Affective Automotive User Interfaces–Reviewing the State of Driver Affect Research and Emotion Regulation in the Car

Affective technology offers exciting opportunities to improve road safety by catering to human emotions. Modern car interiors enable the contactless detection of user states, paving the way for a systematic promotion of safe driver behavior through emotion regulation. We review the current literature regarding the impact of emotions on driver behavior and analyze the state of emotion regulation approaches in the car. We summarize challenges for affective interaction in the form of technological hurdles and methodological considerations, as well as opportunities to improve road safety by reinstating drivers into an emotionally balanced state. The purpose of this review is to outline the community’s combined knowledge for interested researchers, to provide a focussed introduction for practitioners, raise awareness for cultural aspects, and to identify future directions for affective interaction in the car.

Embodied cognition in the booth

From an enactivist perspective, cognition can be described as embodied, since it is determined by our bodily, multisensory, affective interaction with the environment, in particular by our social interaction. In recent years, interpreting has been defined as a multimodal, embodied cognitive activity of inter-lingual mediation, and research on gestures in conference interpreting has found that simultaneous interpreters, although not visible for their audience, do gesture in the booth. However, gestures in interpreting are yet understudied. This paper presents an exploratory, in-depth descriptive study with the aim of generating hypotheses about the cognitive functions of gestures in simultaneous interpreting. To this end, we investigate the different types of gesture that emerge throughout a whole process of simultaneous interpreting, in conjunction with the concurrent speech, the interpreter’s interaction with her environment and her own description of her production of mental images and gestures. The research question guiding our investigation is: What functions do the different types of gestures play in the interpreting process? The results suggest that, in the analyzed material, referential gestures tend to support the construction of meanings, while the main role of pragmatic gestures consists in helping to manage the progress of the interpreting process.

Embodying Charismatic Affect(If): the Example of Bruce Lee (Translation into Russian)

While the concept of charisma is widely used in the social sciences, its embodied nature is less thoroughly explored and theorised. This paper revisits the key embodied characteristics of Weber's sociology of charisma and re-interprets these using Shilling's (2005, 2013) umbrella notions of the body as a source and location of and means for society as a way of analysing the idea of the charismatic body as a force for social change. It then draws on a range of embodied concepts to illuminate how charisma is significant channel of infra and inter-corporeal affective interaction between “leaders” and their followers. In particular, Freund's (2009) social synaesthesia and bio-agency, Massumi's (2002) perspective of affect and the moving body, Thrift's (2010) charismatic celebrity, allure and glamour, Mellor and Shilling's (1997) sensual solidarities, and Seyfert's (2012) conception of affectif. To develop and illustrate this perspective of the charismatically affective body in action, the life of film star and martial artist Bruce Lee (1940–1973) is utilised.

A Reading of Community

The thinking about the idea, forms and practices of communitas has developed a specific discourse in political philosophical writing since the 1980s. This paper retraces the ways in which Jean-Luc Nancy established a “community of writing [and] the writing of community,” how in his view community compears with philosophical writing. Taking Nancy’s discussion as a ground line, the author modulates the perspective on writing—as both text and practice—and focuses on the confrontation with community in reading. By poetologically tackling Nancy’s essay “The Confronted Community” (2001), she investigates into the text’s performing of community and the affective interaction between text and corporeality. Her reading of Nancy’s writing thus activates not only its ecstatic valences leading towards the proposed community of those who have no community; it also uncovers the aesthetic, social and political implications that emanate from Nancy’s writing in this situated reading. Therefore, this paper analytically retraces the textual micro-performances of community in writing as a performative confrontation entailed in reading.

From Analytical Аnthropology to Generative Anthropology

This article discusses the role of the technical in V.A. Podoroga's project of studying the literature worlds as archives of human experience. On the level of content, among many other components of these worlds he distinguished working and non-working machines, “gizmos” and various optical devices, including the mechanic eye, camera, mounting, etc. Formally, the action of these machines can be assessed as alienation, though in the context of modern media studies and exploration of the perspectives of anthropology, they can also be described as a problematic contact zone between the human and non-human, with a bias towards breaking the already historically disrupted bodily-affective interaction with the “outside”. Studies of Andrei Platonov's show the most radical interaction with the technical, in this case causing dissimilation of the human. However, even for this “inhuman” material, Podoroga chooses a form of human-measured approximation and distancing, which allows defending the position of an active researcher, observer, anthropologist. His efforts produce a kind of reconstruction, which at a certain time distance reveals the “seams”, “folds”, “cuts”, “plexuses”, “gaps” that formed at once the experience of the body and experience of writing. This is how the components of literature worlds are extracted, and from them “a picture of the universe can be deduced”. Although an external position to technics is considered to be the only guarantee of the human, even if it is strange, symptomatic, seizure-like, a different understanding of the technical is possible. Without claiming that a “machine” can assemble components in the absence of the observer's (reader's) comprehension ability, it seems nevertheless possible to relate the technical to more general principles: the methods of dispersion and gathering that form the form, the principles of intervalization and binding the heterogeneous, and most importantly, the principle of generating conditions for detecting an event. Then it will be necessary to clarify the relationship between techne and literature in the broader sense of poiesis, in the process of which elements can be formed from the indivisible “compressed”.

Embodying Charismatic Affect(If): the Example of Bruce Lee

While the concept of charisma is widely used in the social sciences, its embodied nature is less thoroughly explored and theorised. This paper revisits the key embodied characteristics of Weber's sociology of charisma and re-interprets these using Shilling's (2005, 2013) umbrella notions of the body as a source and location of and means for society as a way of analysing the idea of the charismatic body as a force for social change. It then draws on a range of embodied concepts to illuminate how charisma is significant channel of infra and inter-corporeal affective interaction between "leaders" and their followers. In particular, Freund's (2009) social synaesthesia and bio-agency, Massumi's (2002) perspective of affect and the moving body, Thrift's (2010) charismatic celebrity, allure and glamour, Mellor and Shilling's (1997) sensual solidarities, and Seyfert's (2012) conception of affectif. To develop and illustrate this perspective of the charismatically affective body in action, the life of film star and martial artist Bruce Lee (1940–1973) is utilised.

Evangelicals, Authenticity, and Sacrament

This chapter examines evangelical worship music as an environment in which ideals of congregational singing focus particularly strongly on dimensions of affective interaction. Recent evangelical discourse has had a lot to say about ideas of authenticity and sacrament as they are present in musical worship. This chapter examines the potential for these terms to be understood as different varieties of resonant interaction as sound is either expressed outward from the worshiper into their surrounding environment or received inward as something that carries with it something from God. It highlights the limits of understanding these phenomena through a simple inward/outward dichotomy. Rather, it suggests that each relies on a range of different back-and-forth sonic and more-than-sonic interactions.