are analogues of the experiences undergone by the spectators of tragedy at large. Parallels are made between the way that Agave and Heracles are both talked back to sanity by looking upon what has happened, and the way that tragedians make their audiences observe lamentations and meditations that follow the central tragic act, to help them return from the intense emotion provoked, perhaps, by the violence they have seen.

Introducing the Prose Poem

This chapter traces prose poetry's development in nineteenth-century France and its early reception and subsequent critical views about the form. The prose poem in English is now established as an important literary form in many countries at a time when the composition and publication of poetry is thriving. However, while poetry generally continues to be recognized as a literary genre highly suited to expressing intense emotion, grappling with the ineffable and the intimate, and while lineated lyric poetry is widely admired for its rhythms and musicality, the main scholarship written about English-language prose poetry to date defines the form as problematic, paradoxical, ambiguous, unresolved, or contradictory. The common observation that the term “prose poetry” appears to contain a contradiction is not surprising given that poetry and prose are often understood to be fundamentally different kinds of writing. The chapter then defines the prose poem's main features and discusses the challenge prose poetry presents to established ideas of literary genre.

Song

Ideas about song, and actual songs, inform literary works in ways that go back to classical and to biblical antiquity. Set apart from non-musical language, song can indicate proximity to the divine, intense emotion, or distance from the everyday. At least from the early modern period, actual songs compete with idealized songs in a body of lyric poetry where song is sometimes scheme and sometimes trope. Songs and singers in novels can do the work of plot and of character, sometimes isolating songwriter or singer, and sometimes linking them to a milieu beyond what readers are shown. Accounts of song as poetry’s inferior, as its other, or as its unreachable ideal—while historically prominent—do not consider the variety of literary uses in English that songs—historically attested and fictional; popular, vernacular, and “classical”— continue to find.

Metalepsis, Grief, and Narrative in Aeneid 2

This chapter investigates the emotional function of metalepsis by considering the case of Virgil, Aeneid 2, a book which combines intense emotion with great narrative complexity. Analysing multiple metaleptic features in the book, it offers a model for reading emotional intensity in terms of immersion and alienation, and concludes that metalepsis may paradoxically both alienate readers and intensify their emotional engagement. The chapter begins by exploring the layered first-person narratives produced by Aeneas and Sinon, both of whom use their grief to establish authority and create a positive reception. It argues that the constant interplay between the levels of the external narrator and these two internal ones creates dissonances for readers, but ultimately intensifies the emotional response of the various levels of audience, both internal (Dido) and external. The chapter then demonstrates that moments of narrative transition are often characterized both by emotional intensity and by lack of narrative realism, opening up the potential for metalepsis by means such as anachronism and simile. A study of the deaths of Polites and Priam shows how puns, intertextual references, and connections to the contemporary world of author and audience can all serve to enhance immediacy even when one might expect them to create distance. Finally, the chapter asks in what sense one can really say with Genette that Virgil ‘has Dido die’, making the case that the death of Dido, too, is a metaleptic moment with paradoxical emotional effects.

Confronting the China–Japan History Problem in Northeast Asia

Chapter 2 looks at the general nature of the history problem in Northeast Asia, and sets up the analytical framework used to put the problem into a wider context. This framework takes the form of a historical accounting that puts NEA’s history since 1840 into a world historical perspective, seeing it not only as a collective encounter with the West, but also as a dual encounter. From the nineteenth century, China, Japan, and Korea faced not just overwhelming Western power, but also had to deal with the existential challenge to their social orders posed by the nineteenth-century revolutions of modernity that underpinned Western power. These twin challenges took much the same form for both China and Japan, and the starting positions from which they had to make their responses shared many similarities. This perspective exposes two layers of history problem: a global one between NEA and the West, and a regional one within NEA. Focusing on the narrowness and selectivity of the history problem discourse between China and Japan, the chapter sets out the case for constructing a much broader, more globally situated, story of their relationship. The local histories are the main focus of the history problem, and are understandably imbued with intense emotion, both personal and national. The collective global history is colder and more remote, and has largely been left out of the history problem discourse. The two sides of this equation need to be put back together.

The Junior Theatre Festival and Broadway Junior

Since 2003, more than four thousand middle school–aged children and their teachers and directors have gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, each January during Martin Luther King Jr. weekend to celebrate musical theatre at the Junior Theatre Festival (JTF). Produced by iTheatrics (the company that adapts Broadway musicals for kids), Playbill, and Music Theatre International, the convention features ninety school or community groups who present a fifteen-minute segment from a show that they rehearsed or performed at home for professional artist adjudicators’ immediate feedback. The weekend also includes performance workshops for kids and producing workshops for adults, a showcase of musical numbers from new shows, and an elaborate distribution of awards, during which almost every group is publicly recognized. Fueled by progressive language and democratic affirmations, JTF is unabashedly profit-driven, since MTI licenses the very repertoire of musicals that the children perform. The kids who attend JTF find affirmation and community in an intense, emotion-filled weekend that celebrates musical theatre. JTF combines crass commercialism and heartfelt outreach in a seamless, exuberant event.

Epistolary Fiction

This chapter focuses on epistolary fiction. In epistolary fiction, stories unfold by means of letters exchanged among fictional correspondents. The governing pretence is that the letters that make up the work represent not fiction at all, but a real-life exchange among correspondents who do not expect their communications ever to become public; only later are the letters collated for publication, often not by the supposed letter writers themselves. Typically written in a moment-by-moment simple past or present progressive tense, stories in epistolary form tend to privilege scenes of intense emotion or suspense, when fictional letter writers are uncertain or confused and the way forward is not clear. There is no controlling narrative voice; the characters who contribute to the telling of the story are themselves trying to determine what particular events mean.

Co-Imagination of Fictional Worlds in Film Viewing

The typical experience of narrative film is characterized by a remarkable intensity as to absorption and emotion. Current explanations attribute the experience to the realistic perceptual impact of the film. This theoretical article sets out to explain the experience as the result first of the film-viewer's acts of imagination of fictional worlds. More specifically, it seems suitable to conceptualize the film experience as arising from pretense play. Pretense play can afford room for free imagination leading to intense emotion, as well as restrictions to the imagination “quarantining” ( Leslie, 1987 ) pretended fictional worlds from the real world, thus safeguarding the enjoyability and adaptiveness of the experience. Applying the concept of joint pretense for the first time to film, we follow Walton (1990) in his account of fiction as an institutionalized form of pretense play enabling intense emotional experiences in the cinema, including unpleasant ones to be appreciated by film-viewers. Thus, the model of co-imagination has as components (a) the generation of fictional film worlds—the acts of pretense in the narrower sense; (b) the participation in; and (c) the appreciation of these. We argue that the account of the experience can be improved if it is conceived as the outcome of joint pretense, in which film-viewers in their imagination activity team up with filmmakers—experts by eminence in prompting the viewers’ imagination. Finally, in our model of co-imagination in popular film joint pretense acts are layered ( Clark, 1996 ) as to the contents of the fictional worlds, with the lowest layer representing the collaboration for imagination between filmmaker and film-viewer in the actual world and the higher ones representing fictional worlds of increasing depth of imagination. Because of asymmetric access relations among layers, returns to the actual world in advanced pretense are difficult, which helps quarantining and the sense of absorption.