Support providers' interaction goals: the influence of attributions and emotions

The current study examines cognitive and emotional influences on the formation of interaction goals. Specifically, it develops and assesses an extension of Weiner's attribution-emotion-intention model of helping (e.g., Weiner, 1995) to the prediction of support providers' goals. 608 college students read situations manipulating attributions of responsibility, stability, and effort with regard to a friend who was seeking support. They subsequently responded to measures of emotional response (anger, sympathy), interaction goals, and attributions. Attributions were found to influence goals both directly and through the mediation of emotion, though the character of this influence depended strongly on the goal. The results suggest that at least some variability in the effectiveness and sensitivity of supportive communication can be explained by support providers' goals. They also indicate the need for continued, closer examination of cognitive and emotional influences on interaction goals and behaviors.     

Critical Time

A politics of time is hidden in the way we approach our objects and areas of inquiry. This includes media, organizations, social movements, technologies, publics, social spaces, identity politics and the environment. Claims upon time are made when we locate power and the various possibilities for social change. In this moment, marked by technological speed up, there is a pervading cultural sense of being short on time. Increasingly time figures within the field and across the disciplines as a problem of better management and control. Time is understood as tension that individuals and institutions wrestle with and must solve. A critical perspective on time should ask a different set of questions. To take a critical perspective is to look beyond individual time and consider time as uncompromisingly tethered, in common while disparate. This paper outlines the possibility of a critical time perspective in communication studies - one where time is understood as multiple, relational, and deeply uneven.