Affective framing in self-organizing interaction: a cognitive event analysis across two cases

Summary

Affective framing—the pre-reflective bodily orientation that shapes how agents coordinate—is proposed as the missing link that connects two prominent enactivist accounts of social cognition. Participatory sense-making explains moment-to-moment co-regulation, while the distributed language perspective shows how interaction draws on cultural, normative, and material resources across timescales. This paper argues that affective framing determines which affordances become salient, how non-local resources are integrated, and how coordination maintains coherence. Analyses of two real interactional episodes—the Invoice Case and the Finding Zoe episode—demonstrate that affective framing organizes co-regulation, integrates distributed resources, and enables self-organizing, sense-saturated coordination.

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Abstract

This paper proposes affective framing as a constitutive aspect of social cognition as an answer to the tension within enactivism concerning how to understand the relation between coupling and interactivity in social cognition. Within enactivist accounts of social interaction, Participatory Sense-Making (PSP) emphasizes the co-regulatory dynamics through which coupling between agents acquires their own autonomy, the Distributed Language Perspective (DLP) shows how interactivity unfolds across multiscalar, sense saturated dynamics that incorporate non-local cultural, normative and material resources. Both perspectives are indispensable, yet the deeper question of how coupling becomes interactivity, how moment-to-moment co-regulation links up with the long arcs of history, language and culture that saturate human coordination in the wild experience, calls for a constitutive layer across these scales. This paper argues that affective framing, understood as the pre-reflective bodily orientation on which self-organizing coordination depends, determines which affordances solicit engagement, which non-local resources become salient, and how coordination sustains its coherence across heterogeneous timescales. It is argued that affective framing, through which agents are selectively primed toward certain affordances, concerns, and relational trajectories, is not a supplementary layer but the binding force that links PSP's account of co-regulation in relational autonomy with DLP's account of sense-saturated interactivity, giving coordination its direction, salience, and capacity for problem-solving. By foregrounding affective framing, the paper shows how coupled agents cross the threshold into self-organization and how distributed interactions form meaningful patterns of coordination without collapsing into computational functionalism. The argument is developed through Cognitive Event Analysis—a methodology designed within DLP precisely to trace the multiscalar, self-organizing dynamics of real interactional episodes, and therefore the natural analytical lens through which affective framing's constitutive role can be demonstrated empirically. I first revisit Steffensen's (2013) Invoice Case to show how affective framing structures the dynamics of solution-probing. I then present cognitive event analysis of the Finding Zoe episode, an emergency-driven instance of distributed co–agency based on autoethnographic data. Across both cases, affective framing emerges not as a byproduct but as a constitutive mechanism: it organizes co-regulation, integrates non-local resources, and enables the emergence of self-organizing, sense-saturated coordination.

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