Terrorist events,emotional reactions,and political participation: the 2015 Paris attacks

The impact of terrorist events on attitude formation and change among mass publics has been well established in political research. Still, no individual-level study has examined the impact of terrorist attacks on political participation. This article aims to fill that gap. Drawing on theories of affect, it is predicted that fear stemming from a terrorist attack will increase motivation to seek out political information, yet will have a negative effect on actual participation. On the contrary, anger will hinder information seeking but will boost the intention to participate in political rallies. These hypotheses are tested using data from a two-wave panel study that collected one wave before and a second wave after the January 2015 Paris attacks, and from one cross-sectional study carried out soon after the November 2015 attacks.     

Feeding Mothers’ Love: Stories of Breastfeeding and Mothering in Urban China

ABSTRACT

By analysing narratives of infant feeding, this article explores how emotions are involved in the making of maternal subjectivity. The article is based on interviews with 21 Chinese middle-class mothers of small infants living in Beijing and their stories of how breastfeeding connects to intimacy and love. By merging post-structural approaches of subjectivity with affect theory, the article shows how the emotional dimension of breastfeeding promotes an ideal of mothers as primary caregivers. It finds that this ideal is challenged by practices of multiple caregiving in the mothers’ everyday lives. By exploring the performativity of emotions, the article adds another sociological perspective beyond those concerned with medical discourses of feeding infants. Also, as emotions have been neglected in much social research on Chinese mothering, it contributes to new sociological knowledge about mothering in China.     

Managing Equality in Social Dilemmas: Emotional and Retributive Implications

The equality rule is an important coordination rule in symmetric public good dilemmas. Although prior research emphasized that people use the equality rule out of efficiency concerns (as it helps to obtain the public good in the most efficient manner among group members), it may also reflect a true preference for fairness. More precisely, research examining emotional and retributive reactions as a result of a violation of the equality rule by a fellow group member showed that equality indeed is related to people’s personal values and what they consider to be fair. The present paper suggests that a violation of the equality rule results in emotional reactions, and these emotional experiences encourage further retributive actions. The different reactions following an equality violation are described as a function of three features: (1) the motives to use equality, (2) attributions for explaining the violation, and (3) the honesty of the given explanation. The write-up of this paper was partly supported by GOA/05/04 from the Research Fund of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The research and write-up was supported by a fellowship of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, Grant No. 016.005.019), awarded to the second author.     

积极情绪对生理的影响

积极情绪（positive emotions）对人有着重要的影响。积极情绪这个名词来自于古老的情绪维度理论。人们对其有不同的解释，但总结所有的看法均有一个共同特征，即认为积极情绪会产生愉悦感受。积极情绪和健康之间存在很大关联，以往人们更多的关注情绪在心理学方面的研究，近年来，人们认为积极情绪可以提高思考问题的能力，促进新观点和思想的产生。本篇论文就是阐述积极情绪对生理的诸多影响，研究结果表明：积极情绪可以增自身预防心脏病的能力、提高了应对压力的能力，有助中风患者恢复视力，提高理解重点地能力、提高视觉认知、提高认知灵活性并延长寿命。     

早期家庭教育应重视幼儿积极情绪的培养

积极情绪有利于幼儿身心的健康发展以及个人的成长,但是在目前的早期家庭教育中,幼儿积极情绪的培养并没有引起家长足够的重视.早期家庭教育应该重视对幼儿积极情绪的培养,早期的情绪教育应该是一种预防性和发展性的教育,而不是在孩子出现情绪问题和障碍之后采取的补偿性措施.     

Japan and identity change: why it matters in International Relations

Abstract

Two approaches to identity have been employed to explore issues in Japan's international relations. One views identity as constituted by domestic norms and culture, and as constitutive of interests, which in turn cause behaviour. Proponents view Japan's ‘pacifist’ and ‘antimilitarist’ identity as inherently stable and likely to change only as a result of material factors. In the other approach, ‘Japan’ emerges and changes through processes of differentiation vis-à-vis ‘Others’. Neither ‘domestic’ nor ‘material’ factors can exist outside of such identity constructions. We argue that the second, relational, approach is more theoretically sound, but begs three questions. First, how can different identity constructions in relation to numerous Others be synthesised and understood comprehensively? Second, how can continuity and change be handled in the same relational framework? Third, what is the point of analysing identity in relational terms? This article addresses the first two questions by introducing an analytical framework consisting of three mutually interacting layers of identity construction. Based on the articles in this special issue, we argue that identity entrepreneurs and emotions are particularly likely to contribute to change within this model. We address the third question by stressing common ground with the first approach: identity enables and constrains behaviour. In the case of Japan, changes in identity construction highlighted by the articles in this special issue forebode a political agenda centred on strengthening Japan militarily.     

The role of religion in Islamist radicalisation processes

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to bridge the gap between social and religious explanations for Islamist radicalisation in the West by understanding the role of religion through the under-utilised perspective of sociology of religious emotions and Wiktorowicz’s concept of cognitive openness. The article draws on interviews with 23 different actors with first-hand knowledge of Islamist radicalisation, and analyses five in-depth interviews with former so-called radicals, four of whom were converts to Islam. The analysis thus has a special focus on the narratives and experiences of converts to radical Islamist worldviews. The radicalisation process of the formers was characterised by an interplay between context specific experiences and individual religiosity. There are social causes for seeking religion as it can provide an emotional meaningfulness in a state of cognitive openness connected to personal family social background, which can stretch over a long period. However, the interviews also show that religiosity affects the social: the religious emotions within radical Islamist groups create a tight-knit community of self-perceived righteous believers, tied to an emotional experience of empowerment that amplifies their radicalisation. The article concludes that the primary role of religion is to structure and direct the emotions from which so-called radical Islamists think and act within religious frameworks.     

The aesthetics of minor intimacy: precarious attachments and queer feelings in the autobiographical fiction of J. M. Coetzee

This essay offers a new perspective on the queerness of the encounters between self and other in Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction. It attends to the dynamics of openness and reservation, immediacy and mediation, desire and longing played out between Anya and Señor C in Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and John and his female cousin, who is represented by the characters Agnes in Boyhood: A Memoir (1997), Ilse in Youth (2002), and Margot in Summertime (2009). Building on Lauren Berlant’s notion of minor intimacy—which asks us to pay attention to encounters without a canon and to desires too elusive for heterosexual conventions— it offers a framework for uncovering modes of attachment in Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction that do not obey the strictures of the couple form. I draw on queer studies on intimacy and phenomenological studies on emotions and embodiment to explore the modes of attachment between self and other.     

论情感在认识中的作用

情感在认识中具有多方面的作用 ,其中最基本的是以下三种作用 :情感是人探求真理的动力 ;情感决定主体认识能否处于最佳状态 ;情感直接影响认识过程中的信息的选择和加工。主体情感的变化与其所处的外部社会文化环境的变化并非绝对同步的。主体情感具有自身的相对独立性 ,因而拓展对主体情感在认识中的作用的研究 ,具有很大的必要性