Emotional Discourse Research Articles

Power Struggles: The Paradoxes of Emotion and Control among Child‐Centered Mothers in the Privileged United States

AbstractIn the discourse on contemporary parenting in the United States, the parent–child “power struggle” is often spoken of as a common event in the everyday lives of parents and children. On the basis of ethnographic interviews with economically privileged white mothers of preschool and elementary‐age children, I analyze the power struggle as a cultural trope. Despite refusal to be considered “mainstream” and outright denigration of what they considered to be “mainstream” parenting, mothers’ discourse reveals cultural understandings about power and its relationship to the self that reflect broader themes of emotional control, choice, rationality, and individualism that are in fact characteristic of “mainstream” views of child development. Further, although mothers explicitly valued emotional connectedness and freedom of expression with their children, the actual strategies advocated for dealing with emotions during the power struggle are centered on control and constraint of emotional discourse and expression. The article explores this theme in the light of tensions surrounding parental identities in privileged communities in the contemporary United States [parenting, emotion, self, power, child development]

The structure of emotion discourse: from Labovian to socio-cognitive models

AbstractThis paper focuses on how narrators convey emotion in the structure of oral narrative discourse in Spanish. To this end, the structure of personal oral narratives of highly emotional events in a sample of radio narratives is analyzed from two different approaches:

Handoff World: Challenges to Meaningful Work in a Fragmented Knowledge Economy

In contrast to the experience of alienation in classic industrial labor, knowledge workers have been shown to seek self-realization in and identify with their work. Yet scholars have also begun to note that distributions of knowledge work are becoming increasingly fragmented. Handoffs appear to have become a key aspect of the experience of knowledge work, as the interdependent knowledge and skills necessary to complete a job are now more frequently distributed across intra- and extra-organizational boundaries. In order to better understand how knowledge workers perceive and strategically respond to the loss of ownership and control inherent in handoffs, we draw on an intensive ethnography of practitioners at a global product design consultancy. Our data detail how practitioners' emotional discourse and strategic behavior are primarily directed at preventing the sudden death of their initiatives after handoff and at preserving the spirit and intent of their initiatives despite loss of direct control. We di...

Discourse(s) of emotion within medical education: the ever‐present absence

Emotion in medical education rests between the idealised and the invisible, sitting uneasily at the intersection between objective fact and subjective values. Examining the different ways in which emotion is theorised within medical education is important for a number of reasons. Most significant is the possibility that ideas about emotion can inform a broader understanding of issues related to competency and professionalism. The current paper provides an overview of three prevailing discourses of emotion in medical education and the ways in which they activate particular professional expectations about emotion in practice. A Foucauldian critical discourse analysis of the medical education literature was carried out. Keywords, phrases and metaphors related to emotion were examined for their effects in shaping medical socialisation processes. Despite the increasing recognition over the last two decades of emotion as 'socially constructed', the view of emotion as individualised is deeply embedded in our language and conceptual frameworks. The discourses that inform our emotion talk and practice as teachers and health care professionals are important to consider for the effects they have on competence and professional identity, as well as on practitioner and patient well-being. Expanded knowledge of how emotion is 'put to work' within medical education can make visible the invisible and unexamined emotion schemas that serve to reproduce problematic professional behaviours. For this discussion, three main discourses of emotion will be identified: a physiological discourse in which emotion is described as located inside the individual as bodily states which are universally experienced; emotion as a form of competence related to skills and abilities, and a socio-cultural discourse which calls on conceptions from the humanities and social sciences and directs our attention to emotion's function in social exchanges and its role as a social, political and cultural mediator.

Reconsidering Consultants' Strategic Use of the Business Case for Diversity

The business case for diversity—the practice of connecting human differences to an organization's bottom line—has been critiqued for its compromised treatment of human difference. Through a grounded in action discursive analysis of 19 interviews with diversity consultants, this research identifies three occupational demands that prompted consultants to use the business case: organizational access, motivation, and emotion work. The analysis also identifies strategies consultants used that met these demands without relying on the business case: connecting to mission statements, connecting to individual tasks, appealing to personal experience, sequencing, combining, balancing discourses of emotion and business, drawing on spiritual grounding, and using humor. By identifying these alternatives, this analysis seeks to decrease consultants' dependence on the business case when meeting occupational demands and consequently mitigate the negative effects that scholars have attributed to its common use and consequent discursive dominance in diversity work. Additionally, the conclusions suggest that diversity professionals and scholars might more explicitly use the notion of “discursive merger” to advocate for social change in organizations.

Victory is Ours! Narrative Reconstruction of Victory and Exultation in Written Sports Reports

The article presents a narrative and linguistic text analysis of the way Danish sports reporters reconstruct national victory and ecstatic exultation at Olympic sports events. Based on a case study of news reports (n = 73) from three consecutive Danish victories in the women's Olympic handball tournaments, 1996-2004, it is documented that the reporters use a variety of narrative and stylistic devices to reconstruct the victory and the emotional discourse of the event, most prominently a highly personal narrative voice, meta-commentaries, descriptions of ritual celebratory acts and figurative language that frames national unity. This leads to the conclusion that the reporters seek to transcend the narrative and stylistic clichés of regular sports journalism in order to reconstruct the extraordinary story and, presumably, make the readers (re-)experience the exultation of the event.

Effective or affective schools? Technological and emotional discourses of educational change

British schools have been positioned by recent educational policy discourses as sites of innovation and transformation in new technological contexts, but more recent concerns about well-being suggest a more ‘affective turn’ in educational policy-making. This article provides an analysis of a project which has explored the ways in which schools are being re-imagined as spaces of effective technology-centredness, as well as sites for more emotional or affective child-centredness. I argue that far from being mutually exclusive categories, these technology-centred and child-centred orientations are conjoined in what I call ‘high-touch-tech’ discourse where the effective and the affective are mutually constitutive. Finally, I situate these changes as consequent upon ‘emotion management’ in work and social life, and suggest that an implication of the new policy focus on well-being for schools will be their requirement to perform ‘affect management’.

The politics of fear and empathy: emotional ambivalence in ‘host’ children and youth discourses about migrants in Cyprus

This article looks at the emotion discourses among 30 Greek-Cypriot children and youth interviewees when they describe their feelings about migrants in Cyprus. It looks at how migrant representations and narratives are highly emotional constructions that children and youth utilize to make sense of their views about how migrants are different or similar to themselves. In particular, the article focuses on the simultaneous contradictory positions and feelings of fear and empathy. Two important implications for intercultural education are discussed. First, it is suggested that it is valuable to acknowledge that the emotion work required from ‘host’ children and youth in their interactions with migrants should not be taken for granted. Second, rather than painting a ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ image of children and youth’s responses to migrants – which categorizes children and youth in simplistic ways – it might be more productive to examine how their emotions are linked to ambivalent discourses and inform actions in negotiating the presence of the other and one’s sense of belonging.

Besmirched with blood: an emotional history of transnational romance in colonial Singapore

In 1900, in the British colony of Singapore, a Siamese man, Manit, shot his beloved British wife, Maude, and allegedly attempted suicide. Several competing interpretations of the incident exist. In one, Manit is considered a deranged and treacherous fraud; in another, he is a pitiable cuckold; in the third, he is a respectable gentleman suffering from unrequited love. Surprisingly, given the racialized context of high imperialism in Southeast Asia, the British in Singapore came to empathize with the Asian Manit as a lovelorn gentleman and to disavow their own countrywoman. The court ultimately acquitted him of any wrongdoing. This article considers the competing interpretations and explains why a seemingly race-blind one prevailed. It reviews genealogical records, personal letters, newspaper accounts of court proceedings, and internal Thai government internal records, which provide unusually rich documentation of a romance that crossed national, cultural, and racial boundaries and created surprising transnational affiliations based on emotional empathy. Maude and Manit's relationship and court case provide a captivating glimpse into the sentimental, dramatic, and sometimes brutal details of daily life; the emotional and subjective aspects of history that are often discarded as mere embellishment to more ‘substantive’ histories focused squarely on political and economic power. However, it is precisely the emotive aspects of their relationship and their interpretation that highlight the existence of a transnational, transracial alliance between Manit and British elites in Singapore, based on shared notions of upper class masculinity, common educational experiences, and a mutual spatial and power relationship with the imperial metropole in London. The case cuts across racial divisions and highlights a transracial emotional style. Approaching history through a study of emotional discourse sheds light on a broader racial, sexual, and gendered organization of power in late colonial Southeast Asia.

‘It's People's Whole Lives’: Gender, Class and the Emotion Work of User Involvement in Mental Health Services

The concept of emotion work has been widely applied to the study of service work. Yet its use in understanding the social dynamics of user involvement in public services remains under explored. Drawing on a study of user involvement in mental health service development, I show its utility for understanding this social and political realm. The article discusses findings from a critical discursive and contextual emotional labour perspective, taking into account organizational and institutional factors as well as social structural dimensions of gender and social class. It shows how discourses on emotion, constructed through articulation of personal experiences of service usage both reflected and constructed the ideological and structural positionings of women service users, while emotional discourse — displays of anger in user involvement forums — worked to constitute traditionally male and ideologically masculine elements of the field, as well as the working‐class identities of some participants. These forms of emotion work, and the ways in which they elicited further emotion management from service users and workers alike, are located in relation to the rules of engagement of user involvement and the bureaucratic institutional forms within which this took place. The article concludes that the emotion work of user involvement ultimately helped to reproduce the dominant institutional and social order, including its gender and class dimensions. Implications for policies and practices of user involvement in mental health services are provided.

Emotion Discourse and Its Implications for Educational Philosophy

Emotion Discourse and Its Implications for Educational Philosophy

Kidnapping Women: Discourses of Emotion and Social Change in the Kyrgyz Republic

In 1974, Anthropological Quarterly published a special issue on bride theft. Since then, considerable work has been published on the practice. Drawing on my fieldwork in the Kyrgyz Republic, I assess current understandings of the practice. I argue that although functionalist and symbolic approaches to kidnapping are still relevant, it is necessary to consider kidnapping in the context of intensifying discursive competition over marriage, gender roles, and authority. In my account, kidnapping is a practice that both supports and undermines existing systems of oppression. As such, it has become a powerful engine of social change.

Guilt, Empathy and the Ethical Potential of Children's Literature

The paper takes as its point of departure cognitive criticism, the direction of inquiry that investigates readers’ cognitive and affective engagement with literature, partly based on recent brain research. It argues that for young readers who may not yet have developed full comprehension of fundamental moral issues and who have not attained the literary competence necessary to understand fictive characters’ mental processes, representation of emotions in literature may produce a problem. Since guilt is a complex social emotion, involving a reconciliation of several contradictory goals, such representation demands well-developed empathy and advanced mind-reading skills, as well as factual knowledge of relevant legislation and understanding of moral implications of crime, guild and remorse. The paper examines these issues through a reading of two texts for young audience, Forbidden (2010), by Tabitha Suzuma, and His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000), by Philip Pullman. The former is totally focused on guilt, in legal as well as moral sense, experienced by two siblings who enter an incestuous relationship. In the latter, guilt is less conspicuous, yet proves on closer consideration to be a major plot engine in the protagonist Lyra’s physical and spiritual quest. While Suzuma’s novel has an overt educational agenda, it is ambiguous in supporting young readers’ ethical position towards the protagonists’ guilt. In Pullman’s trilogy, guilt becomes closely connected with the fundamental philosophical issues of determinism and free will. Although Pullman does not provide any clear-cut ethical guidance either, the use of emotion discourse, or emotion ekphrasis, is more subtle, not least because the genre allows a outward projection of emotions in the form of dæmons. Lyra’s guilt becomes a driving engine in her maturation process. The ultimate argument of the paper is that literature provides an excellent training field for young readers’ developing of empathy skills, and the vicarious experience of guilt exposes readers to a wide range of ethical questions.Keywords: children’s literature; young adult literature; cognitive criticism; emotions; empathy; ethics; emotional education; Pullman; Suzuma(Published: 15 May 2012)Citation: Barnboken tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research, Vol. 35, 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/clr.v35i0.18081

Reason Giving: When Public Leaders Ignore Evidence

Discussion of bioethics-related policy, given its value-laden nature, can result in heated and emotional discourse. Political leaders significantly affect public deliberations surrounding bioethica...

Neural networks for emotional discourse comprehension in schizophrenia

Neural networks for emotional discourse comprehension in schizophrenia

Word order and discourse functions in spoken Hebrew

In this article we discuss the discourse functions of the alternative linearizations of Spoken Hebrew sentences, as reflected in the possessive sentence pattern. We begin by presenting the available variants of possessive sentences in Hebrew. Next, we address the issue of markedness in our discussion of the discourse functions of the different word orders. The discourse functions demonstrated are contrast, parallelism, side-sequencing, emotive and argumentative discourse. The study is based on corpora of naturally occurring speech. Previous studies of possessive sentences in Hebrew have focused mainly on grammatical issues. These studies have not addressed the field of discourse functions, nor have they used naturally occurring speech. The current study fills this gap.

Print media reportage of agricultural biotechnology in the Philippines: a decade’s (2000-2009) analysis of news coverage and framing

This article presents key results of a ten-year study of media coverage of agricultural biotechnology in the Philippines, the only country in Asia to date to approve a biotech food/feed crop (Bt corn) for commercialization. The top three national English newspapers – Manila Bulletin, Philippine Daily Inquirer, and Philippine Star were analyzed to determine patterns of media attention measured by coverage peaks, tone, source of news, keywords, and media frames used. Biotechnology news was generally positive but not high in the media agenda. News coverage was marked by occasional peaks brought about by drama and controversial events which triggered attention but not long enough to sustain interest. The study provides a glimpse into the role of mass media in a developing country context. It shows how a complex and contentious topic is integrated into the mainstream of news reporting, and eventually evolves from an emotional discourse to one that allows informed decision making.

Victorian Values

The contested values associated with the term ‘Victorian’ call for fresh and informed consideration in the light of far-reaching changes brought about by the global economic downturn. Victorian writers engaged with public questions that were often associated with the issues we must now address, and their vigorously contentious responses reflect a drive to influence a wide audience with their ideas. Fiction of the period, including the sensation novels of the 1860s, provide telling examples of these developments in mid-Victorian writing; but non-fictional texts, including those of the philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill and the critic John Ruskin, also question the foundations of social thought. As they challenged traditional genre boundaries through the innovative forms that emerged across a range of diverse works, many Victorian authors argued for closer links between the discourses of emotion and those of logic. These are difficult times for researchers and critics, but the stringencies we find ourselves confronting can provide opportunities to create connections of the kind that the Victorians chose to make, bringing together different genres of writing and disciplines of thought, and arguing for a more generous understanding of our responsibilities towards each other.

Toward a Rhetorical Cosmopolitanism: Stoics, Kant, and the Challenges of European Integration

In this article, I present a mode of cosmopolitanism that builds on Stoic and Kantian views toward not just rational cosmopolitan agents but rhetorical ones. I outline a new rhetorical approach to cosmopolitanism that addresses the challenge of “otherness.” This rhetorical cosmopolitanism focuses on the conditions for deliberative and participatory practices that bring us before others; it seeks to help us recognize that the way we develop actual—and not just abstract—political relationships to others is fundamentally rhetorical, not just rational or emotional. I explore the debates over the inclusion of minorities in the European Union, particularly focusing on the Muslim population, in order to outline a rhetorical cosmopolitanism that accounts for the place of emotions in discourses of citizenship.

Mothers' Acculturation and Beliefs About Emotions, Mother–Child Emotion Discourse, and Children's Emotion Understanding in Latino Families

Research Findings: We examined associations among Anglo acculturation, Latino enculturation, maternal beliefs, mother–child emotion talk, and emotion understanding in 40 Latino preschool-age children and their mothers. Mothers self-reported Anglo acculturation, Latino enculturation, and beliefs about the value/danger of children's emotions and parent/child roles in emotion socialization. Mother–child emotion talk was observed during a Lego storytelling task. Children's emotion understanding was measured using 2 age-appropriate tasks. Correlations showed that mothers' Latino enculturation was associated with mothers' stronger belief in guiding children's emotions and children's lower emotion understanding. Anglo acculturation was associated with mothers' lower belief that emotions can be dangerous and children's better emotion understanding. Mothers with a stronger belief in guiding children's emotions more frequently labeled emotions. Mothers with a stronger belief that emotions can be dangerous less frequently explained emotions. Regressions controlling for child age and maternal education demonstrated that mothers with a stronger belief that children can learn about emotions on their own and mothers with greater Latino enculturation had children with lower emotion understanding, whereas mothers with greater Anglo acculturation had children with better emotion understanding. Practice or Policy: Results suggest that understanding both family acculturation and family enculturation will be helpful for early childhood researchers and educators seeking to assess and promote children's socioemotional development.