Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item The Feeling of Persuasion: A Cognitive Rhetorical Account of the Emotional Appeal(2019) Mozafari, Cameron; Israel, Michael; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emotion often takes the back seat in contemporary rhetorical investigation, as emotions are treated as subjective reactions rather than the result of deliberate forms of argumentation. In classical antiquity, rhetorical training for emotional persuasion required students not only to learn what sorts of arguments could move their audiences but, more importantly, how that movement was composed linguistically and psychologically. Yet as history progressed and disciplines branched, the formal study of language and cognition separated from the study of rhetoric, resulting in a conceptually stunted understanding of the emotional appeal. This dissertation returns to classical questions and theories of emotional persuasion but does so with insights from contemporary emotion science and cognitive linguistics. Emotion is understood as neither purely physiological nor purely conceptual but rather as embodied conceptualizations grounded in culture-specific scripts. The dissertation lays out a model for understanding how non-emotive language links up to emotion activation through the introduction of the theater of the mind model, an expansion on the stage model of Cognitive Grammar. It then traces three strategies for arousing and controlling audiences’ emotions from classical rhetorical theory: the enthymematic activation of emotion concepts, the enargeiac amplification of emotion events, and the mitigation of potential threats so as not to excite emotions. Analyzing discourse from politics, fundraising letters, and college student writing, this project argues, contrary to popular opinion, that emotional appeals are not antithetical to reason but instead very much dependent on reason, in that they act as grounds for arousing and guiding inferences in predictable ways for rhetorical purposes.Item Nuclear reactions: Testing a message-centered extension of enduring predictions about expert and lay person perceptions of and reactions to risk(2011) Evans, Sarah Anne; Turner, Monique M; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this dissertation was to critically examine differences in risk perceptions among experts and lay people. In particular, this project aimed to address inconsistent definitions of "expert" found in the existing literature and to test the predictions of the psychometric paradigm in the context of communication. To examine the effect of message features and expertise on risk perceptions and evaluations of risk characteristics, this dissertation employed a 2 (emotional appeal: fear, anger) x 2 (message topic: nuclear energy, traffic accidents) x 4 (expertise: general risk assessors, traffic safety experts, nuclear energy experts, lay people) between-participants design. The results replicated some findings of the existing research. First, in the main, experts reported lower risk perceptions than lay people. Second, expressed fear led to increased risk perceptions compared to expressed anger. This study also advanced theory regarding risk perception and risk communication in two critical ways. First, differences were found not only between experts and lay people but also among the various expert groups, and, even in the expert groups, these differences were influenced in meaningful ways by the messages viewed. Second, this study demonstrated the potential for messages to affect not only risk perceptions but also the evaluation of risk characteristics, a possibility not previously tested. Specifically, the findings indicated that emotional appeals and message topic can affect evaluations of risk characteristics for risks both related to the message and unrelated to the message. The messages' effects on evaluations of risk characteristics were, in fact, more pronounced than the effects of the messages on general risk perceptions. The results suggest the factors argued to be predictive of risk perception (dread risk and knowledge risk), presented previously as inherent characteristics of risks rather than as targets for influence, can be altered through strategic communication. Both theoretical and applied implications of these results are discussed, and recommendations for future research are provided.