5 - Affective Mobility

Summary

MEMORY IS NOT ONLY a matter of knowledge and beliefs about the past; memory is also about the feelings and attitudes we attach to the past. In fact, some consider that emotion is the key to memory. Assmann says that: ‘only emotionally cathected forms of communication bring structure, perspective, relevance, definition and horizon into memory’. Attitudes, which express evaluative emotions of favourableness or unfavourableness towards an object, are thus an essential part of memory. In the experimental school of social psychology attitudes are considered to be ‘pre-formed’ inner mental states that influence behaviour. They are categorized as explicit (consciously endorsed) or implicit (involuntary or unconscious), and different methods are used to investigate them: questionnaires for explicit attitudes, and indirect tests for implicit attitudes. In the discursive school of social psychology attitudes are considered to be ‘performed’ in evaluation talk which is produced in order to achieve specific functions in discursive contexts. Attitudes may be posited as psychological entities, but in the methodological approach adopted here it is recognized that all means of investigation are mediated, whether discursive contexts (chronicles, newspapers), or a quantitative survey; these constitute our sources for the study of attitudes.