Lucia Abbamonte

Corpus Linguistics and the Appraisal Framework for Retrieving Emotion and Stance – The Case of Samsung’s and Apple’s Facebook Pages

The identification of emergent structures in dynamical systems is a major challenge in complex systems science. In particular, the formation of intermediate-level dynamical structures is of particular interest for what concerns biological as well as artificial network models. In this work, we present a new technique aimed at identifying clusters of nodes in a network that behave in a coherent and coordinated way and that loosely interact with the remainder of the system. This method is based on an extension of a measure introduced for detecting clusters in biological neural networks. Even if our results are still preliminary, we have evidence for showing that our approach is able to identify these “emerging things” in some artificial network models and that it is way more powerful than usual measures based on statistical correlation. This method will make it possible to identify mesolevel dynamical structures in network models in general, from biological to social networks.

Helpful Contextual Information Before or After Negative Events: Effects on Appraisal and Emotional Reaction

This study investigated the effect of helpful contextual information, presented before and after a negative event, on modifying appraisal and emotional reaction. Through the scenario technique, a basic situation of negative outcome (in health or hobby domain) entailing appraisal of high responsibility and low remediability (control condition) was manipulated by adding—separately or together—two types of contextual information able to modify the two appraisal dimensions: knowing that other people shared the same outcome (sharing) and knowing that it was possible to remediate the negative outcome (remedy possibility). In half scenarios, the information was presented before the event, and in the other half after the event. We expected that sharing and remedy possibility would selectively affect the two appraisal dimensions which in turn would selectively affect the emotions chosen to assess emotional reaction. We also expected that the event-preceding information would be more effective than the event-following information. On the whole, the results corroborated our predictions but also revealed unexpected effects that have been discussed.

Shopping as ‘Best Practice’ - Analyzing Walmart’s Debated Sustainability Policies

Nowadays, companies who want to engage environment-friendly consumers increasingly rely on green-economy oriented campaigns. Such categories of (ethical) consumers are numerically increasing, and expressions evoking environmental friendliness are becoming particularly trendy. In this vein, words such as ‘sustainability’ have been variously recontextualized/reframed and have become an ‘ought to’ for media-savvy companies ‘with a vision’ - Walmart, the American multinational retail corporation, being a relevant case in point. It is no accident that, on the first Google page for ‘sustainability’, ‘Walmart’ proudly surfaces:http://corporate.walmart.com/global-responsibility/sustainability. The company has made an explicit commitment not just to expand the business but also to improve communities and enhance the sustainability of the products they sell, by encouraging more responsible production practices, while at the same time making product choices more affordable for customers, as reported on its website. However, as the world’s largest company, Walmart is an easy target for attack mainly by environmentalists. Sometimes, Walmart gives its critics grounds for some legitimate criticism in a variety of fields ranging from the supply chain emissions to renewable energy and preserving habitat. Such criticism resonates across the media, owing to their ‘lack of closure’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985), finalized to offer an unbiased perspective. Against this ‘complexified’ (Macgilchrist 2007) background, our study aims to examine, from a broadly Multimodal and Positive Discourse Analysis perspective, the Walmart website ‘sustainability’ pages with their variety of communicative strategies, advertising ‘responsible’ Walmart positive attitudes to fundamental issues like Energy, Waste, Products and Responsible Sourcing.

Contextual Information and Reappraisal of Negative Emotional Events

In this study the effect of the contextual-information induced reappraisal on modifying the emotional response elicited by failure has been investigated. To an academic or job setting failure (control condition) it has been added one of two types of contextual information (knowing that many other people failed the same task and knowing that it would be possible to try the failed task again) affecting three dimensions of failure appraisal: responsibility, sharing, and remediability. In an experimental condition both information were added. Four hundred and eighty undergraduates participated in this study. The experimental design was a 2 (negative emotional event) x 4 (contextual information) between-subjects design. The first variable was included in the design as covariate. We expected that generalized failure should imply a decrease of responsibility and an increase of sharing, the possibility of retrying should imply an increase in the remediability, and that the presence of both types of information should produce all the abovementioned effects. Our findings substantially corroborated the hypotheses.