Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As illegal immigration emerges again as a core political issue, we note that the effectiveness of campaign appeals on immigration is not well understood. In particular, there is a lack of experimental work on the topic, and the precursors to attitudes on illegal immigration are typically inferred from cross sectional data. In addition to understanding attitudes toward immigration policy, our second goal in this project is to use the issue of illegal immigration to explore the role of anxiety in responses to political appeals. According to the Affective Intelligence theory, anxiety motivates citizens to learn, pay more attention to news coverage, and base voting decisions on contemporary information rather than partisanship. Anxious citizens also seek out additional information relevant to the issue or candidate that provoked the anxiety. While we do not dispute the empirical link between anxiety and information, we question both the measurement of information seeking and the assumptions of the AI theory about how anxious individuals process information. Literature in cognitive psychology demonstrates that high stress and anxiety is associated with biased information processing, that is a tendency to pay closer attention to threatening information. We predict that anxious citizens will seek more information but that they will be attracted by threatening presentations of information and pay closest attention to threatening pieces information. We also predict that participants made anxious about immigration will search out information relevant to immigration policy. Rather than relying on self-reported intentions to gather information, as the AI literature does, a better method is to simulate an information environment in order to monitor actual information consumption. In an experiment we expose subjects to campaign appeals about immigration, either intended to enhance anxiety about illegal immigration or not. Subjects are then given the opportunity to search for additional information in a website that we designed to mimic online news sources. The website will have both immigration and non-immigration stories, and the immigration stories will be balanced between threatening coverage and non-threatening coverage. Experimental subjects see campaign appeals about immigration. They have a chance to search for more information in a website that we designed. We predict that anxious citizens will seek information but will be attracted by threatening presentations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: When Tawfiq al-Hakim serialized Yawmiyyat na’ib fi-l-aryaf in 1937, readers received it as a detective novel. The text played by the rules of the genre, its central character was involved in the investigation of a murder and the narrative was organized in cliffhanging chapters with unfolding clues and dead-ends. None of this would have been especially remarkable for the first Egyptian readers of Yawmiyyat because, from the turn of the century, they had been accustomed to a steady stream of detective pulp fiction. The novel is also linked to an earlier pulp genre from the 1920s, the fictional memoirs. Like detective fiction, fictional memoirs were relatively popular in their heyday and dealt explicitly with the social problems of the city—from prostitution, crime and drug abuse among the new urban working classes to the hypocrisy of the Egyptian lawyer class.
In this paper, I will make the case that these pulp genres are critical if we are to understand the emergence of the novel form in Egypt. Moreover, novels had a special relationship to the new legal institutions of colonial Egypt. To develop this point, I will outline the emergence of the legal professions during the colonial period and suggest ways in which they intersected with the novel form. Suffice it to say that just as the novel became synonymous with the effendiyya during the early twentieth century, so too was it tied to new forms of law. One might say that in Egypt the novel was sometimes the practice of law by other means. Since these ‘means’ were the stuff of fiction, the performativity of these novels within the actual practice of law was uncertain. For al-Hakim, writing fiction about impolite or contentious social issues became an alternative way of addressing problems normally resolved through legal deliberation and action.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The extant research examining trait and state anxiety has revealed a weak relationship between the two variables. In order to account for more of the variance between the two, both are operationalized from a cognitive-physiological perspective. Specifically, this study examined the extent to which trait anxiety and physiological reactivity predicted anxious arousal during a public speaking presentation. Anxious arousal, a cognitive-physiological construct, is introduced as a more sophisticated means of determining public speaking state anxiety. When combined with trait anxiety, physiological reactivity accounted for 73.3% of anxious arousal. Suggestions for pedagogical and therapeutic practice are included.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As illegal immigration emerges again as a core political issue, we note that the effectiveness of campaign appeals on immigration is not well understood. In addition to understanding attitudes toward immigration policy, our second goal in this project is to use the issue of illegal immigration to explore the role of anxiety in responses to political appeals. According to the Affective Intelligence theory, anxiety motivates citizens to learn, pay more attention to news coverage, and base voting decisions on contemporary information rather than partisanship. Literature in cognitive psychology demonstrates that high stress and anxiety is associated with a tendency to pay closer attention to threatening information. We predict that anxious citizens will seek more information but that they will be attracted by threatening presentations of information and pay closest attention to threatening pieces information. In an experiment we induce emotions about immigration and then subjects are then given the opportunity to search for additional information in a website that we designed to mimic online news sources. The website has both immigration and non-immigration stories, and the immigration stories are between threatening coverage and non-threatening coverage. We find that anxious subject exhibit biased information processing; they pay closest attention to threatening information about immigration. Additionally, we find that there are two dimensions of anxiety about immigration – anxiety about the effect of immigrants on the country and anxiety on behalf of immigrants.

Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: This paper traces the apprehensions of middle-class adults as well as the ambivalences of teenage girls about babysitting from its origins during the 1920s through WWII. I examine how the expanding autonomy of teenage girls who practiced, negotiated, and contested gendered identities through wage earning and teen consumerism provoked anxiety in experts, employers, and other adults. I also examine how poor labor practices cemented during the Depression led wartime babysitters to seek out new opportunities for employment and entertainment. Alarmed by wartime female social and sexual autonomy, wartime experts tried but failed to recruit an “army” of teenage babysitters.