What can the concept of affective scaffolding do for us?

ABSTRACT

The concept of affective scaffolding designates the various ways in which we manipulate the environment to influence our affective lives. In this article, I present a constructive critique of recent discussion on affective scaffolding. In Part 1, I summarize how the theories of situated mind and niche construction contribute to a multidimensional notion of scaffolding. In Part 2, I focus specifically on affective scaffolding and argue that current ambiguity over its distinctive criteria causes uncertainty as to how the concept can and should be used. In Part 3, I identify and examine two possible responses to the suggested state of conceptual ambiguity. The first, restrictive option is to keep pushing for more definite criteria. The second, permissive option is to embrace and work with a broad understanding of affective scaffolding. I argue that the latter choice is more pragmatic and productive. To conclude, I summarize where my examination leaves us in regard to ongoing theoretical work on affective scaffolding.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective scaffolding
• affectivity
• situated mind
• scaffolded mind
• niche construction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a helpful overview of the history and uses of the term ‘scaffolding’ in developmental psychology, educational theory, and cognitive science, see Pea (2004) and Sutton (2016).

2. Besides this type of “perturbational” niche construction, organisms also exhibit “relocational” niche construction when they expose themselves to novel selective environments via migration, habitat selection, and dispersal (Laland et al., 2016).

3. The suggested categorization into domains is not meant to imply that cognition and affect are experientially separate from each other. On the contrary, they both contribute to ongoing, unitary experience in their own particular ways. To illustrate, occurrent emotions are typically understood as incorporating both feeling and cognition (belief, judgment). Even so, these general areas of our mental life are not equivalent; we regularly interact with the world in order to influence a specific aspect of one or the other. For example, using a measuring tape to gauge distances is experientially, motivationally, and functionally very different from getting a massage to feel good and relax. These scaffolding activities target two broadly distinguishable and commonly established domains: the former being cognition, and the latter being affect.

4. Interestingly, Krueger and Szanto (2016, p. 867) use the same candle-example and the criterion of bidirectional coupling and integration to distinguish extended affects from non-extended ones. ‘Mutual influence’ is thus used as a distinctive criterion in two different directions, as it were: between extended affectivity and non-extended affectivity, on the one hand, and between scaffolded affectivity and non-scaffolded affectivity, on the other. This complicates the issue further, since it seems to conflate extension and scaffolding.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Koneen Säätiö.

Notes on contributors

Jussi A. Saarinen

Jussi A. Saarinen is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests lie in philosophy of emotion, philosophy of psychology, and aesthetics. He has published in these areas in, for example, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His first book, “Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel”, is set to be published by Routledge in 2020.