The Power of the In-Between

"The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection gathers fourteen individual case studies where intermedial issues—issues concerning that which takes place in between media—are explored in relation to a range of different cultural objects and contexts, different methodological approaches, and different disciplinary perspectives. The cases investigate the intermediality of such manifold objects and phenomena as contemporary installation art, twentieth-century geography books, renaissance sculpture, media theory, and public architecture of the 1970s. They also bring together scholars from the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and the history of ideas. Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as “relations between media conventionally perceived as different,” each author specifies and investigates “intermediality” in their own particular case; that is, each examines how it is inflected by particular objects, methods, and research questions. “Intermediality” thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, cultural contexts, methodological approaches, and so on, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on. Rather than merely applying a predefined concept, the objectives are experimental. The authors explore the concept of intermediality as a malleable tool of research. This volume further makes a point of transgressing the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media technologies and media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, and the latter targets formal considerations of media objects and its various meaning-making elements. These two conventionally separated fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, as well as the aesthetic and technological, conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.

Maternal Socialization of Children's Emotion Knowledge

The relations between family emotional expressiveness and children's emotion knowledge were examined. Participants were 258 3.5-year-old children whose emotional knowledge was assessed; mothers reported on their emotion socialization practices and mothers and children were observed during an emotion-eliciting book-reading task. It was hypothesized that positive family expressiveness would be positively related to children's emotion knowledge, whereas negative family expressiveness would have a curvilinear association which would be moderated by additional forms of emotion socialization (parental responses to children's negative emotions and parental explanations about emotions) and child gender. Results showed a curvilinear relation for positive expressiveness and emotion knowledge and no association for negative expressiveness. An interaction between positive expressiveness and negative expressiveness was significant for boys, suggesting that boys have higher emotion knowledge when positive expressiveness is high but only in homes where negative expressiveness is low. Parental responses to negative emotions and explanations of emotions were directly related to emotion knowledge, but the moderation hypotheses were not supported. Results are discussed in terms of implications for how parents can be most effective in teaching their children about emotions

A new model for aesthetic education

Aesthetic education and the theoretical foundations for its existence have not been accorded the important place in curriculum which they deserve. Recently, Broudy, Greene, and Macdonald have attempted to validate aesthetic criticism as an alternative to scientific or statistical studies in curriculum. Humanistic psychologists have also provided curriculum scholars with a more detailed analysis of the nature of aesthetic experiences in order to help systematize the study of encounters with the arts. This study examines two models of aesthetic criticism which may prove helpful to school curriculum supervisors inasmuch as the models can serve as guides to writing narrative evaluations of school arts programs. Also, the researcher develops a model which compares the aesthetic growth of the individual with the Piagetian model of cognitive development. Using the data on the nature of aesthetic experience, the investigator traces the types of aesthetic experiences a child may typically undergo from infancy through adolescence

Attitudes toward feminism and patterns of family economic decision-making

The primary purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between attitudes toward feminism and patterns of economic decision-making. In addition, these other related topics were investigated: (1) the difference between the wife's attitudes toward feminism and the husband's attitudes toward feminism as perceived by the wife, (2) the relationship between attitudes toward feminism and selected demographic variables. and (3) the relationship between patterns of economic decision-making and selected demographic variables. Subjects were 156 randomly selected married women from Greensboro, North Carolina. Data on attitudes toward feminism were collected using a scale developed by Richey (1972) which was adapted in order to obtain, in addition to women's attitudes toward feminism, the women's perception of their husbands' feminist attitudes. Data on decision-making was obtained through a scale developed by the researcher concerning the conceptualization of a framework for viewing the family economic decision-making process. The scale provided information concerning who makes decisions concerning four economic functions of the family: (1) the production function, (2) the expenditure function, (3) the savings and investment function, (1) the investment in human capital function

Social-cultural predictors of parental racial/ethnic and emotion socialization and relations to child social-emotional adjustment

The following body of work addressed several gaps in the literature regarding our understanding of racial/ethnic differences in parents’ emotion socialization practices, the social-cultural antecedents of African American parents’ racial/ethnic and emotion socialization practices, and the interactive effect of parents’ racial/ethnic and emotion socialization practices on young African American children’s social-emotion development. Study 1 used 2 waves of data to examine whether differences in experienced racial/ethnic discrimination between African American and European American parents predict differences in their beliefs about the appropriateness and social consequences of children’s displays of negative emotions and subsequent differences in their use of suppression responses to children’s negative emotions. Study 2 used 2 waves of data and a within group design to examine whether African American parents’ reported discrimination, ethnic identity, and emotion beliefs predict their racial/ethnic and emotion socialization practices in similar ways given the two practices are theorized as joint strategies aimed at protecting children from experiences of bias. Study 3 used 1 wave of data and a multi-informant (i.e., parent and teacher report), multi-method (observational and questionnaire data) to examine the joint role of parents’ racial/ethnic and emotion socialization practices in promoting young African American children’s social-emotional adjustment. Collectively, the studies provided empirical evidence for the view that racial and emotion socialization have developed out of similar socio-cultural and ecological antecedents, specifically, the context of racism and discrimination that African American families must navigate. Results also revealed that how parents combine their use of racial and emotion socialization has a significant impact on children’s social-emotional development. Implications for research and practice are discussed