College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Points of Learning Instead of States of Being: Reimagining the Role of Emotions in Teacher Development through Compassionate and Developmental Supports(2020) Stump , Megan; Madigan Peercy, Megan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The existing research on second-language (L2) teacher emotion presents emotional experiences as largely descriptive: we know what emotions L2 teachers feel, and how emotions impact L2 teachers and their pedagogy. However, current framing of emotion in L2 teaching does little to examine how L2 teachers navigate emotional experiences and how emotions factor into their learning and development process. I fill this gap in the literature by studying how L2 teacher preparation programs can support pre-service L2 teachers’ (L2 PSTs) expressed emotions and how this emotional support may impact L2 PSTs’ conceptions of their teaching and themselves as teachers. I approach this study from a sociocultural perspective which posits that the cognitive and emotional minds function as a dialectical unity and therefore, positions cognition and emotion as central to teacher development. Central to the findings for this study is a better understanding of how teacher educators support L2 PST emotion and what this support does for L2 PSTs. Specifically, I highlight two types of emotional support that teacher educators may provide to L2 PSTs: Compassionate Emotional Support (CES) and Developmental Emotional Support (DES). CES focuses specifically on emotions by encouraging L2 PSTs in successful and challenging times, normalizing their emotions, and providing multiple opportunities for them to share their emotions. Conversely, DES focuses on cognitive aspects of emotions by exploring alternative ways of thinking, doing, perceiving, and understanding L2 PSTs’ teaching. When L2 PSTs have a greater cognitive pool of options from which to orient themselves toward their teaching, they appear to be able to change their thinking, feelings, and activity related to their teaching. Essentially, L2 PSTs transform as a result of DES. My findings clearly indicate that emotions signify areas of significance to L2 PSTs and thus, are rich areas for exploration for learning. Teacher educators should focus on supporting cognitive understandings connected to expressed emotions to help foster L2 PST growth and development. When teacher educators approach emotions as being rooted in cognition, they are able to reimagine emotions as points of learning instead of states of being.Item The Issue with Issues Management: An Engagement Approach to Integrate Gender and Emotion into Issues Management(2016) Madden, Stephanie; Sommerfeldt, Erich; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using sexual assault on college campuses as a context for interrogating issues management, this study offers a normative model for inclusive issues management through an engagement approach that can better account for the gendered and emotional dimensions of issues. Because public relations literature and research have offered little theoretical or practical guidance for how issues managers can most effectively deal with issues such as sexual assault, this study represents a promising step forward. Results for this study were obtained through 32 in-depth interviews with university issues managers, six focus groups with student populations, and approximately 92 hours of participant observation. By focusing on inclusion, this revised model works to have utility for an array of issues that have previously fallen outside of the dominant masculine and rationale spheres that have worked to silence marginalized publics’ experiences. Through adapting previous issues management models to focus on inclusion at the heart of a strategic process, and engagement as the strategy for achieving this, this study offers a framework for ensuring more voices are heard—which enables organizations to more effectively communicate with their publics. Additionally, findings from this research may also help practitioners at different types of organizations develop better, and proactive, communication strategies for handling emotional and gendered issues as to avoid negative media attention and work to change organizational culture.Item "You've Really Got a Hold on Me": The Power and Emotion in Women's Correspondence in Fifteenth-Century Italy(2012) McLean, Nicole Lynn; Bianchini, Janna; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the lives of Alessandra Strozzi and Lucrezia de'Medici of Florence. The fifteenth-century in Italy saw women's power declining, and patrician women used letter writing to enter the public sphere and exert power. This study analyzes socially constructed emotional themes in women's correspondence which is in concert with scholars like Barbara Rosenwein in that it seeks to instead situate emotions in specific historical contexts. For Alessandra, we see how she successfully employs the emotions of guilt and shame to manipulate her sons into behaving properly, as these emotions were closely connected to Italian culture. Second, in the patronage letters written to Lucrezia by potential clients, we see the use of motherly emotions by clients in hopes that Lucrezia will essentially fill a mother's role, helping them with their hardships. Even though client's letters represent a "fictive" mother/child relationship, they are a testament to Lucrezia's power as a mother.Item Frame Problems, Fodor's Challenge, and Practical Reason(2008) Deise, Erich Christopher; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)By bringing the frame problem to bear on psychology, Fodor argues that the interesting activities of mind are not amenable to computational modeling. Following exegesis of the frame problem and Fodor's claims, I argue that underlying Fodor's argument is an unsatisfiable normative principle of rationality that in turn commits him to a particular descriptive claim about the nature of our minds. I argue that the descriptive claim is false and that we should reject the normative principle in favor of one that is at least in principle satisfiable. From this it follows, I argue, that we have no reason for thinking the activities of our minds to be, as a matter of principle, unmodelable. Drawing upon Baars' Global Workspace theory, I next outline an alternative framework that provides a means by which the set of engineering challenges raised by Fodor might be met. Having sketched this alternative, I turn next to consider some of the frame problems arising in practical reason and decision-making. Following discussion of the nature of emotion and its influence on practical reason and decision-making, I argue that consideration of emotion provides one means by which we might contend with some of the frame problem instances that arise in that domain.Item A Roles Approach to Conflict Strategies: Modeling the Effects of Self- and Other-Role Enactment on Conflict Strategies Through Goals and Emotion(2008) Xie, Xiaoying; Cai, Deborah A.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation addresses how, in a conflict situation, individuals enact different roles and how their responses to the other party's role enactment affect the strategies they choose to handle the conflict. A model is proposed to delineate the cognitive and emotional process through which the focal individual and the other party's role enactment affect the focal individual's conflict strategies. The model was first examined using the data based on participants' recall of a past conflict and their answers to questions that assessed behaviors (N = 265). Next, a laboratory experiment was used to test a model in which a conflict was induced and each participant interacted with a confederate to complete a decision making task (N = 261). The focal person's obligation to his or her general role and the other party's expectation violations were manipulated. Participants' embracement of their situated roles, perceived goal importance, emotion, and the use of four types of conflict strategies were measured. Results indicated that obligation predicted the use of relational-protective strategies through the mediating effect of relational goal importance. Embracement of the situated role was found to directly predict the use of a relational-protective confronting strategy but indirectly predict the use of a relational-disruptive confronting strategy through situated goal importance. The other's expectation violation changed the perceived goal importance and the emotion of the focal individual, which predicted the use of relational-disruptive strategies. However, the main reason for the effect of expectation violation on relational-disruptive strategies was individuals' direct reaction to the other's behavior rather than anger. Interpretations and implications of the results, the limitations of the study, theoretical and methodological contributions of the study, and future directions were discussed.Item The Role and Effect of Discrete Emotion in Negative Political Advertising(2007-03-14) Underhill , Jill Cornelius; Turner, Monique M.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is based on the idea that anger, guilt, and fear have a unique impact on persuasive outcomes in political campaigns. Using a negative political advertising context, it was hypothesized that participants would report varied amounts of persuasiveness, varying attitudes toward the target candidate, and dissimilar intention to vote based on the emotion induced and the political orientation (liberalism) of the participant. It was also hypothesized that felt emotion would be highly correlated with persuasion, attitude toward the candidate, and voting intention. Furthermore, it was posited that participants' degree of liberalism would affect their response to the negative message. It was also predicted efficacy would play an important role in facilitating persuasion, attitude toward the candidate, and intention to vote. The data provided mixed support for the predictions. This potential trend toward significance encourages further investigation into the unique effects of fear, anger, and guilt.