Team 3 Project

The consequentiality of emotions is a way of saying that the way that we feel, our individual emotional response to a situation, has an impact on the communication process. Our “exhalations” are molded by a complex array of emotional responses that we experience, such that they are dependant on them. Thinking about the wide variation of emotions I experience in daily communication with friends, colleagues, classmates, strangers, family, and so on I feel like every situations elicits in me a unique emotional response. In effect, my “exhalations” are unique to each different situations that I encounter, producing different “shades” of my personality according to who I am conversing with and how I feel at that time.To help solidify the understanding of the consequentiality of my emotions in interpersonal communication, I found it very interesting to observe some of my fellow classmates “exhalations” on this point, and think about the effect of emotions in these cases. Steph mentioned the response of anticipation and this struck me as a very powerful example of consequentiality of an emotion. Steph says “In terms of communication – particularly in terms of the relationships that communication makes possible – anticipation can be divided into two broad categories, which (for simplicity’s sake) I will call “negative” and “positive.” In other words, I can anticipate the worst and craft my communication to either defend against ‘the bad’ or offensively assert ‘the good’ (roughly, what I desire); or I can anticipate the best and design my discourse to minimize ‘the bad’ and emphasize ‘the good.’”  I feel like this perfectly encapsulates the conundrum of anticipation in effecting “exhalations.” What we anticipate, how we approach the situation accordingly, profoundly effects how we communicate. I have many times experienced extreme responses anticipating the worst, and I feel like these instances produced the worst, least effective “exhalations.”

The further explore this point it may be interesting to see how through a few objective examples, individuals’ communications could be seen to change through the consequentiality of emotions. Ap1115 says “I think that the more a group undergoes together the more of a cohesive unit it becomes. By employing this methodology on our group it gives the group a way to bond together to deal with a certain goal, and problem (confusion, ambiguity, etc) together.”  They are hitting on the issue of consequentiality here by mentioning that their group worked more smoothly after initial emotional issues. Anticipation along with a mixture of possible emotional clashes probably produced the initial state of confusion.

Commsyr09 provided a concise summary of the communications process, included several elements of interest to the consequentiality of emotions: “After reading the chapter, lectures, and postings, my own interpretation is that as communicators we are responsible for listening (actively, aka not just hearing), absorbing or “inhaling” the information, anticipating what sort of route we should take in our response and simultaneously judging the situation (comfort level, situation, cultural norms, etc), nexting to find out more, and finally exhaling our own opinions, thoughts, feelings, etc.”  Here they make a link between past and present, and also talk about the effect of anticipation. They mention “comfort level” which I think is closely related to the anticipation/consequentiality dynamic. Our comfort level is the summation of all emotional responses to the situation at hand, and this always effects how our “exhalations” come out. How comfortable we are is a product of what we anticipate, and this has consequentiality in the following “exhalations.” (Samuel Grinnell)

Emotions affect and are affected by our inhalations and exhalations and are important to communications. My teammate Ninjacook percieved a relaxed sentiment among his teammates and it caused him to voice his concerns on the issue. “Also, in their suggestions for how the teams should be grouped they say that “some of us are laid back and like to wait till the last minute to get work done, and others like to work with a schedule and do things way before they are due” and that the teams should be grouped by similar work ethics. Gym411 seems to subscribe to the “laid-back” approach but unfortunately this is very inconvenient for me. I hope our group can work out the kinks and collaborate efficiently!” Ninjacook inhaled a slightly relaxed orientation towards the team project and responded by showing how that conflicts with him. This also shows the basic tension of dialogue. After NinjaCook read Gym411’s (and his other teammates) feelings and thoughts about the team project he experienced the otherness of the others and responded by holding his ground. (Peter Hutchings)

Consequentiality of emotion in Interpersonal Communication applies to everyone; this is because an emotion is a reaction based on how something was communicated or “nexted” if you will. For example a person “nexting” in a fashion that was displeasing to the people he/she is having a conversation with, hence creating an opportunity for a negative emotion. In other words it “matters” because it affects the kinds of lives people lead. And more importantly, this impact is due more to the way people communicate rather than what they say (Sigman pg46). For example in the Group Dynamics class there were a few examples that stuck out, specifically the speeches given by the presidential candidates. The consequentiality of the speeches created an emotion were the people believed in the candidates (http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fe751kMBwms&feature=related) (http://youtube.com/watch?v=BC1Ls0yK1_o). Senetor John McCain’s courageous service video sends an emotional message of admiration, patriotism, perseverance, and service, among other things. Some other examples that I have obtained from my fellow classmates were comments in response to the weblogs and discussion threads. Specifically the introductions/ something new we have learnt, I mentioned that I was an immigrant and based on past experiences in regards to racism and affirmative action I mentioned how pleased I was with American society. In Gym411 comments, he disagreed and released an emotional story from the past. He says: “I came from Puerto Rico to the US when I was 12. I also experienced many embarrassing moments and some “cruel” ones that dealt with racism. Now I’m not saying that everyone is cruel, but are there cruel people in the world? Sadly yes. Some people feed of stereotypes and enjoy making others feel less so that they can feel better about themselves. But, that’s life; we can’t concentrate on the ignorance of others, that’s their problem.” (http://saboy82.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/3/#comment-3). When having a conversation with someone, we can be certain that how we next or have a conversation with someone, may lead to a person trying to relate to you so that it may create the opportunity for a some what less formal response. For example delivermesummer expressed her same love for South Africa, while being very specific about it (http://saboy82.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/3/#comment-4). (Yukeshan Naidoo)

A time in class that has shown us the “Consenquentiality of Emotions” was when the students responded to the reading “Look me in the Eye” by John Elder. The first couple of students that responded were Saboy82 and Beaver32. These students responded with their definite answers to the life situation that John went through in the book. Without any of the students knowing it, John came into the “blog” and responded to Saboy82 and Beaver32. John’s responses always seemed to prove wrong what the students wrote. For example, Beaver32 said in his blog that “Basically John believes there really isn’t any right way to respond to someone’s thoughts our ideas.”, and John responded with the following “Indeed, there ARE right and wrong ways…I don’t believe there’s “no right way.” Rather, I believe there is often no way to deliver a truthful response without eliciting an undesirable reaction.”.

John also corrected Saboy82. Saboy82 wrote “So it is a possibility that Robison’s misinterpretation of the conversation is due to poor “inhaling” skills, and thus producing poor “exhaling”, and John immediately “corrected” Saboy by saying “Wheat if that’s not quite right? What if the other person WAS making a mistake, and I started off on the wrong foot by pointing it out?” From John’s additions to the class blog, the “emotion” of the blog changed. Stephanie found John’s comments to be humurous as she was “laughing with delight”, and in some way it was, but it changed the emotion of the blog. Gym411 shared how his blog entry changed because of Johns comments. Gym411 was going to write something similar to what Saboy82 and Beaver32 wrote on their entries, but decided to write in a more “passive” way that would agree to what John was saying in his previous responses in order to not “get corrected” by John. In Gym411’s case, the “emotion” of the blog changed from being an open discussion of the book to a closed discussion were there was a correct answer being expected (by John).

https://learning.umassonline.net/webct/urw/lc26190.tp0/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct (Thomas Ortiz)