Shifting the affective narrative: atmospheres as solicitations to alter situational emotion scripts

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, the notion of affective affordances has gained some prominence, particularly in the context of 4E approaches to affectivity. One example of affective affordances, mostly mentioned in passing in 4E approaches to affectivity, are atmospheres. Notoriously difficult to pin down in general, it has so far also remained unclear what distinguishes atmospheres from other affective affordances and whether they are a distinctive type of solicitations. Intuitively, the atmosphere of a situation implies an affect-regulatory profile different to what and how single objects solicit. Notably, as affective frames of sociocultural delineated situations they are relevant for coordinating social interactions and modulate personal concerns pertaining to a given situation. In accordance with paradigm cases of experiencing atmospheres, I will claim that they make salient how one is affectively disposed toward situation-specific feeling norms. I will clarify this claim by drawing on the concepts of social and emotion scripts as they have been developed in cognitive psychology and psychology of emotions. Atmospheres will thus be understood as solicitations to change situational emotion scripts. In this way, they represent a distinct avenue for changing fields of affordances over time, based on personal concerns for social and cultural belonging. Conversely, this account sheds light on the affective underpinnings of the perception of social norms.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective atmosphere
• affective affordance
• social norms
• emotion scripts
• situated affectivity
• narrative identity

Acknowledgements

I thank two anonymous reviewers whose very helpful comments improved the clarity of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A recent exception is García (2023), who approaches this topic from an enactivist perspective.

2. Whereas Gibson’s idea of affordances captures invariants in the organism-environment relation, the unit of analysis for affective atmospheres as solicitations is more fine-grained: not every physical environment will be perceived as an affective solicitation just because agents having sufficiently similar organisms. Atmospheres as solicitations imply additional factors like sociocultural background, emotional enculturation, but also one’s personal past. Accordingly, the unit of analysis of affective atmospheres as affective solicitations rather refers to the relation of a person to a sociocultural milieu than to the relationship of an organism to an environment.

3. The notion of “feeling rules” has been introduced by Arlie Hochschild (1979) to describe socially shared norms for how one should feel in different situations, especially in occupational contexts. Although feeling rules operate implicitly in most cases, the term “rules” might lead to the assumption that there was once an explicit introduction to a given set of norms for when one should feel which emotion and with what intensity. To avoid this connotation, I have opted for the term “feeling norms”. Furthermore, the term “feelings” in this context includes a variety of affective phenomena, for instance, emotions, moods, or sentiments.

4. If “force” means the degree of affective arousal, one will equally find examples of calm or heated as well as threatening atmospheres. Similarly, construing the intensity as different degrees of readiness to follow invitations to feel in a specific way will not provide a uniquely defined picture of atmospheres. How strong one feels drawn to share the cheery mood of a party is not essential for determining what one means when saying that an affective quality pertains to a situation as a whole. Similarly, one may atmospheres as positive or negative and thus valence is only a contingent dimension of how atmospheres solicit. This will become clearer when discussing the difference phenomena as paradigm cases of atmospheres below (section 3.2).

5. In the following, I use “affect regulation” as an umbrella term for the regulation of emotions or moods.

6. Atmospheres have been a topic in (gestalt) psychology (Hellpach, 1911; Metzger, 1941) since the early 20^th century, and in a sense it would be more adequate to speak of a “renewed interest”. However, the current interest in situated affectivity appears to be more systematic and anchored in interdisciplinary exchange.

7. Griffero’s use of “microaffordances” seems not to coincide with the meaning of the term which has been introduced by Ellis and Tucker (2000), at least not without further qualification. Griffero seem to imply here that the phenomenal quality of atmospheres emerges from a set of functionally or phenomenally cohering affordances. However, he does not further specify the meaning of “microaffordances” in this context. Earlier, he considers whether “atmospheric feelings may within certain limits be traced back to a more or less homogeneous set of affordances” (Griffero, 2022, p. 87). He does not explicate the qualifier “within certain limits”, and neither whether “traced back” indicates an epistemological or constitutional relation in this passage. At least the qualifier “within certain limits” points to a difference in how subjects relate to some types of atmospheres and (non-Gibsonian) affordances, since Griffero suggests that in some instances of experiencing atmospheres “perceivers” can be “separated from their environment-lived space” (2022, p. 88). The converse would be ruled out for affordances and “much more frequent” (ibid.) atmospheres. I cannot unpack this claim in detail, but this point seems to repeat his previous contention that atmospheres and (non-Gibsonian) affordances are not the same. I remain neutral on this as an ontological claim, yet I disagree if this is to say that atmospheres cannot be (a distinct type of) solicitations (for a positive argument see section 4). For the current purpose, which is to specify how and what atmospheres solicit, the question whether and in which sense atmospheres must be composed by subsets of affordances (of a specific kind, e.g., sensorimotor affordances) can be set aside.

8. Griffero (2022, p. 91) seems to understand the “velvet material” that affods “to indulge in touching it”, or how a “tree […] resisting the powerful sway of wind affords/invites us to feel strength and obstinacy” as instances of experiencing atmospheres.

9. See also Moritz Geiger’s (1911) pioneering work on how one “empathizes” with moods for a taxonomy of feeling a distance toward or being immersed in moods adhering to a situation.

10. One line of research that supports the idea that social and cultural categories are readily available in perception centers on studies of scene gist perception. These studies investigate how quickly subjects are able and how much information is necessary to correctly categorize visual scenes. Some studies have shown that semantic information can be extracted even more accurately than spatial information (Anderson et al., 2022; see also McLean et al., 2023), or that the function of depicted scenes overrides spatial commonalities by being prioritized in discrimination tasks (Greene et al., 2016). Beyond rapid categorization, scene perception activates schematic memories of similar situations (Biederman, 1972; Potter, 2012; Võ, 2021; Greene, 2023). Hence, scene perception and categorization are based on individual learning histories. Some findings show that also more detailed information about similar scenes can be retrieved from long-term memory (Klonke et al., 2010; Lyu et al., 2020), which suggests that also more fine-grained scene categories might be readily available in perception. If atmospheres are perceived qualities of scenes, the just mentioned findings indicate that also the perception of affective qualities of scenes might supervene on highly variable and ramified categorization processes.

11. For a recent approach that clarifies the role of sociocultural norms in affordance perception, see Segundo-Ortin (2022). Similarly, several empirical findings suggest that perception is to a certain extent permeated by sociocultural specificities (e.g., Germar et al., 2023; Larøi et al., 2014; Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005). How to spell out this “permeation” relation in detail is a lively philosophical debate. Accounts building on theories of perceptual learning suggest that social and cultural categories diachronically shape perception (Connolly, 2019; Jenkin, 2023). More liberal accounts on the admissible contents of perception have become known as “cognitive penetration” (for an overview see Zembekis & Raftopoulos, 2015). The debate on cognitive penetration is highly ramified, yet common claims are that higher-order cognitive states synchronically and directly influence perceptions or that one at least sometimes perceives higher-order perceptual contents, for instance social categories “as such” (for this distinction, see Burnston, 2023). The present purpose does not require taking a stance on whether the awareness of feeling norms is an awareness of these norms “as such”, and I rest content with the assumption that subjects are able to discriminate the affective profile of situations in accordance with theories of perceptual learning. In addition and taking the difference phenomena as paradigm cases, these experiences of affective qualities of a situation seem to involve some attentional selection, namely of global properties of a situation or scene. In turn, even skeptics of cognitive penetration of perception admit the influence of higher-order cognitive processes on attention (Pylyshyn, 1999).

12. For a recent proposal of how affordances and social normativity might be compatible, see Heras-Escribano (2022).

13. Conceiving of schemata as pivotal organizing units of cognition goes, at least, back to Kant’s epistemology. Already gestalt theory in psychology (e.g., Koffka, 1936; Wertheimer, 1924/1938) was based on the Kantian idea of structured perception (for the link between gestalt theory and atmospheres, see also footnote 6 above). Similarly, Piaget (1923) has taken up the Kantian impulse and developed two related notions of “schema” for actions and representations respectively. Ben-Ze’ev (1984) emphasized this Kantian origin in the context of ecological psychology. Different from Kant, Ben-Ze’ev (1984) understands cognitive and perceptual schemata as malleable. This is in line with the idea that schemata are dynamic (Schank & Abelson, 1977; Schank, 1982), which is a common presupposition in the philosophical works that discuss (how to change) schemata or scripts and which I draw on in the following sections. The connection between schemata and contextual factors is at the core of Bartlett’s (1932) theory of reconstructive memory. In this sense, Bartlett’s work lays additional emphasis on the contextual variables of the malleability of schemata. This, in turn, resembles the main claim developed in this paper, namely that atmospheres solicit the alteration of emotion scripts. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the various meanings and usages of schemata in philosophy and psychology.

14. In line with the use of “affect regulation” as an umbrella term for the regulation of emotions or moods, situational emotion scripts also include standards of appropriateness for emotions or moods. Since moods entail tendencies to have certain emotions and not others, regulating moods indirectly also regiments the appropriate range of emotions.

15. For a discussion of the type of “cognitive penetration” required for the present purpose, see footnote 11.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [513696000].