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Political anger seems to override inhibitions online, study finds
LAWRENCE — The desire to express political anger seems so strong that it overrides the instinct, found in older research, to control one’s anger in public, according to a new paper co-written by a University of Kansas associate professor of communication studies. Ashley Muddiman is co-author of the study “Emotion Work on Social Media: Differences in Public and Private Emotions about Politics and COVID-19 on Facebook,” published in late 2023 in the journal Social Media + Society.
Study finds clear instruction, parental support predict students’ sense of school belonging
LAWRENCE — A new study from the University of Kansas has analyzed the roles classroom interaction and parental support play in school connectedness, finding that students who feel their teachers provide good classroom management felt supported by those teachers and that they belong in their school. Those who felt they had more support from their parents also felt like they belonged in school, but parent support did not predict feelings of teacher support. The study was published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
KU research center to host global audience for premier developmental disabilities research conference
LAWRENCE — The KU Life Span Institute will welcome more than 350 scientists, graduate students and practitioners from the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities to the 56th annual Gatlinburg Conference, which will take place April 17-19 in Kansas City, Missouri. Registration for the conference is open, and all activities will take place at the InterContinental Kansas City at the Plaza.
All We Can Save series will highlight discussion on clean energy transition
LAWRENCE — The All We Can Save series at the University of Kansas returns March 28 with a virtual event titled “The Power of Local Advocacy: Beyond Coal to Clean Energy,” featuring Mary Anne Hitt, senior director of Climate Imperative. Hitt will join Ali Brox, assistant teaching professor of environmental studies, for this moderated event, with opportunities for audience members to ask questions. The program will take place at 3 p.m.; register online on Zoom.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Political anger seems to override inhibitions online, study finds
LAWRENCE — A new study gives clues as to why anger is so pervasive in political discussions on social media.
The desire to express political anger seems so strong that it overrides the instinct, found in older research, to control one’s anger in public, according to a new paper co-written by a University of Kansas associate professor of communication studies.
In “Emotion Work on Social Media: Differences in Public and Private Emotions about Politics and COVID-19 on Facebook” published in late 2023 in the journal Social Media + Society, KU’s Ashley Muddiman and Emily Van Duyn of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ran an experiment with 518 people, comparing how they expressed emotion online about the topic of COVID-19 versus politics in general. They also compared the participants’ expression of emotion about the two topics compared with their actual feelings. For example, did they outwardly express what they were feeling inside, or did they hide their feelings? The latter condition, Muddiman said, is known as performing “emotional work.”
The experiment took place in early 2021, when COVID-19 vaccines were still rolling out across the country. Participants were asked to craft, but not to actually post, a social media post about one of the two topics.
Then, per the paper, “Participants were asked … to indicate how much anger and anxiety they felt when crafting their specific message from never to often …” Human coders then compared the emotions expressed in their posts to their inner feelings.
The authors write that theories of emotion work in communication suggest that people repress expressions of anger in public, fearing a loss of control over who receives the message. However, the experiment showed that was not the case with political posts. People asked to write political posts felt more angry than people asked to write posts about COVID-19, and were the most likely to express anger in public social media posts, Muddiman said.
“Just because people felt an emotion didn’t mean they always expressed that emotion,” the KU researcher said.
That was particularly true with regard to online expressions about the pandemic.
“There were a lot of reasons to be mad about the situation surrounding COVID,” Muddiman said. “And people were not necessarily expressing that in public settings in our study.
“It seemed like people were … not just saying, ‘I feel angry. I’m going to express that anger online,’ but they were being a little more strategic with expressing their emotions.
“The other big takeaway is that there’s something about politics online that overrides that. If somebody felt angry, and they were expressing themselves about politics in a public setting, they were very willing to express that anger, which was against what we expected. We thought that people would tamp down their expression of anger, that even if they were very angry, they wouldn’t want to share their political anger in public. And that was actually the opposite of what we found. So there’s something about politics that made people want to express their anger publicly. That was very interesting to me.”
“We didn’t test this directly,” Muddiman said, “but we can speculate at least that in our current political landscape, anger can actually show that you care about your political identity. And so there’s something about being a partisan in public that gives people leverage in a political situation.
“I think our findings show that people might actually see expressing anger as a good thing in public, even though, theoretically, we thought it was going to be different than that. We thought that people would kind of rein in their anger because they were not in control of the people they were talking to. So we think there’s something about anger that just overrides a lot of this and that invites or encourages people to share their political identities … in public with everyone. And that might be one of the reasons why we see so much anger online, even when it’s not always what people are feeling. There’s a cachet to expressing anger in online political settings.”
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Study finds clear instruction, parental support predict students’ sense of school belonging
LAWRENCE — A new study from the University of Kansas has analyzed the roles classroom interaction and parental support play in school connectedness, finding clearly communicated instruction in class and support from parents are closely linked with belonging.
The study found students who feel their teachers provide good classroom management felt supported by those teachers and that they belong in their school. Those who felt they had more support from their parents also felt like they belonged in school, but parent support did not predict feelings of teacher support. Understanding the links between support and school connectedness can help students succeed as well as help schools and teachers use practices that foster belonging, according to the researchers.
Anqi Peng, doctoral student in KU’s School of Education & Human Sciences, has a scholarly interest in student-school connections. She began this research journey by studying school outcomes for students who are learning English as a second language while being educated in English-only classes in American schools.
“It made me think a lot about identity and how students felt about school connection and if they felt they were supported,” Peng said. “And I found there wasn’t much research into how we can foster school connectedness. Research had shown that school connectedness decreases during adolescence, but not necessarily why or how we can facilitate it. That’s what we’re hoping to learn more about.”
For the study, authors analyzed data from 4,838 high school students in the United States from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment. Students in the data set expressed how much support they felt in a variety of school and family factors. For school they specifically examined classroom management, instructional support and emotional support. The students were also asked about how much parental support they felt.
Results showed classroom interactions to be the factor that most predicted teacher support and belonging to school. Especially in terms of classroom management, students who felt their teachers managed class well by minimizing classroom disruptions had a higher sense of connection to their schools. Instructional support, in which students that felt teachers set clear goals and adapted lessons to fulfill students’ learning needs, also positively predicted teacher support, but emotional support was not related to teacher support or school belonging.
The study, co-written by Peng; Meagan Patterson, professor of educational psychology; and Sean Joo, assistant professor of educational psychology, all of KU, was published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
“I think this study shows the importance of classroom management and instructional support and that their impact may have been underestimated, compared to emotional support from teachers,” Patterson said. “I feel that’s an important area of focus for future research. We also know that how students feel about school is not static, so we’d like to look at if this changes over time.”
“Teacher support is more related to specific behaviors in the classroom. Parental support is more related to school connectedness in general,” Peng said. “We are looking at both feelings of support from teachers in a certain class and school belonging in general. Students move through classes throughout the day, so we wanted to see a bit more about how these things fit together.”
Students were asked about their feelings of in-class interactions during their English classes.
“There is a certain emotional vulnerability that comes up in English class that we thought might make English classes especially important for how students feel in relation to their school,” Patterson said.
The authors said more understanding of what fosters school connectedness can help schools, teachers and families provide more developmentally appropriate supports necessary to help students feel like they connect to their schools, as well as demonstrate the importance of higher education to prepare teachers that are skilled at classroom management and instructional support. The study is part of Peng’s larger body of work on bilingual education and cognitive function in learning and Patterson’s research in parent-child relationships.
The authors said they hope to build on the research by gauging students’ feeling of connection over time, or throughout a school year.
“We need much more information on how school connectedness could be fostered,” Peng said. “But this does highlight the importance of parental support and especially effective classroom management and how expressing clear expectations in teaching can foster connection.”
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Contact: Jen Humphrey, Life Span Institute, 785-864-6621, [email protected], @kulifespan
KU research center to host global audience for premier developmental disabilities research conference
LAWRENCE — The KU Life Span Institute will welcome more than 350 scientists, graduate students and practitioners from the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities to the 56th annual Gatlinburg Conference, which will take place April 17-19 in Kansas City, Missouri.
Registration for the conference is open and ranges from $475 for academic professionals to $200 for self-advocates, early career researchers and students. All conference activities will be held at the InterContinental Kansas City at the Plaza.
Co-hosted by the Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD), the conference is a forum for exchanging information and new findings in behavioral and biobehavioral research and theory, said John Colombo, director of the KU Life Span Institute.
“The Gatlinburg Conference is where, for over 50 years, senior and early-stage investigators gather every year to share their most recent work on intellectual and developmental disabilities,” Colombo said. “It’s specifically devoted to graduate students, postdocs and early-stage scientists, and so it has served as the literal launching ground for many careers in the field.”
The 2024 conference, which is named for the city in which it began in the 1960s, features talks by:
Beth Tarini, associate director at the Center for Translational Research and professor of pediatrics at George Washington University. She leads research on optimizing the delivery of genetic services to families and children, with a focus on screenings for newborns.
Maya Sabatello, associate professor of medical sciences at the Center for Precision Medicine and Genomics and the Division of Ethics at Columbia University. Her work focuses on law, society and disability, and the implications of genetics, especially in pediatrics and judicial settings.
Ami Klin, director of the Marcus Autism Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University School of Medicine. Klin’s research is focused on the emergence of the social mind and brain from infancy to adulthood.
Other highlights include a preconference workshop on science communication led by Liz Weintraub, a senior advocacy specialist at the AUCD and host of “Tuesdays with Liz” on YouTube, with Beth Haller, author of “Disabled People Transforming Media Culture for a More Inclusive World.”
There will be conference sessions on funding strategies, a panel presentation about early life identification of intellectual and developmental disabilities, and updates from the National Institutes of Health.
Additional information on registration, accommodations, transportation and accessibility is available through the Gatlinburg conference website.
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Don’t miss new episodes of “When Experts Attack!,”
a KU News Service podcast hosted by Kansas Public Radio.
https://kansaspublicradio.org/podcast/when-experts-attack
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Contact: Emily Ryan, The Commons, 785-864-6293, [email protected], @TheCommonsKU
All We Can Save series will highlight discussion on clean energy transition
LAWRENCE — The All We Can Save series at the University of Kansas returns this week with a virtual event titled “The Power of Local Advocacy: Beyond Coal to Clean Energy,” featuring Mary Anne Hitt, senior director of Climate Imperative.
Hitt will join Ali Brox, assistant teaching professor of environmental studies, and Madeleine Bonnallie, graduate student in English, for this moderated event, with opportunities for audience members to ask questions. The program will take place at 3 p.m. March 28; register online on Zoom.
Hitt previously worked for 12 years as the national director of campaigns for the Sierra Club and also served for a decade as director of the Beyond Coal Campaign. That campaign blocked the construction of 200 proposed coal plants in the U.S. and confirmed the closure of two-thirds of existing coal plants.
“The opportunity to connect with Mary Anne Hitt, whose career and experiences provide concrete examples of successful strategies used to work for a cleaner and more just future, means we can interact with someone whose national initiatives coincide with issues KU students are learning about in their classes and that are relevant to campus and the wider Lawrence community,” Brox said.
The All We Can Save series centers climate justice and draws from knowledge across and beyond fields of academic research. Contributors to the book “All We Can Save,” edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson, share wisdom from their own experiences and work to inspire collective agency around the urgency of climate change. The KU series highlights activists, scholars, thinkers and others whose life work generates and speaks to ideas for action, survival and nourishment.
The All We Can Save series is supported by The Commons; the Hall Center for the Humanities; the Environmental Studies Program; the KU departments of African & African-American Studies, English, Geography & Atmospheric Science, and Geology; the Emily Taylor Center for Women & Gender Equity; the History of Black Writing; the Office of Multicultural Affairs; and the University Honors Program.
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