The tendency for emotions to be predictable over time, labelled emotional inertia, has been linked to low well-being and is thought to reflect impaired emotion regulation. However, almost no studies have examined how emotion regulation relates to emotional inertia. We examined the effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on the inertia of behavioural, subjective and physiological measures of emotion. In Study 1 (N = 111), trait suppression was associated with higher inertia of negative (...) behaviours. We replicated this finding experimentally in Study 2 (N = 186). Furthermore, in Study 2, instructed suppressors and reappraisers both showed higher inertia of positive behaviours, and reappraisers displayed higher inertia of heart rate. Neither suppression nor reappraisal were associated with the inertia of subjective feelings in either study. Thus, the effects of suppression and reappraisal on the temporal dynamics of emotions depend on the valence and emotional response component in question. (shrink)

Variability in the emotion regulation (ER) strategies one uses throughout daily life has been suggested to reflect adaptive ER ability and to act as a protective factor in mental health. Moreover, psychological inflexibility and persistent negative affect (or affective inertia) are key features of depression and other forms of mental illness and are often further exacerbated by rigid or overly passive regulatory behaviours. The current study investigated the hypothesis that ER variability might serve as a protective factor against depressive (...) symptoms and affective inertia. Using experience-sampling (N = 213), we tested whether two indictors of ER variability (between- and within-strategy SDs) were related to depressive symptoms and affective inertia. We found that people with higher between-strategy variability and within-strategy variability (specifically for reappraisal and distraction) reported fewer depressive symptoms. Both within- and between-strategy variability were negatively related to negative affective inertia. Between-strategy variability and negative affective inertia had unique effects on depression, when used as simultaneous predictors. Altogether, this study provides further evidence for the utility of ER as a factor buffering against depressive symptoms and particularly for the use of variable ER strategies. (shrink)

Introduction: Burnout, inertia, meltdown, and shutdown have been identified as important parts of some autistic people’s lives. This study builds on our previous work that offered early academic descriptions of these phenomena, based on the perspectives of autistic adults.Objectives: This study aimed to explore the unique knowledge and insights of eight autistic children and youth to extend and refine our earlier description of burnout, inertia, and meltdown, with additional exploration of shutdown. We also aimed to explore how these (...) youth cope with these phenomena and what others around them do that make things better or worse, with a hope to glean knowledge to design better supports.Methods: One-to-one interviews were conducted with eight children and youth, who shared their experience with BIMS. To match individual communication strengths of children and youth, we took a flexible approach to interviews, allowing for augmentative communication systems and use of visual images to support verbal interviews, as needed. We conducted a reflexive, inductive thematic analysis, using an iterative process of coding, collating, reviewing, and mapping themes.Findings: Our analysis has identified that these youth describe BIMS as a multi-faceted experience involving emotional, cognitive and physical components. Moreover, these multifaceted experiences are often misunderstood by neurotypical adults, which contributes to inadequate support in managing BIMS. Of the four experiences, these youth identified meltdowns as most common.Conclusion: By gaining first-hand perspectives, we have identified novel insights into BIMS and developed a more holistic understanding of these phenomena. These youths’ descriptions of supportive strategies for BIMS stress the importance of compassion and collaboration from trusted adults. This new knowledge will provide a foundation for how to better support autistic children and youth. Further research is required to develop an understanding of BIMS, especially with respect to how it is experienced by children and youth. Future research should leverage the insights and experiential knowledge of autistic children and youth to co-design support tool for BIMS. (shrink)

Can one explain both the resilience of the status quo and the possibility for resistance from a subordinate position? This paper aims to resolve these seemingly incompatible perspectives. By extending Randall Collins's interaction ritual theory, and synthesizing it with Norbert Wiley's model of the self, this paper suggests how the emotional dynamics between people and within the self can explain social inertia as well as the possibility for resistance and change. Diverging from literature on the sociology of emotions (...) that has been concerned with individual emotional processes, this paper considers the collective level in order to explore how movement action is motivated. The emotional dynamics of subordinate positioning that limit women's options in face-to-face interactions are examined, as are the social processes of developing feminist consciousness and a willingness to participate in resistance work. Pointing toward empirical applications, I conclude by suggesting conditions where resistance is likely. (shrink)

This chapter connects the phenomenon of double bookkeeping to two critical debates in the philosophy of delusion: one from the analytic tradition and one from the phenomenological tradition. First, I will show how the failure of action guidance on the part of some delusions suggests an argument to the standard view that delusions are beliefs (doxasticism about delusion) and how its proponents have countered it by ascribing behavioral inertia to avolition, emotional disturbances, or a failure of the surrounding (...) environment in supporting the agent’s motivation to act. Second, I will show how the mismatch between the experience of double bookkeeping and that of having the usual propositional attitudes of folk psychology suggests another, more recalcitrant argument not only against doxasticism but against the very attempt to fit delusion into folk psychology. Third, I will show how phenomenologically inspired theories of delusion, such as the multiple realities hypothesis, bypass the debates above and focus on describing and understanding the disturbances in the structure of experience undergone by patients. I conclude that the philosophical discussions ensuing from an appreciation of double bookkeeping show some of the limitations of the analytic philosophical approach to delusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy by Mario TelòSean LambertTelò, Mario. Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy. Ohio State University Press, 2020. 344pp.In Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, Mario Telò takes aim at one of the most canonical (if also one of the most contested) features of Greek tragedy: its potential to deliver catharsis (12).1 Through careful close readings of Greek tragedies informed by (...) psychoanalytic theory and deconstruction, Telò makes a persuasive case that tragedy is anti-cathartic. “The Freudian take on catharsis is complicated, or even undercut,” he writes in the introduction, “by its own anti-cathartic latencies… We can accordingly look at tragedy as a form of dramatic poetry that finds its affective raison d’être… in these anti-cathartic feelings” (34).Telò states that the intent of Archive Feelings is mainly to intervene in the age-old debate, asking: “why do human beings enjoy tragedy?” (14). He suggests that the pleasure of tragedy is, in fact, a masochistic one: a denial of release or pleasure (such as would come from catharsis) that an audience or reader enjoys in its specifically joyless jouissance. At stake is “feeling material,” a “fantasy” of “merging into the impersonal, anorganic, universal matter of elemental life” (44) evoked in tragedy’s death-driven withdrawal from action. With this concept in mind, Telò goes beyond even his own ambitions for his project. More than merely intervening in debates about the pleasures of tragedy, he argues powerfully for the continuing relevance of Greek tragedy for critical theory today, particularly in light of the so-called “affective” and “material” turns in the humanities. Archive Feelings is thus a useful book for classicists conducting interdisciplinary and/or trans-historical research, but even more so for any scholar working within the constellation of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, queer theory, affect theory or critical race theory. Telò makes a persuasive case for tragedy as a lodestar within this firmament–a vital tool for thinking through problems within and across disciplines.In striking contradistinction to previous theorists of Greek tragedy, including Aristotle and Nietzsche, Telò locates the engine of Greek tragedy in the death drive. In so doing, he reads in ancient narratives a number of experiences such as “acceleration, hoarding, vertiginous suspension, [End Page 113] breathless looping, affective bulimia or binge-eating, serial cutting, trying to enter or fold in upon oneself, auto-immune inflammation” (14), and finds in “the orgasm as an unfinished, non-teleological pleasure,” a desire to return to a state of “inert matter” (13).2 Noting that the original meaning of the Greek word archê is “origin,” Telò connects this impulse to once again become “inert” with the desire to create archives. Thus, Telò sees Greek tragedies as both a model for projects of archival reconstruction as well as archival projects themselves: they are “anxious and debilitating” attempts to “re-create the past as it was” (13).3Telò’s study is divided into three parts: Archival Time, Archival Space, and Archival Endings, which attempt to “structurally reproduce the psychological temporalities of the archive” (49). In each of his five chapters, Telò elaborates the diverse narrative masochisms of Greek tragedy, exploring the various stakes and species of tragic anti-catharsis. In Chapter 1, Telò reads the “archive fever” of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus against the “archive fatigue” of Euripides’ Phoenissae, finding in both of these plays—near the end of the epoch of ancient tragedy—an impulse toward “textual hoarding” (76) that both undermines the possibility of catharsis and “exhausts” (106) the possibilities of the genre (107). In both the “synchronic gathering of disparate fragments of experience” into the body of Oedipus before his death and the aesthetics of boredom, fatigue, and inertia that suffuse the Phoenissae, Telò locates a desire to store up, rather than purge, emotions such as pity and fear, in a flouting of the normal formula for catharsis (73).In Chapter 2, Telò looks at the figures of Heracles and Medea in their original myths and tragic incarnations, seeing in both the compulsion to recircle around scenes of their respective “primordial traumas” (145). In Euripides’s Medea, this move manifests in repeated references... (shrink)

In this article we present a conjecture regarding the biology of subjectivity and feeling, based on biophysical and phenomenological considerations. We propose that feeling, as a subjective phenomenon, would come to life as a process of resistance to variance hypothesized to occur during the unfolding of cognition and behaviours in the wakeful and emoting individual. After showing how the notion of affect, when considered from a biological standpoint, suggests an underlying process of resistance to variance, we discuss how vigilance, (...) class='Hi'>emotional arousal and attentional behaviours reflect a dynamics of controlled over-excitation related to cognitive integration and control. This can be described as a form of resistance to variance. We discuss how such a dynamics objectively creates an internal state of tension and affectedness in the system that could be associated with subjective states. Such a dynamics is shaped by the system's need to cope with its own inertia, to engage in intentional behaviours, attend, preserve coherence, grapple with divergent cognitive, emotional and motivational tendencies, and delayed auto-perturbations of the brain-body system. More generally, it is related to the need to respect the hierarchy of the various influences which affect its internal dynamics and organization. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 76–81 Comments on Eugene Thacker’s “Cosmic Pessimism” Nicola Masciandaro Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has. —Vernon Howard In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. The cosmicity of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “ Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core ” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates (...) the sigh that issues from my heart]. 1 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of the soul’s eventual exit from the dead body’s mouth, the sigh restores consciousness to the funeral of being, to the passing away that is existence. Pessimism speaks in piercing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.” 2 … pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. To the pessimist, the ‘real’ world—the world on whose behalf we are expected to wake up in the morning—is a ceaseless index of its own unreality. The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. These two paths are distinguished by their relation to pessimism’s guilt vis-à-vis the world’s reality-project. The first form, that which remains pessimism for the world and puts on a smiling face, stays guilty to itself (i.e. unconscious) and thus turns hypocritical, becoming at once the pessimism of the commoner who really just wants things to be better for himself and the pessimism of the elite who wants to critically refashion reality in his own image. The general form of this worldly, hypocritical pessimism is the impulse to ‘make the world a better place’, which is the global mask under which the world is diurnally made worse. The second form, that which follows pessimism away from the world and ceases to put on a smiling face, refuses guiltiness as itself theessential Occidental mode of pretense and turns honest, becoming at once the intelligent pessimism required of all ordinary action and the radical pessimism necessary for self-knowledge: seeing that no one is capable of doing good. The general form of this universal, honest pessimism is the impulse not to worry, to give up and embrace dereliction, which is the only real way the world is actually improved. Where worldly pessimism is the engine productive of interminably warring secular and sacred religions (good-projects), universal pessimism strives hopelessly for the paradise of a supremely instantiated pessimus: things are getting so bad that there is no longer any time for them to get worse; things are so constantly-instantly worst that this is BEST. Cosmic pessimism is the mode of universal pessimism which can yet discourse with the world, which has not chosen silence and can spread the inconceivably BAD NEWS in an orderly form ( kosmos ) that the world can understand (if it wanted to). … the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world. That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world). … a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. Pessimism’s love of fate is a blind love, a love of the blindness of being human in a cosmos conceived around the human’s eclipse, a heavy levitation in the contradictory space between the inescapability of its having been and the impossibility of its will-be. Pessimism’s song of futility is a sensible way of loving fate, with a minimum of eros, by means of a kind of matrimonial love of the fatal. As music, pessimism stays open to the irreparable and the inexorable without the binding of affirmation, in the apparent absence of the radical, infinitely surplus will that absolute amor fati seems to require. Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? “Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will scarcely be worth the trouble of his achieving it. We should aspire to the impossible, to absolute and infinite perfection [….] The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a norm of action, it is a beacon for high deeds [….] For true charity is a species of invasion [….] It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to anguish and torment of spirit.” 3 … the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought. “The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself [….] There are no arguments [….] On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos [….] I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing .” 4 It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. According to the earliest account of Cecilia’s martyrdom, the beheading turns out worse. After not severing her head in three strokes, “the cruel executioner left her half dead” (seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit). 5 Cecilia’s effortlessly powerful endurance of the three strokes—a fitting icon for pessimism as an art of dereliction—demonstrates the “passivity and absence of effort [….] in which divine transcendence is dissolved.” 6 There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. Like words from a pre-waking dream. There is no reason to think that they are not. NOTES 1. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova . ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 2. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan . trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 3. Miguel de Unamuno. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations . trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. 305-6. 4. E.M. Cioran. On the Heights of Despair . trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. 9-10. 5. Giacomo Laderchi. S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . Rome. 1723. 38. 6. Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche . trans. Bruce Boone. London: Continuum. 2004. 135. See Nicola Masciandaro. “ Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia .” A Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s "Cosmic Pessimism" Gary J. Shipley Pessimism is the refusal to seek distraction, the refusal to remodel failure into a platform for further (doomed) possibilities, the refusal of comfort, the acceptance of the sickness of healthy bodies, the cup of life overflowing with cold vomit. If, as Ligotti suggests when discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1 humans prefer the anxieties of their familiar human lives to the contentment of an alien one, then the pessimist, we could argue, represents some perverted combination of the two, preferring (presuming he has a choice) the defamiliarization of human life to the contentment of its unquestioned mundanity. The quasi-religious state of mind that Wittgenstein would mention on occasion, that of “feeling absolutely safe,” 2 is a state the pessimist could only imagine being approximated by death, or perhaps some annihilative opiate-induced stupor. This Wittgensteinian commingling of certainty and faith looks every bit the futile gesture, a mere rephrasing of collapse or partial collapse. The only certainty open to the pessimist is that of the toxic formula of life itself—a formula known and lacuna-free. Certainty, far from being the gateway to deliverance, becomes the definitive impediment; and the possibility of salvation, as long as it remains, becomes crucially reliant on postulations of ignorance, epistemic gaps, a perennial incompleteness: “the perfect safety of wooed death […] the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown.” 3 The height of Leibniz’s Panglossian insanity nurtured the idea that our knowing everything—via the universal calculus—could be accurately described a triumph, as opposed to a nightmare in which our every futility is laid bare. Stagnancy and boredom are perhaps two of the greatest ills of Western civilisation, and the most potent pessimism tells you that you’re stuck with both. The most we can hope for, by way of salvation, is to throw open our despair to the unknown. The fact that Schopenhauer’s pessimism stopped short of morality and allowed him to play the flute, as Nietzsche complained, highlights the predicament of a man who despite having adorned nothingness with a smiling face still found himself alive. The demand here is that it be felt: a cross-contamination of intellect and emotion. The safety net of numerous parentheses makes for a failed philosophy, rather than a philosophy of failure. Depressives make bad pessimists, because, unless they choose to die, living will always infect them with necessities of hope, forcing them to find something, anything (all the various “as ifs”) to make existence tolerable. For as Cioran observed, while “[d]epressions pay attention to life, they are the eyes of the devil, poisoned arrows which wound mortally any zest and love of life. Without them we know little, but with them, we cannot live.” 4 And even when cured of our depressions we’ll find ourselves consumed, eaten alive by the hyper-clinical (borderline autistic) mania that replaces them: a predicament captured all too clearly in the microscriptual fictions of Robert Walser, where spectral men and women stifle their depressive madness with protective comas of detail, their failed assimilations buried beneath thick crusts of remote data. Like Beckett’s Malone their stories may have ended, but cruelly their lives have not. Pessimism is an extraneous burden (a purposeless weight) that makes everything else harder to carry, while at the same time scooping it out and making it lighter. If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh non-noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world’s last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that “he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now.” 5 The pessimist suffers a derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of his being: he’s the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see him. If Cioran’s refusal is manifested in sleep (when even saying ‘no’ is too much of a commitment), then Pessoa’s resides in the dreams inside that sleep. Pessoa chooses to exploit the fact that he’s being “lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied” 6 by growing more voids to live him. His is a Gnostic breed of sleep, “sleeping as if the universe were a mistake,” 7 a sleep that dreams through Thacker’s cosmic pessimism (“a pessimism of the world-without-us.”, “the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time” 8 ), through the critical error of there being anything at all when there could be nothing. The metaphysical pessimist is someone who, however well life treats them, still desires to wake from it, as from the poisonous air of a bad dream. Pessimism is a paradox of age, being simultaneously young and old; its youth residing in a refusal to accept the authority of existence (its rich history, its inherent beneficence), a refusal to “get over” the horror of what it sees with its perpetually fresh eyes, and its maturity in the unceremonious disposal of the philosophical playthings (those futile architectures) of adolescence. As Thacker remarks: “Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.” 9 A sentiment shared with Pessoa, who duly categorizes those that choose to enact this futile struggle: “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering.” 10 If the pessimist has shared a womb with anyone, it’s with the mystic and not the philosopher. As Schopenhauer tells us: “The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. […] But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.” 11 The crucial difference between the mystic and the pessimist is not the latter’s impassivity and defeatism, but his unwillingness/inability to contain in any way the spread of his voracious analyticity, his denial of incompleteness, his exhaustive devotion to failure. The truth of our predicament, though heard, is destined to remain unprocessed. Like the revelations of B.S. Johnson’s Haakon (“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that?” 12 ) the pessimist’s truths are somehow too obvious to listen to, as if something inside us were saying, “Of course, but haven’t we gotten over that?” Pessimism is simple and ugly, and has no desire to make itself more complex or more attractive. The true moral pessimist knows that the Utilitarian’s accounts will always be in the red. He can see that for all his computational containments, his only honest path is a negative one, and that such a path has but one logical destination: that of wholesale human oblivion. Thacker notes how at the core of pessimism lies the notion of “the worst,” through which death is demoted by the all-pervasive suffering of a life that easily eclipses its threat. And so with doom made preferable to gloom, death begins to glint with promise, “like beauty passing through a nightmare.” 13 But even among pessimists suicide is, for the most part, thought to be an error. Schopenhauer, for instance, regarded suicide a mistake grounded in some fundamentally naïve disappointment or other. Pessoa too thought suicide an onerous escape tactic: “To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” 14 There is a call here to be accepting of and creative with the puppetry of your being, an insistence that it’s somehow a blunder to attempt to hide in death from the horrors you find inlife. 15 Tied up with this perseverance is the slippery notion of the good death, for maybe, as Blanchot warns, suicide is rarely something we can hope to get right, for the simple reason that “you cannot make of death an object of the will.” 16 “Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete,” 17 and this is not simply because the project itself belies something yet to be disclosed, but because the project itself is a thing waiting. It waits on a cure it knows will not come, but for which it cannot do anything (as long as it continues to do anything) but wait. NOTES 1. See Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . New York: Hippocampus Press. 2010. 91. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review . (74) 1. 1965. 8. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire . New York: Vintage. 1989. 221. 4. E. M. Cioran. The Book of Delusions . trans. Camelia Elias. Hyperion. 5.1. (2010): 75. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 609. 6. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 67. 7. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 35. 8. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 68. 9. Ibid. 73. 10. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 341. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 610-11. 12. B.S Johnson. “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.” in Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson . London: Picador. 2004. 177. 13. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 415. 14. Ibid. 199. 15. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Anne Sexton. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose . ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1985. 92. 16. Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989. 105. 17. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 75. (shrink)

In this article I propose to understand inertia in art as a “disposition to meaning”. I compare inertia in art with that of a face of a person recently deceased. To acquaintances, i.e. to family and friends, it holds a promise of memories (of the deceased); to all the others the corpse offers the possibility of a projection of meanings. Art is made of plain, or extra-ordinary stuff, which is turned into artistic material. The artist is to bring (...) the inert potency of stuff to artistic life, and to turn it into something that is expressive. If she is successful, then the work will offer its audience a concentrated, absorbing experience. Art is autonomous in that the aimed for experience is morally neutral. In the view of many contemporary artists, such experiences fail art’s deeper significance: absorbing experiences are, simply, too easy. If artists want to really move the audience (to emotion), or so they feel, they should also move the audience into action. Wanting to achieve this is not just difficult; it is a paradox. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World's BeliefsRobert Cummings NevilleDimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World's Beliefs. By Ninian Smart. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 359. $17.95.After decades of nervous retreat from the projects of understanding religions in comparative perspective and religion itself as a complex artifact of human culture, these projects are showing new signs of life, of which "the late" Ninian (...) Smart's Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World's Beliefs is one of the most important so far. Good reasons have justified the retreat, however, at least a little. One was embarrassment at the quickness with which Christianity was taken to be the paradigm of religion according to which the others were analyzed, an embarrassment that applies to eighteenth-century studies and some twentieth-century philosophy of religion more than to recent studies and is hence sometimes over-estimated. Another embarrassment was the kind of analysis associated with Hegel, in which important differences among religions were noted but Christianity very quickly turns out to be the best; this continues to be an issue of concern whenever the analysis takes place from the standpoint of a religious culture. A subtler embarrassment comes from a political analysis that points out that the colonial dominance of Western culture marginalizes religions that should be given greater importance, or marginalizes certain aspects of religion such as its popular expressions. [End Page 420]Another caution, if not embarrassment, comes from those who insist that religions are so singular that any attempt to compare them or lift up certain categories that might fit into an explanatory theory necessarily biases their representation; not that the categories compared are not present, but that these categories are not the important ones for the religion at hand. Moreover, hosts of new critical disciplines have arisen that look for precisely the things that biases exclude from view, starting with women and moving through marginalized persons and religious expressions; these disciplines say that the traditions of comparison and explanation have done a bad job. A final caution that has urged retreat is that most comparative and explanatory projects are reductive in the sense of taking one discipline, say theology, anthropology, myth studies, or whatever, to be the focus of comparison.There are ways now of controlling for all of these destructive biases in the comparative and explanatory enterprises, and Ninian Smart's book is an admirable introduction to them all.Of course the greatest strength of Smart's book is Smart himself. He has lived through all of the criticisms of these projects and has amassed such enormous erudition that his arguments carry powerful inertia against all these objections. He says, rightly, that both comparison and explanation still have far to go and that he is presenting hypotheses here that move these projects forward. He also would admit that his treatment of any religious idea, figure, or movement can always be criticized by specialists as not sufficiently detailed or nuanced. That goes with the territory of any comparison or explanation. Nevertheless, he can argue, and this reviewer agrees, that his characterizations of religions and comparisons generally articulate what is important, and that exceptions can be registered within his approach; he can also say that his explanations are hypotheses that might be improved upon but that cannot be rejected as having no explanatory force.As readers of Smart's earlier work might suspect, the explanatory analysis here is based on his idea of the dimensions of religion, explained in The Religious Experience (1969) and The World's Religions (1989). These dimensions, each of which commands a chapter of this book, are: the ritual or practical, the doctrinal or philosophical, the mythic or narrative, the experiential or emotional, the ethical or legal, the organizational or social, and the material or artistic; the book adds a chapter on the political dimension. Each dimension is characterized by two terms that between them brace a spectrum of elements. Among themselves the dimensions are sufficiently different in clear ways as to push attention to aspects of religion likely to be obscured from within any dimension, yet within themselves they are... (shrink)

The greatest wish of the Baeda l people, or South Koreans, living in the Korean Peninsula is the unification of Korea. However, even when it has been 70 years since the outbreak of the Korean War, the two Koreas that used to be one nation are still in conflict. There have been many discourses on unification over the past 70 years, but these discourses still fail to create clear rules and a framework for unification. Discourses from the perspective of biblical (...) theology offer insight regarding the problems at stake as well as alternatives, but they do not offer perspectives on a definite solution. This article, in line with its statement on biblical theology, does not pretend to contribute to a clear-cut solution to meet the challenge of Korea’s unification. Rather, this article intends to contribute to the formation of an emotional consensus that can contribute to the unification of Korea by looking at the teachings about peace in the Gospel of Matthew. The article explores whether the notion of embracement, forgiveness and love written during the conflict between the Matthean community and Formative Judaism can be applied to help create an emotional bond between the two Koreas. The terms embracement, forgiveness and love found in the Gospel of Matthew are upheld as symbolising peace derived from opposition and conflict. Jesus taught us to overcome situations of opposition and conflict through embracement, forgiveness and love.Contribution: The purpose and contribution of this article was to discuss if the notions of embracement, forgiveness and love found in the Gospel of Matthew can be helpful for the emotional preparation of the peaceful unification of the Korean Peninsula by comparing the situations reflected in the Gospel of Matthew and that of the Korean Peninsula. (shrink)

The growing threat of terrorism has increased the importance of aviation security and the work of airport security officers (screeners). Nonetheless, airport security research has yet to focus on emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction as major determinants of screeners’ job performance. The present study bridges this research gap by applying the job demands–resources (JD−R) model and using work–family conflict (WFC) as an intervening variable to study relationships between work characteristics (workload and supervisor support), emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction (...) in 1,127 screeners at a European airport. Results of structural equation modeling revealed that (a) supervisor support as a major job resource predicted job satisfaction among screeners; (b) workload as a major job demand predicted their emotional exhaustion; and (c) WFC proved to be a promising extension to the JD–R model that partially mediated the impact of supervisor support and workload on job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a substantial amount of research on emotional intelligence (EI) across a wide range of disciplines. Also, this term has been receiving increasing attention in the popular business press. This article extends previous research by seeking to determine whether there is a relationship between emotional intelligence and ethical judgment among practicing managers with respect to questions of ethical nature that can arise in their professional activity. It analyzes the results of a survey of (...) 324 managers enrolled in executive MBA programs from five universities in the southeastern and northeastern United States. This study is based on a model presented by Forsyth showing two dimensions that play an important role in ethical evaluation and behavior. Respondents were classified into one of four groups according to their idealism and relativism levels—situationists, subjectivists, absolutists, and exceptionists. The four ideological group’s scores were compared. The results indicate significant differences between the situationists and absolutists on the one hand, and subjectivists and exceptionists on the other. The former’s emotional intelligence scores were significantly higher thus demonstrating a strong relationship between emotional intelligence and ethical ideology. The results raise important implications for practitioners and educators. (shrink)

This article interprets emotional change as a transition in a complex dynamical sys- tem. We argue that the appropriate kind of dynamical system is one that extends recent work on how neural networks can perform parallel constraint satisfaction. Parallel processes that integrate both cognitive and affective constraints can give rise to states that we call emotional gestalts, and transitions can be understood as emotional ges- talt shifts. We describe computational models that simulate such phenomena in ways that (...) show how dynamical and gestalt metaphors can be given a concrete realization. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationship between emotional sharing and the extended mind thesis. We argue that shared emotions are socially extended emotions that involve a specific type of constitutive integration between the participating individuals’ emotional experiences. We start by distinguishing two claims, the Environmentally Extended Emotion Thesis and the Socially Extended Emotion Thesis. We then critically discuss some recent influential proposals about the nature of shared emotions. Finally, in Sect. 3, we motivate two conditions that an account of (...) shared emotions ought to accommodate: Reciprocal Other-awareness and Integration. Consideration of and discussion of relational accounts of joint attention lead us to the proposal that a construal of socially extended emotions in terms of a constitutive integration of the participating individuals’ experiences is more promising than proposals that simply appeal to various forms of social situatedness, embeddedness, or scaffolding. (shrink)

Compare with other professions, teachers are reported to have a higher risk of poor mental health. This study examined the relationships between emotional intelligence, perceived organizational justice, and mental health among Chinese high school teachers. Three hundred and eighty-one high school teachers, with their age range between 21 and 50 years, were administered the Emotional Intelligence Scale, Perceived Organizational Justice Scale, and Mental Health Scale. The result found that emotional intelligence and perceived organizational justice directly influence the (...) mental health of high school teachers. In addition, perceived organizational justice mediated the association between emotional intelligence and mental health. Moreover, the present study analyzes the different role of subtypes of perceived organizational justice on the relationships between emotional intelligence and mental health, and the results showed that the mediating effects of perceived distributive justice and interactive justice on emotional intelligence and mental health are not significant, only the perceived procedural justice mediated the relationships between emotional intelligence and teachers’ mental health. The results are discussed in a conceptual context. (shrink)

Drawing on feminist and sociocultural theories of emotion that focus on the social, political, and dynamic nature of emotions in history teachers’ pedagogical decision-making, this article presents findings from the analysis of interviews with two white teachers on the role of emotions in their teaching of history in comprehensive, urban high schools. While the teachers perceived that students’ emotional connection to historical content was a necessary step in learning history, each teacher negotiated different emotional rules in their classrooms, (...) creating unique learning experiences for their students. This study demonstrates the significance of emotions in history teaching, providing examples of the complexity of how teachers navigate dominant discourses about students and education and their own personal goals when it comes to teaching about the past. (shrink)

Although laughter plays an essential part in emotional vocal communication, little is known about the acoustical correlates that encode different emotional dimensions. In this study we examined the acoustical structure of laughter sounds differing along four emotional dimensions: arousal, dominance, sender's valence, and receiver-directed valence. Correlation of 43 acoustic parameters with individual emotional dimensions revealed that each emotional dimension was associated with a number of vocal cues. Common patterns of cues were found with emotional (...) expression in speech, supporting the hypothesis of a common underlying mechanism for the vocal expression of emotions. (shrink)

I discuss Toulmin's (1964) concept of backing with respect to the emotional mode of arguing by examining an example from Fogelin (1985), where emotional backing justifies a warrant concerning when we should judge that a person is being pig-headed. While Fogelin 's treatment is consistent with contemporary emotion science, I show that it needs to be supplemented by therapeutic techniques by comparing an analysis of an emotional argument from Gilbert (1997). The introduction of psychotherapy into argumentation theory (...) raises the question of the extent to which ordinary arguers can use such techniques. Psychotherapeutic techniques can be used in an intractable quarrel; is it fruitful to use them in the context of a deep disagreement? (shrink)

This study examined cancer patients’ perceived emotional and informational support from a variety of interpersonal and media sources. We recruited patients from cancer patient association websites and online cancer forums and asked them to report to what extent they received support from interpersonal and media sources. Patients rated professional sources and personal sources as nearly equal sources of emotional support; however, professional sources were rated as significantly greater sources of informational support. Although family and oncologists were the most (...) mentioned interpersonal sources of support, they were also the most mentioned disappointing sources. Of the media sources, online interaction sources were rated as nearly equivalent sources of emotional support as interpersonal sources. That patients perceived emotional support, not only informational support, from various media sources is promising since interpersonal sources can be disappointing to some patients. (shrink)

The word "truth" retains, in common use, traces of origins that link it to trust, truth, and truce, connoting ideas of fidelity, loyalty, and authenticity. The word has become, in contemporary philosophy, encased in a web of technicalities, but we know that a true image is a faithful portrait; a true friend a loyal one. In a novel or a poem, too, we have a feel for what is emotionally true, though we are not concerned with the actuality of events (...) and characters depicted. To have emotions is to care about certain things: we can wonder whether those things are really worth caring about. We can wonder whether our passions reflect who we are, and whether they constitute fitting responses to the vicissitudes of life. So there are two aspects to emotional truth: how well an emotion reflects the threats and promises of the world, and how well it reflects our own individual nature. That is the starting point of this book, which looks first at the analogies and disanalogies between strict propositional truth and a looser, "generic" sense of truth. As applied to emotions, generic truth is closer to those original meanings: as in a portrait's fidelity or friend's loyalty. Taken in this sense, the notion of emotional truth opens up large vistas on areas of life essential to our existence as social beings, and to our concerns with beauty, morality, love, death, sex, knowledge, desire, coherence, and happiness. Each of those topics illustrates some facet of the dominant theme of the book: the crucial but often ambivalent role of our emotions in grounding and yet also sometimes undermining our values. Emotions act, in holistic perspective, as ultimate arbiters of values where different and independently justified standards of value compete. (shrink)

Despite the growing appreciation of the relevance of affect to cognition, analogy researchers have paid remarkably little attention to emotion. This paper discusses three general classes of analogy that involve emotions. The most straightforward are analogies and metaphors about emotions, for example "Love is a rose and you better not pick it." Much more interesting are analogies that involve the transfer of emotions, for example in empathy in which people understand the emotions of others by imagining their own emotional (...) reactions in similar situations. Finally, there are analogies that generate emotions, for example analogical jokes that generate emotions such as surprise and amusement. (shrink)

Emotional intelligence can be defined as the ability to identify, express, understand, manage, and use emotions. EI has been shown to have an important impact on health, relationships, and wor...

I begin this article with an increasingly accepted claim: that emotions lend differential weight to states of affairs, helping us conceptually carve the world and make rational decisions. I then develop a more controversial assertion: that environments have non-subjective emotional qualities, which organize behavior and help us make sense of the world. I defend this from ecological and related embodied standpoints that take properties to be interrelational outcomes. I also build on conceptions of experience as a cultural phenomenon, one (...) that coheres around shared environmental contours and public emotional concerns, introducing normative constraints (or what might be called “world grammars”). Endorsing this outlook suggests an argument for the view that cultural spaces have affectively charged, non-subjective, normative openings and closures. These openings and closures engender selectively permeable barriers which cordon space without physically preventing entry, as seen with decorative half walls and elevation changes. An area with such barriers may look emotionally hostile to, say, the dispirited homeless who are in fact less welcome there. Outcomes like these might be thought of as “political affordances.” These affordances can be regarded as normative openings and closures that implicitly filter, and hence segregate, according to various social divisions. Although registering political affordances requires more than the detection of ambient arrays, the notion retains core Gibsonian ideas: that affordances are values, that these values are linked with how a space can be used, and that the existence and nature of such affordances is not a subjective matter. (shrink)

Internationally, the research on the education of boys has sought to understand how social practices, behaviours and rituals contribute to identity construction. We are interested in approa...

In this study, we examined the effects of emotional experience, a relatively new dimension of emotional knowledge that gauges the ease with which words evoke emotional experience, on abstract word processing in the Stroop task. In order to test the context-dependency of these effects, we accentuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1A by blocking the stimuli such that one block consisted of the stimuli with the highest emotional experience ratings and the other block consisted (...) of the stimuli with the lowest emotional experience ratings. We attenuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1B by intermixing the stimuli. We observed slower color naming performance for words with higher emotional experience ratings only in Experiment 1A, suggesting that the dimension of emotional experience is an aspect of semantic representation for abstract words but that its influence can be modulated by context. We interpret these results more generally using Vigliocco, Meteyard, Andrews, and Kousta's framework of semantic representation, and more specifically using Cohen, Dunbar, and McClelland's model of Stroop task performance. (shrink)

The study was designed to examine whether trait emotional intelligence would moderate the impact of negative emotions at work on job burnout. A total of 188 female nurses participated in this study and completed measures of trait affectivity, emotional intelligence, anger and sadness at work [over five consecutive days, nurses rated the extent to which they experienced anger-related emotions (i.e., irritation, embitterment and anger) and sadness-related emotions (i.e., depression, disappointment and sadness)], and burnout. The results revealed significant and (...) positive relationships between both types of negative emotions and burnout above and beyond demographics and the nurses’ trait affectivity. Importantly, the study demonstrated that trait emotional intelligence buffers the effects of negative emotions on burnout. Specifically, anger- and sadness-related emotions predicted greater burnout among nurses with low trait emotional intelligence but not among nurses with high trait emotional intelligence. These results suggest that emotional intelligence training could be implemented to prevent the adverse effect of negative emotions felt at work on job burnout. (shrink)

Forming intimate relationships is a fundamental human motive. Emotions play a critical role in intimate relationships—they are central to the development and maintenance of these bonds, and these very bonds can influence both individual and interpersonal emotional dynamics across time. Investigating emotional dynamics in an interpersonal context provides unique insight into the functioning of intimate relationships and, at the same time, provides a window into the interdependence of partners’ daily experiences. Reviewing a selection of the literature involving (...) class='Hi'>emotional dynamics in intimate relationships, we explore how intimate relationships shape partner’s emotional experiences and the implications this may have for their relationship across time. (shrink)

In The Emotional Mind, Asma and Gabriel develop their grand vision of affect. Their goal is to demonstrate the foundational and pervasive nature of emotion in the mind, culture and society through the embodied, embedded, and enactive process of evolution. The book discusses how affective adaptation supports or leads diverse facets of human psychology and society. In this paper, however, I raise three critical questions about Asma and Gabriel’s approach to emotion: whether emotion is a natural kind, whether internalized (...) self-critical emotions came to exist through the adaptive and interactive process of decoupling, and whether the variance and integrity of the tripartite layers of the mind can be maintained. (shrink)

Trait emotional intelligence concerns our perceptions of our emotional abilities, that is, how good we believe we are in terms of understanding, regulating, and expressing emotions in order to adapt to our environment and maintain well-being. In this article, we present succinct summaries of selected findings from research on the location of trait EI in personality factor space, the biological underpinnings of the construct, indicative applications in the areas of clinical, health, social, educational, organizational, and developmental psychology, and (...) trait EI training. Findings to date suggest that individual differences in trait EI are a consistent predictor of human behavior across the life span. (shrink)

People with higher levels of emotional intelligence (EI: adaptive emotional traits, skills and abilities) typically achieve more positive life outcomes, such as psychological wellbeing, educational attainment, and job-related success. Although the underpinning mechanisms linking EI with those outcomes are largely unknown, it has been suggested that EI may work as a ‘stress buffer’. Theoretically, when faced with a stressful situation, emotionally intelligent individuals should show a more adaptive response than those with low EI, such as reduced reactivity (less (...) mood deterioration, less physiological arousal), and faster recovery once the threat has passed. A growing number of studies have begun to investigate that hypothesis in respect to EI measured as both an ability (AEI) and trait (TEI), but results are unclear. To test the ‘stress-buffering’ function of EI, we systematically reviewed experimental studies that explored the relationship between both types of EI and acute stress reactivity or recovery. By searching 4 databases, we identified 45 eligible studies. Results showed that EI was only adaptive in certain contexts, and that findings differed according to stressor type, and how EI was measured. In terms of stress reactivity, TEI related to less mood deterioration during sports-based stressors (e.g. competitions), physical discomfort (e.g. dental procedure), and cognitive stressors (e.g. memory tasks), but did not appear as helpful in other contexts (e.g. speeches). Furthermore, effects of TEI on physiological stress responses, such as heart rate, were inconsistent. Effects of AEI on subjective and objective stress reactivity were often non-significant, with high levels detrimental in some cases. However, data suggest that both higher AEI and TEI relate to faster recovery from acute stress. In conclusion, results provide mixed support for the stress-buffering effect of EI. Limitations and quality of studies are also discussed. Findings could have implications for EI training programmes. (shrink)

This paper presents a theory and computational model of the role of emotions in group decision making. After reviewing the role of emotions in individual decision making, it describes social and psychological mechanisms by which emotional and other information is transmitted between individuals. The processes by which these mechanisms can contribute to group consensus are modeled computationally using a program, HOTCO 3, which has been used to simulate simple cases of emotion-based group decision making.

Prior research has shown that narrative coherence is associated with more positive emotional responses in the face of traumatic or stressful experiences. However, most of these studies only examined narrative coherence after the stressor had already occurred. Given the outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 in March 2020 in Belgium and the presence of data obtained two years before (February 2018), we could use our baseline narrative coherence data to predict emotional well-being and perceived social support in (...) the midst of the pandemic. In a sample of emerging adults (NT1 = 278, NT2 = 198), higher baseline coherence of narratives about positive autobiographical experiences predicted relative increases in emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the relation between the coherence of positive narratives and emotional well-being was partially mediated by perceived social support. These findings suggest that narrative coherence could be an enhancement factor for adaptive emotional coping with stressful situations, in part by evoking more supportive social reactions. This study demonstrates the importance of researching cognition (narrative coherence) and emotion (well-being) to shed light on pressing societal matters such as the global COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)