On Feeling Political: Negotiating (within) Affective Landscapes and Soundscapes

Affective Landscapes

This essay examines, in Ben Highmore’s words, the implications of “a materialist turn towards the immaterial, towards affect, towards thinglyness, the senses” and how this might be determined by “the social world that produced them.” In viewing the “social,” or “sociocultural,” as always affective, and in viewing the significance of landscape in terms of how people define themselves and their r...

Discriminative and Affective Touch: Sensing and Feeling

The multimodal properties of the human somatosensory system continue to be unravelled. There is mounting evidence that one of these submodalities-touch-has another dimension, providing not only its well-recognized discriminative input to the brain, but also an affective input. It has long been recognized that touch plays an important role in many forms of social communication and a number of th...

Are perceived soundscapes within urban parks restorative?

What a Feeling ! ? Perspectives on Affective Word Processing

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The feeling of uncertainty intensifies affective reactions.

Uncertainty has been defined as a lack of information about an event and has been characterized as an aversive state that people are motivated to reduce. The authors propose an uncertainty intensification hypothesis, whereby uncertainty during an emotional event makes unpleasant events more unpleasant and pleasant events more pleasant. The authors hypothesized that this would happen even when u...