Critical Feeling

How can we develop the sensitivity necessary for playing music or making crafts? How can teachers make their lessons interesting? In what ways can consumers avoid undue influence? How do we acquire refined tastes, or come to believe what we want to believe? Addressing these issues and providing an account for tackling personal and societal problems, Rolf Reber combines insights from psychology, philosophy, and education to introduce the concept of 'critical feeling'. While many people are familiar with the concept of critical thinking, critical feeling denotes the strategic use of feelings in order to optimize an outcome. Reber discusses the theoretical and empirical foundations of critical feeling and provides an overview of applications, including well-being, skill learning, personal relationships, business, politics, school, art, morality, and religion. This original and thought-provoking study will interest a broad range of researchers, students, and practitioners.

"Tom was a young engineer employed at one of the country's largest steel companies. He had been an outstanding individual performer, and now he was a new manager, leading a team responsible for producing steel for a major automobile company. After just one week on the job, Tom and his team met with over 20 engineers from that other company. It was a rude awakening. I sat in a room with maybe 20 or 25 of their engineers for the annual quality evaluation of suppliers. And I learned for the first time that we were in the bottom of the bottom quartile as a supplier. We had lousy quality, we had lousy invoicing, we had lousy on-time delivery. And this was my first general manager role! I had grown up as an engineer. And how did Tom respond to this unexpected shock? I had a holy shit moment! I had been in the job literally a week. So part of it was, 'Oh my God, what the hell am I going to do?' Also I thought about how my guys had been in the business for a while, and I thought, 'What the hell have you been doing?' And I was thinking, 'I'm going to clean house!' But then... I've learned that you just can't react viscerally every time something comes up because it just scares people away. So Tom listened attentively as the engineers from the auto company presented their litany of complaints. When they finally finished, he stood up and said, "I wouldn't blame you if you fired us as a supplier. But if you give us a chance to fix these problems, I guarantee you that that we will not have this kind of meeting next year." When Tom met with his team the next morning to discuss the situation, he started by just listening to them. They went on for some time complaining about how the company and their previous boss had made it impossible for them to provide good products and service. Rather than disagree with them or join in pointing fingers at others, Tom listened. "I didn't think about it at the time, but that first couple of hours was very cathartic for them. My focus was not on beating anyone up but rather, what can we do to fix this?" The team responded positively to Tom's approach. The next year when they met, the auto company told Tom that they "never saw any business turn around that quickly in one year." As a result, they began giving Tom's company more business, and Tom went on to a distinguished career, eventually becoming one of his company's top executives"--

How can we develop the sensitivity necessary for playing music or making crafts? How can teachers make their lessons interesting? In what ways can consumers avoid undue influence? How do we acquire refined tastes, or come to believe what we want to believe? Addressing these issues and providing an account for tackling personal and societal problems, Rolf Reber combines insights from psychology, philosophy, and education to introduce the concept of 'critical feeling'. While many people are familiar with the concept of critical thinking, critical feeling denotes the strategic use of feelings in order to optimize an outcome. Reber discusses the theoretical and empirical foundations of critical feeling and provides an overview of applications, including well-being, skill learning, personal relationships, business, politics, school, art, morality, and religion. This original and thought-provoking study will interest a broad range of researchers, students, and practitioners.

Stop negative thoughts, assuage anxiety, and live in the moment with these fun, easy games from improv expert Clay Drinko. If you’ve been feeling lost lately, you’re not alone! Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans were experiencing record levels of loneliness and anxiety. And in our current political turmoil, it’s safe to say that people are looking for new tools to help them feel more present, positive, and in sync with the world. So what better way to get there than play? In Play Your Way Sane, Dr. Clay Drinko offers 120 low-key, accessible activities that draw on the popular principles of improv comedy to help you tackle your everyday stress and reconnect with the people around you. Divided into twelve fun sections, including “Killing Debbie Downer” and “Thou Shalt Not Be Judgy,” the games emphasize openness, reciprocation, and active listening as the keys to a mindful and satisfying life. Whether you’re looking to improve your personal relationships, find new meaning at work, or just survive our trying times, Play Your Way Sane offers serious self-help with a side of Second City sass.

Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

DIVA collection of essays examining theories of affect and how they relate to issues of performance and performativity./div