Assessing sonic affects in everyday life: looking for metacognition and metaemotion

The purpose of this paper is to show how material gathering and elicitation can induce metacognition and metaemotions in interviewees and its usefulness for the study of affective phenomena.

The author will draw on the exploratory study on sound affects conducted with five individuals in Lisbon’s metropolitan area in order to discuss these aspects. After presenting the methodology, the author will address the concepts of metacognition and metaemotion. Afterwards, the author will explain how these occur during the gathering of data by ordinary people and the use of elicitation of materials during interviews.

Metacognitive and metaemotional experiences can be triggered through material gathering and their elicitation during interviews with the purpose of identifying aspects of the everyday experience that are usually unnoticed. Furthermore, they are instrumental to obtain empirical data that illustrates subjects in their everyday lives as simultaneously affective-reactive and reflexive, meaning-making individuals.

The interview has often been disregarded as a method for interpreting affective phenomena. However, the author argue that this method remains very useful to address the distinct interpretations that subjects make of themselves and their emplaced experiences, by calling for attention to the role of metacognition and metaemotions, an instrumental yet unrecognized tool for interpreting affective phenomena.