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

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.

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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.