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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

tential actions performed by the body” (16). But such acknowledg-
ment tends to remain simplified and abstract. Literature is one means
of giving richness to reflections on practical engagement. Of course,
art may distort real experience and must always be approached crit-
ically for that reason. Nonetheless, it presents us with nuanced rep-
resentations of complex situations. In the case of successful, enduring
works, these situations appear to have widespread resonance for re-
cipients. In contrast, empirical research on real life situations—for
example, diary-based research—poses problems of idiosyncrasy in
the test subjects’ relations to those situations, distortion produced by
the study itself, and even problems of how to represent the real
events, selecting from them and construing their properties in order
to define precisely what test subjects are experiencing. Literary study
is, again, far from a perfect means of psychological research. But all
forms of research have limitations. In each case, the key point is to
integrate different forms of research in the hope that they will con-
verge on systematic descriptions and explanations. 3
Again, emotion is not absent in research on space and time.
However, treatment of emotion in this context tends to be limited in
its scope. Perhaps the most obvious research treating time and emo-
tion is in the area of memory. But this tends to focus on topics that
are, so to speak, laboratory-friendly, such as emotion and vividness
4
of memories, or mood and recall. Of course, the whole idea of emo-
tional memory is relevant here as well, but that too does not address
the importance of emotion for the ongoing experience and processing
of time or temporal relations. In short, this work on emotion and
memory is extremely valuable. However, it is very restricted, and
does not address the ongoing, emotionally nuanced, mood-inflected,
and shifting micro-affective processes of life. 5

3 For further discussion of the bearing of literature on psychological research,
see chapter one of Hogan, 2011b.
4 For example, McGaugh explores emotion and “The Making of Lasting Mem-
ories” (to quote the subtitle of his book on Memory and Emotion). Though they
treat a wider range of sub-topics, the same basic point holds for the essays in
Reisberg’s and Hertel’s valuable collection on Memory and Emotion.
5 An apparent exception is Francisco Varela, but his investigations are more
broadly theoretical, and not, as far as I am aware, typically embedded in the
particularity that characterizes real life as well as literature.

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