When Affective Relation Weighs More Than the Mug Handle: Investigating Affective Affordances

Enactive and embodied approaches to cognition are becoming increasingly interested in the affective dimension of human experience. Consistently, this issue has been addressed in empirical research, which is paying growing attention to the affective quality of social contexts by addressing motor simulations, joint actions, emotional disorders, and body psychotherapy. Still, while in the relationship between two or more agents the involvement of the affective variable, even when uninvestigated, is intrinsically evoked, in the case of the agent-object relationship the recognition of such engagement requires more specific care. In laboratory-based studies, when dealing with an object and an observer, the practical opportunities that she is able to perceive and use have been mainly operationalized referring to visual manipulable properties of the object, as shape and orientation, associated with its canonical use. Progressively empirical research introduced, and manipulated, also the physical context, and the required responses, distinguishing between functional and volumetric gestures. Are these ‘affordances’? Strictly speaking no, as these accounts clash with direct perception, but they are undoubtedly elegant approaches suitable for outlining answers (also) to most questions of ecological psychology. In light of the heated debate on affordances between philosophers and cognitive scientists, we propose to draw upon literature in both fields as our aim is twofold. (1) Exploring the great absentee of empirical investigations conducted so far: the affective dimension of perception-action coupling of our relationship with the physical context. To this end a clarification of the philosophical concept of ‘affective affordance’ would be essential. (2) Specifying some criteria of definition for this construct and suggesting an analysis of AAs in its application to the individual human agent’s practice – for our proposal to be not only theoretical, but suitable for experimental investigation, promoting a constructive dialogue between philosophy and empirical psychology.