The Notion Of Ideational Triggers For Affect Reconsidered

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 126-7):

AFFECT in verbal and visual texts is always triggered by ideational phenomena. These can be entities or occurrences of any kind. Ideational triggers for expressions of FACIAL AFFECT in Coraline may be sourced via a diversity of perceptual channels that are interpreted as available to the character in particular instances. A taxonomy of types of perceptual channel is presented in Figure 5.5.

The triggering information may be sourced externally through an auditory perceptual channel (as sound or silence) or a visual, olfactory, gustatory or tactile one (Feng and O’Halloran, 2013). Alternatively, it can be sourced internally through reflection, memory or imagination. In interpreting the trigger for a particular facial expression of emotion in multimodal discourse such as that in Coraline more than one perceptual channel is likely to play a part.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, with the notion of ideational triggers for emotion, the authors have left the interpersonal domain of appraisal by emotional attitude and entered the ideational domain of cause and effect (reason and result). The ideational trigger, here, is the Phenomenon/Agent of an impinging mental Process of emotion (Music pleases me). This notion, however, ignores the distinction with the Phenomenon/Range of an emanating mental Process of emotion (I like music).

[2] To be clear, the taxonomy of types of perceptual channel corresponds to a taxonomy of types perceptual Phenomenon/Agent ('triggering information') of an impinging mental Process of emotion.

[3] To be clear, internal triggering information corresponds to a cognitive Phenomenon/Agent of an impinging mental Process of emotion.