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. (shrink)

Constructivist theories of emotions and empirical studies have been increasingly stressing the role of contextual information and cultural conventions in emotion recognition. We propose a new account of emotion recognition and attribution that systematically integrates these aspects, and argue that emotion recognition is part of the general process of person impression formation. To describe the structural organization and the role of background information in emotion recognition and attribution, we introduce situation models and personal models. These models constitute the top-level structures (...) in a complex hierarchy of dimensions which considers different types of basic emotion cues. Thus, we propose a multidimensional account of emotion recognition which enables us to integrate the top-down and bottom-up processes involved: basic emotion cues in certain contexts can trigger situation models and person models, which influence emotion recognition which, in turn, reinforce or modify these models. We argue that this kind of loop deeply affects the way emotions enter our social interactions. Our account is in line with the “normative turn” of social cognition, that stresses the way social expectations actively shape the patterns we recognize, and make, in our social world. (shrink)