Mindful feelings, responsible perceptions : the influence of affect and affective attention on perceptual experience

Affective realism refers to the projection of our feelings onto the world, making us perceive external stimuli in ways that are congruent to the way we feel. Although there is a useful side to affective realism, it may also reflect our implicit biases and prejudices and be used as a poor excuse to sidestep personal responsibility. The goal of this talk will be to examine certain manifestations of affective realism in perceptual experience, as well as possible metacognitive strategies to deal with them. It will pursue a promising suggestion that a particular form of attention to affect, based on the meditative practice of mindfulness, is able to monitor and control our tendency towards affective realism by providing us with an effective strategy of emotional regulation, whereby our feelings come to be experienced more as subjective reactions than as properties of the world. This allows for more flexibility in the way we deal with external stimuli, and emphasizes that we are, to a certain extent, responsible for the way we perceive the world to be and how we react to it based on these perceptions.