The article investigates how dancers can actively shape and handle the ways they are affected throughout their artistic practices. To do so, we adopt a phenomenological-ethnographic approach, analysing the dance-artist Kitt Johnson's site-specific performance production called Mellemrum ('the space between spaces)'. We put ethnographically based interview data in a dialectical interaction with the existing notions of affectivity and affective scaffolding - showing their usefulness, while also noting the need for the further notion of what we call affective engagement. This notion, we argue, is needed to account for how artists actively handle their affective involvements. Specifically, as we show, in Mellemrum the dancers deliberately and affective engagement with the environment (space and people), and (iii) an affective-aesthetic engagement with the choreography and artistic ideas of the performance.

This article applies approaches from current emotion research on material affective scaffolds—objects made and used to enhance, and more generally transform, affective states—to the emerging field of study focusing on emotions in ancient Near Eastern societies. Its main goal is to extend the framework of 4E cognition—with its central notion that human cognition is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended—to the realm of affective states, emphasizing that through our bodily interactions with material objects we transform not just our cognitive processes but also our emotions, moods, and so forth. Thereby, the present study seeks to contribute to the exploration of the relationships between sensory experiences, emotions, moods, and the material world by investigating the affective meanings that material things acquire through people’s entanglements with them. The study focuses on one particular class of objects—Mesopotamian amulets from the first millennium BC, which served as bodily adornments but were also understood to have the power to evoke affective responses through their activation in ritual performances. Referring to scholarly compendia in Mesopotamian cuneiform texts, this study demonstrates that these objects were recommended by healing experts to influence different affective states, both in oneself and others. It examines the connection between affective states and specific material features of the amulet components (consisting of minerals, metals, and plant and animal substances). Finally, Mesopotamian views of affective states and their management are compared with those of contemporary cognitive-affective science. This comparison shows that although there are some analogies, there are also important differences that depend mainly on different understandings of the human mind and agency. byUlrike SteinertJohannes Gutenberg University Mainzusteiner@unimainz.deandGiovanna ColombettiUniversity of ExeterG.Colombetti@exeter.ac.uk

The article investigates how dancers can actively shape and handle the ways they are affected throughout their artistic practices. To do so, we adopt a phenomenological-ethnographic approach, analysing the dance-artist Kitt Johnson's site-specific performance production called Mellemrum ('the space between spaces'). We put ethnographically based interview data in a dialectical interaction with the existing notions of affectivity and affective scaffolding — showing their usefulness, while also noting the need for the further notion of what we call affective engagement. This notion, we argue, is needed to account for how artists actively handle their affective involvements. Specifically, as we show, in Mellemrum the dancers deliberately and strategically juggle between (i) a self-affective engagement, (ii) an affective engagement with the environment (space and people), and(iii) an affective-aesthetic engagement with the choreography and artistic ideas of the performance.

Recent analytic-philosophical works in the field of situated cognition have proposed to conceptualize the self as deeply entwined with the environment, and even as constituted by it. A common move has been to characterize the self in narrative terms, and then to argue that the narrative self is partly constituted by narratives about the past that are scaffolded (shaped and maintained) by, or distributed over, a variety of objects that can rekindle episodic memories. While we are sympathetic to these approaches, here we propose a different strategy to situate the self—one which can be seen as complementing the narrative one, and which draws from concepts and ideas central to the phenomenological-existentialist tradition. We suggest, first, that the self has a sense of its past not just via narratives and episodic memories, but in virtue of being embodied and thus, importantly, sedimented (in other words, it has, or rather is, a body memory). Embodiment and sedimentation, in turn, always necessarily imply an environment or a situation, entailing that the self is also inherently situated. Second, we discuss the future-oriented dimension of selfhood, and argue that we understand ourselves as projected into the future, again not necessarily only narratively and reflectively, but also tacitly, in a bodily and inherently situated way.

The main topic of this chapter is the experience of incorporating objects into the sense of self, specifically in the sense of being a bodily or corporeal self. It has long been observed that using tools can lead to experiencing them no longer as external objects, but as constitutive of the lived body. Specifically, discussions of incorporation have focused on the body schema. In this chapter, I draw attention to the fact that we can incorporate objects in other ways because we experience ourselves as bodily not just in the sense implied by the notion of the body schema. Specifically, we can incorporate objects into the body image and into the seen body. Importantly, these forms of incorporation are not mutually exclusive, but usually coexist in experience.

We agree with Smrdu that pain cannot be reduced to a neurophysiological event and we welcome a (micro-) phenomenological investigation of pain experience. However, we do not think such an investigation can provide sufficient support for either a 5E theory of pain, or (just) an enactive one. A 5E theory of pain would require a clarification of how the 5Es fit together. An enactive account would require a "circulation" between first- and third-person data.

Embodied Self-Referentiality Giovanna Colombetti (bio) Glas's rich article makes several useful points about both anxiety and enactivism, and about how enactivism can help to conceptualize anxiety in a suitably complex way. I agree that we need to characterize anxiety as an embedded, context-sensitive and temporally evolving phenomenon with layered symptoms. As Glas points out, the enactive approach has useful conceptual tools for doing so, because of its incorporation of the theoretical apparatus of dynamical systems theory. I am sympathetic with most of what Glas says about this point, so I shall not dwell on it any further. I want to focus instead on Glas's discussion of self-referentiality, which I found interesting and valuable but also in need of further explication, and possibly not wholly consistent with enactivism. Mainly as an invitation for Glas to say more about this notion, in this commentary I explain where I think his understanding of selfreferentiality appears to diverge from some of the core tenets of enactivism. On page 39, Glas writes that "emotions are by definition self-referential. If there is no selfreferentiality, even after attempts at clarification, the putative emotion is just a physiological state or a sensation" (italics mine). I agree with him that emotions are self-referential, in the sense that they reveal something about the person undergoing the emotion. Thus anxiety, for example, reveals "one's vulnerability for being left alone" or "one's fear for failure" (p. 38. This idea is not inconsistent with the enactive approach to emotion and affectivity (although it has not been much discussed), because enactivism acknowledges, like appraisal theories of emotion do, that emotions embody and disclose our interests and values. So enactivists can agree with Glas that an episode of anxiety (as well as of anger, jealousy, and so on) indicates (signifies) something about the person undergoing it—her values, needs, and concerns. Where the passage quoted above appears to be in tension with the enactivist approach to emotion is in the assumption that "a physiological state or a sensation" is "just" that. Here Glas's claim echoes traditional, "disembodied" cognitivist accounts of emotion, according to which bodily arousal and bodily sensations, without accompanying intentional (i.e., world-directed, contentful) evaluations or judgments, are mere physiological happenings (see, e.g., Solomon, 1984; Nussbaum, 2004). Importantly, however, the enactive account of emotion rejects the dichotomy between cognitive appraisals and bodily arousal, and the accompanying assumption that bodily arousal is "just" bodily happenings, "just" or "mere" physiology (Colombetti, 2014, chapter 4). A physiological response, be it as part of jealousy or love, but also of panic, hunger or fatigue, is for enactivism a response that is meaningful for the organism undergoing it—it is, at its minimum, good or bad for the organism, and it says something about the organism's relation to the environment. It may well be that physiological responses occur without [End Page 51] the person (or even a therapist) being able to say why or what the response is about. This, however, does not make the response a meaningless "mere" physiological response. If the response does not fit into a clinical narrative and cannot be linked up with the person's beliefs and evaluations, it does not follow that it is "just" a bodily process. From an enactivist perspective, a physiological response is a sense-making activity and thus a cognitive-affective form of understanding, an implicit embodied way in which the organism appraises its situation. The upshot is that for the enactivist there are no "mere physiological states" that are not self-referential—they all say something about the organism and its inherent normativity (Di Paolo, 2005). Notice that this form of self-referentiality need not be accompanied by consciousness. A bacterium presumably does not feel anything, and yet its swimming up a sugar gradient reveals that it evaluates sugar as good for its survival. This point relates to other passages in the article that it would be useful to hear more about. For example, on page 41 Glas writes that embodying an interest is conceptually not the same as self-referentiality, but it is an empirical approximation of it. Self-referentiality is caught...

Emotions are cognitive in that they involve some level of understanding of what is going on in the world or in one's own body. The cognitive nature of the emotions, however, does not imply that they are merely "brainy." Brain and body are deeply interrelated, and emotions should therefore be regarded as thoroughly embodied. At the same time, we are also intimately familiar with mental states that clearly appear to involve the body. It is certainly important to stress that emotions are cognitive. In the history of emotion theory, however, this claim has often led to dismissing and side-lining the body. Psychological and philosophical accounts popular in the 60s and 70s illustrate this phenomenon well. The situation is different today, as most emotion theorists and affective scientists conceive of emotions as both cognitive and bodily. They regard cognitive appraisals as well as various bodily changes as central aspects, or "components," of emotion.

Existing accounts of cognitive artefacts are a useful starting point for developing the emerging notion of situated affectivity. Starting from a recent taxonomy of cognitive artefacts, I propose a taxonomy of material affective scaffolds (material objects that we use to support, shape and more generally regulate our affective states). I distinguish representational material affective scaffolds (divided into iconic, indexical and symbolic ones) from nonrepresentational ones (psychoactive and sensory ones). I conclude by pointing out that the resulting taxonomy is based not only on properties of objects but also on the user’s stance towards objects, which in turn depends on other contextual factors.

We call affective brainocentrism the tendency to privilege the brain over other parts of the organism when defining or explaining emotions. We distinguish two versions of this tendency. According to brain-sufficient, emotional states are entirely realized by brain processes. According to brain-master, emotional states are realized by both brain and bodily processes, but the latter are entirely driven by the brain: the brain is the master regulator of bodily processes. We argue that both these claims are problematic, and we draw on physiological accounts of stress to make our main case. These accounts illustrate the existence of complex interactions between the brain and endocrine systems, the immune system, the enteric nervous system, and even gut microbiota. We argue that, because of these complex brain-body interactions, the brain cannot be isolated and identified as the basis of stress. We also mention recent evidence suggesting that complex brain-body interactions characterize the physiology of depression and anxiety. Finally, we call for an alternative dynamical, systemic, and embodied approach to the study of the physiology of emotions that does not privilege the brain, but rather aims at understanding how mutually regulating brain and bodily processes jointly realize a variety of emotional states.

EDITORIAL article Front. Psychol., 25 July 2018Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology Volume 9 - 2018 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01307

The enactive approach to mind and cognition has several important implications for our understanding of affectivity. It entails that cognition is inherently affective and, relatedly, that the process of cognitive appraisal is not “purely brainy” but embodied. It also entails that a dynamical systems approach is more suitable than other conceptual frameworks to account for the variability of emotional episodes across individuals and populations, while acknowledging the important role of evolution in shaping the physiological and behavioral aspects of those episodes. Finally, the enactive approach does not entail that the material vehicles of affective episodes are necessarily only biological processes occurring inside the organism; rather, it allows extraorganismic processes to be part of the physical realizers of affectivity, and to be phenomenologically incorporated into affective experiences.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Quodlibet via the link in this record

In this paper I argue that it is misleading to regard the brain as the physical basis or “core machinery” of moods. First, empirical evidence shows that brain activity not only influences, but is in turn influenced by, physical activity taking place in other parts of the organism (such as the endocrine and immune systems). It is therefore not clear why the core machinery of moods ought to be restricted to the brain. I propose, instead, that moods should be conceived as embodied, i.e., their physical basis should be enlarged so as to comprise not just brain but also bodily processes. Second, I emphasise that moods are also situated in the world. By this I do not simply mean that moods are influenced by the world, but that they are complexly interrelated with it, in at least three different ways: they are shaped by cultural values and norms; they are materially and intersubjectively “scaffolded”; and they can even “experientially incorporate” parts of the world, i.e., include the experience of parts of the world as part of oneself.

In conveying experiences of meditation, the question of what exceeds or should resist description has been a recurrent topic of commentary in a wide array of literature including religious doctrine, meditation guides (secular and religious), and contextual accounts written by historians and social scientists. Yet, to date, this question has not significantly informed neuroscientific studies on the effects of meditation on brain and behaviour, in large part but not wholly because of the disregard for first personaccounts of experience that still characterizes neuroscience in general. By juxtaposing perspectives from non-neuroscientific accounts on the tensions and questions raised by what is and is not expressed or expressible in words, this article paves the way for a new set of possibilities in experimental contemplative neuroscience.