Copyright ©Tatar 2006
A barrier to effective management of attentional engagement between people, a key to managing small group work, and to promoting good classroom and meeting practices is to acknowledge that people are feeling creatures as well as thinkers, and that emotional states may influences goals, behaviors and cognitions. This is not basic research on emotions, but rather emphasizes the social aspects of emotional states. In particular, people seek to regulate their own emotions by regulating their interaction with others. In some cases, this involves a wish for more interpersonal interaction, or certain kinds of interpersonal interaction, while in other cases or situations, it may involve avoidence.
Jamika Burge and I have been looking at high-stakes emotions, those involving conflict in relationship to communication at a distance. Retrospective work focuses on workplace accounts of conflict and conflict resolution processes. Laboratory work consists of bringing couples into the lab and asking them to argue utilizing different technological mechanisms (phone, IM, face-to-face). This work differs from other work on Computer-Mediated Communication because it involves emotions, because it involves conflict, and because it involves an on-going high-stakes relationship. It differs from other work on understanding couples because of its focus on technology and because it draws on cross-cutting psychological theory: couples work such as that championed by John Gottman and Laura Carstensen, interpersonal theory such as that championed by Len Horowitz (my thesis advisor),and psycholinguistic theory such as that championed by Herb Clark.
Although we have not yet found a way to look at emotion or conflict in classroom contexts, it goes without saying that children as well as adults have feelings. The reality that students face in "doing school" is that they must find a way to manage their emotions within the strictures of the classroom. The reality that teachers face is that they must help their students manage the complex array of feelings derived from or brought to the classroom on a daily basis. These emotions are a key component in the flux of attentional states that interfere with or promote focus on the task at hand. Of course, this is not a new idea; Dewey said it first. But we as researchers sometimes lose track of the ways that as psychological and sociological theory has improved, we can do a better job of detecting and evaluating latent variables in the success of classroom interventions. This is especially important when we evaluate interventions that involve technologies, because (1) The technologies change classroom interactions and (2) The technologies themselves are not exactly neutral. They often gain adoption by virtue of the enthusiasm they inspire (in teachers, parents, administration and students), often followed by a disappointing sense of their limitations.