emotion

How people feel their engagement can have efficacy for a bio-based society

Susanne Sleenhoff, Patricia Osseweijer

Up till now, the transition to a bio-based economy mainly involves expert stakeholders. However, the actions required are of a collective scale necessitating public engagement for support and action. Such engagement is only successful if members of the public believe their participation holds efficacy. This belief is closely linked to their personal representation of the issue. We report findings from our Q methodology workshop that explored public’s efficacy beliefs on their perceived ways for engagement with a bio-based economy. Participants were provided with stakeholders’ visual representations depicting a concourse of the transition to a bio-based economy for Q sorting. We found five efficacy beliefs that differ in scale on which participants consider themselves capable for action. These results indicate that members of the public foresee distinct and shared ways and levels in how they can engage with the transition to a bio-based society that do not always concur with stakeholders’ views.

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Communicating Food Safety via the Social Media: The Role of Knowledge and Emotions on Risk Perception and Prevention

Yi Mou, Carolyn A. Lin

This study examined the Chinese public’s use of Weibo (a microblog platform) and their cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to a series of food safety crises. Based on a sample of 1,360 adult Weibo users across China, the study found that Weibo use contributed to cognitive and behavioral responses to food safety concerns, but access to other online and off-line news and information outlets was largely irrelevant. Emotional response toward the food safety incidents was a stronger predictor of both food safety risk perception and prevention action, relative to food safety incident awareness and factual awareness. Theoretical and social implications of study findings are discussed.

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Emotional climate and high quality learning experiences in science teacher education

Alberto Bellocchi, Stephen M. Ritchie, Kenneth Tobin, Donna King, Maryam Sandhu, Senka Henderson

The role of emotion during learning encounters in science teacher education is under-researched and under-theorized. In this case study, we explore the emotional climates (ECs), that is, the collective states of emotional arousal, of a preservice secondary science education class to illuminate practice for producing and reproducing high quality learning experiences for preservice science teachers. Theories related to the sociology of emotions informed our analyses from data sources such as preservice teachers’ perceptions of the EC of their class, emotional facial expressions, classroom conversations, and cogenerative dialogue. The major outcome from our analyses was that even though preservice teachers reported high positive EC during the professor’s science demonstrations, they also valued the professor’s in the moment reflections on her teaching that were associated with low EC ratings. We co-relate EC data and preservice teachers’ comments during cogenerative dialogue to expand our understanding of high quality experiences and EC in science teacher education. Our study also contributes refinements to research perspectives on EC.

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