Communication
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2223
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item CULTURAL DEPENDENCE OF EMOTION-REGULATION STRATEGIES(2022) Hundal, Savreen; Fink, Edward L.; Waks, Leah; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emotion-regulation strategies are attempts to impact emotions within oneself or others (McRae & Gross, 2020). Strategies such as mindfulness and reappraisal are associated with benefits to well-being and mental health. However, the influence of culture on mindfulness and reappraisal has not been established. Emotion-regulation strategies are culturally dependent. It is through cultural socialization that cultural values are transmitted. Cultural values give meaning to emotion and emotion-regulation strategies. This dissertation proposes a theoretical model in which (1) cultural values predict mindfulness and reappraisal emotion-regulation strategies, and (2) the effectiveness of both strategies is assessed using the emotional dimensions of valence, arousal, power, and surprise. Three pilot studies were conducted to test the validity of emotion-regulation instructional messaging, to create a negatively valenced emotion-eliciting video stimulus, and to assess the differences in mindfulness between American and Chinese students. For the main study, American and Chinese students completed an online experiment that tested the effects of emotion-regulation strategies. The findings suggest that emotion-regulation strategies differ both culturally and in their effects, either altering the emotions individuals feel (in the case of the reappraisal strategy) or the experience individuals associate with the emotions they feel (in the case of the mindfulness strategy). This study supports the need for further investigation into the relationship between cultural socialization’s impact on emotion-regulation strategies.Item Mental Health Advocates as Cultural Intermediaries: A Sociocultural Perspective of Advocacy and Legitimacy(2021) Aghazadeh, Sarah Abigail; Aldoory, Linda; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study sought to understand how advocacy as a public relations activity can give voice to marginalized publics and how/if mental health advocates perceive their advocacy work as influencing culture as it relates to mental health. This study incorporated the theoretical frameworks of fully functioning society theory (FFST) and the circuit of culture. Additionally, this study investigated the concepts of advocacy, legitimacy, cultural intermediation and discourses as they entangle with and within FFST and the circuit of culture. The juxtaposition of these theories helped to uncover both culturally situated best practices of advocacy and interrogate the frames that underpin the rhetorical ideals of a fully functioning society. This study employed qualitative, in-depth interviews with 38 mental health advocates who communicated a variety of perspectives about mental health and illness. Some themes that emerged include: advocacy as both education and empowerment, legitimacy as authority that can derive from both lived and learned experience, the multiple subcultures within the field of mental health advocacy, and the variety of mental health discourses. Furthermore, two overlapping, but distinct missions of advocacy exist including 1) general mental health for all of society and 2) advocacy for people who have experienced significant challenges to daily life and/or harm (e.g., prejudice, discrimination) because of a psychiatric diagnosis. This dissertation extended FFST and the circuit of culture to present a culturally embedded conceptual model of advocacy and theoretical propositions to help guide future theory building. The theoretical propositions outline how advocacy is a vehicle for voice to change status quos, how dysfunction and marginality are parallel within FFST, and how legitimation and cultural intermediation align in the context of culturally situated responsible advocacy. The findings also contributed to the existing theories by applying those theories to a specific context of mental health advocacy, which illuminated the importance of questioning normalized values within FFST and approaching intermediation with reflectiveness. This research considers the consequences of advocacy for people with lived experiences and situates advocacy within social justice contexts to inch closer towards the ideals of FFST.Item No Tangle So Hopeless: Toward a Relational Cluster Analysis(2018) Nichols, Annie Laurie; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How does a semi-nomadic shepherd people on the border of Russia and Azerbaijan place themselves? How do twitter users challenge and transform institutional versions of events? How can citizens resist then narrow confines of reductive algorithmic assumptions on the internet? Questions such as these are not readily answered with traditional rhetorical methods, yet they recommend a rhetorical approach to their focus on meaning-making, constitutive community, and identity creation. This project argues that Kenneth Burke’s method of cluster analysis can be profitably revived to meet rhetoric’s growing need for an approach that focuses on relationships, listens to vernacular voices, engages multiple texts, and considers the world from other viewpoints. The most commonly used approach to cluster analysis is a reductive equational form that is primarily concerned with the dissective, analytic half of cluster analysis. Reconstituting Burke’s more constructive, drawing-together form, this project develops a relational cluster analysis that centers in connections, community, and the relationships between words, people, and ideologies. Relational cluster analysis’ effectiveness is demonstrated by use with ethnographic fieldnotes, a database of 5 million tweets, and the algorithmic infrastructure of Web 2.0. These exemplars demonstrate that, when applied at several layers of meaning, such as individual, community, dominant culture, and cross-cultural, this relational method is particularly generative in working with vernacular voices, community meanings, networked arguments, and digital cultures. Inductively listening to meaning-making foregrounds the subject, leading to substantial insight into not just individual but also community and cultural values and orientations. The elastic nature of a relationally-focused, multilevel cluster analysis affords the opportunity to gaze, engrossed, from others’ points of view.