Darren Ellis

New media technologies are becoming an increasingly prominent constituent of everyday living, with their proliferation presenting new challenges to key aspects of the self, namely agency and identity. The potential recalibration of these notions comes about through new forms of agency being produced when information technologies play an increasingly powerful role in our lives. In this context agency is not something that can be reified and easily measured, or understood as solely intentional human action. Instead, agency is understood as something that comes to be as practices of life making. We take up these ideas in relation to people’s experiences with information technologies. Through semi-structured interviews with members of the public from London and the South East of the UK, we analyse how information technologies potentially recalibrate people’s subjectivity through informational agency. Participants’ engagements with information technologies are more nuanced and complex than a ‘either good or bad’ distinction. This is one of the analytic foci of the paper, as information technologies, even when viewed with suspicion or as creating concern, are often willfully utilised due to the perceived benefits they can bring. We focus on the potential technologisation of identity and subjectivity through arguing that new forms of digitally mediated selves are produced when daily lives come to be defined more by information than by the flesh and blood of our bodies. We conclude by drawing attention to challenges facing our experiences, and understandings of, subjectivity brought about by the relentless informationalisation of life.

This book analyses historical, philosophical, psychological, biological, sociological, post-structural, and technological perspectives of emotion that it argues are important for a viable social psychology of emotion. It begins with early ancient philosophical conceptualisations of pathos and ends with analytical discussions of the transmission of affect which permeate the digital revolution.

"This impressive book is simultaneously erudite, comprehensive and accessible. Ellis & Tucker place the social psychology of emotion in its historical context, whilst also providing an introduction to some of the contemporary social scientific work associated with the ‘affective turn’. In so doing they draw out the sometimes unexpected continuities, discontinuities and uncertainties that have characterised this field, whilst clearly demonstrating the continual relevance of emotional phenomena to social psychology. With clear aims for each chapter and suggestions for further reading throughout, this book should be a valuable resource for students and researchers alike.

John Cromby

Loughborough University"

Theories of affect have become an increasingly popular tool with which to conceptualise and analyse subjectivity. Of particular interest to us in this article are expositions that have sought to bring to the forefront of analysis notions of excess and
virtuality on the grounds that they bear fruit in relation to a potential politics of change. Although contemporary notions of virtuality and excess are highly attractive, they also
bring us to one of the more unsettling features of affect theory: How is it possible to suitably analyse the realms of virtuality and excess due to their non-representational qualities? To begin to address this problem, we explore process-oriented theories of
virtuality in relation to the Marxist process theory of Ernst Bloch, and draw on the recent protest movements against cuts to Higher Education funding as an example of what we term ‘affective hope’, a concept indebted to Bloch’s notion of educated hope.

Abstract: This article discusses the ways in which individualism has become more prevalent in Western culture in recent years, creating a 'culture of narcissism', in which people are dependent on various forms of therapy as the everyday world has become an atomised space of interpersonal alienation. Increasingly, perhaps, we imagine that the proper place for emotional talk and reflection is the professionalized and relatively costly space of the therapeutic encounter.

Evidence generated within the emotional disclosure paradigm (EDP) suggests that talking or writing about emotional experiences produces health benefits, but recent meta-analyses have questioned its efficacy. Studies within the EDP typically rely upon a unidimensional and relatively unsophisticated notion of emotional inhibition, and tend to use quantitative forms of content analysis to identify associations between percentages of word types and positive or negative health outcomes. In this article, we use a case study to show how a qualitative discourse analysis has the potential to identify more of the complexity linking the disclosure practices and styles that may be associated with emotional inhibition. This may illuminate the apparent lack of evidence for efficacy of the EDP by enabling more comprehensive theorisations of the variations within it.