This week my literature search took me down the path of emotions and how we are influenced by our own emotions especially when it comes to perceived accuracy of news items. Preston et al. (2021) found that individuals with higher emotional intelligence (EQ) were better at detecting fake news than individuals with lower EQ. Although this was a small scale study and so these results are not definitive, yet another study from 2020 conducted by Martel et al. had similar findings. While they don’t specifically mention EQ in their study, Martel et al. do suggest that emotional thinking may hinder the ability for one to accurately discern real news from fake news. Learning that the influence of emotion may be impacting people’s perceptions of news is quite interesting to me. Perhaps teaching emotional regulation in some capacity to students may help to mitigate this issue. From a critical literacy standpoint it is an interesting topic of discussion because critical literacy is a seemingly analytical and cognitive skill. However, critical literacy education may do well to include affective reasoning to the list of desired competencies to be developed in students.
I read an interesting article this week that took the framework of the 4 dimensions of critical literacy by Lewison et al. (2015) and re-framed these dimensions through an emotional lens. The way in which the article reframed the first two dimensions in particular stood out to me. For the first dimension, Disrupting the commonplace, the article suggested having individuals acknowledge their feelings with regard to a piece of media and subsequently ask themselves why they felt this way (Anwarrudin, 2016). This forces individuals to consider not only how they are being positioned to perceive news but how they are being positioned to feel. The suggestion for the second dimension, Interrogating multiple perspectives, was that individuals should enter into a relationship of affective equivalence with the subject of the media that they are consuming (Anwarrudin, 2016). Similar to the subtle change from Lewison et al.’s first dimension, this second suggestion forces the individual to move away from the analytical, simply thinking about the perspectives of others and instead encourages them to feel as others feel.
Based on the studied effects of emotion on an individual's critical literacy competencies, I think it would be prudent to study the relationship of emotions with science learning in order to better understand how to help students develop critical science literacy competencies. In a preliminary literature search on the matter, one study found that when students are excited about science this may help them to be resilient in the face of uncertainty with the science they are exploring (Jaber et al., 2021). As discussed in my last blog, one way to increase student engagement in science is through inquiry which also reflects many critical literacy competencies. As I move forward with this research project I will aim to determine what connection (if any) exists between the influence of emotion and the influence of inquiry on each other and critical science literacy competencies.
References:
Anwaruddin, S. (2016). Why critical literacy should turn to ‘the affective turn’: Making a case for critical affective literacy. Discourse, 37(3), 381-396.
Jaber, L. Z., Hufnagel, E., & Radoff, J. (2021). “This is really frying my brain!”: How affect supports inquiry in an online learning environment. Research in Science Education, 51(5), 1223-1246.
Lewison, M., Leland, C., & Harste, J. C. (2015). Creating critical classrooms: Reading and writing with an edge. Routledge.
Martel, C., Pennycook, G., & Rand, R.G. (2020). Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5(1), 1-20.
Preston, S., Anderson, A., Robertson, D. J., Shepherd, M. P., & Huhe, N. (2021). Detecting fake news on Facebook: The role of emotional intelligence. PLoS ONE, 16(13), 1-13.