Ayşe Uslu

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

Language Sciences May 15, 2026 Ayşe Uslu

Affective framing—a pre-reflective bodily orientation that primes agents toward certain affordances, concerns, and relational trajectories—is a constitutive mechanism binding together two key enactivist accounts of social cognition. Participatory Sense-Making emphasizes co-regulatory dynamics between coupled agents, while the Distributed Language Perspective highlights multiscalar, sense-saturated interactivity incorporating cultural and material resources. Affective framing organizes co-regulation, integrates non-local resources, and enables self-organizing coordination across heterogeneous timescales. Analysis of the Invoice Case and the Finding Zoe episode demonstrates that affective framing is not a byproduct but the binding force giving coordination direction, salience, and problem-solving capacity, bridging moment-to-moment coupling with long arcs of history and culture.