Identificación del agente (prueba prescrita para el comercio internacional)

My literature review shows that, since the investigation of mathematical affect has been taken up successively by researchers in the domains of mathematics education, emotion

nature and internal determinants of affect, the relationship between affect and cognition during the mathematical problem-solving process and the role of the social context in generating and regulating affect.

During the 1980s, the characterisation of affect was widened considerably. While Polya (1957) and others beforehand had recognised that problem solving was often accompanied by emotions which hampered the problem-solving process, mathematics education researchers employed a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to classify a diverse range of affect that included internalised beliefs, attitudes and anxiety that was specifically associated with mathematics and test taking. As MacLeod (1992) reconfigured the categories of affect into ‘beliefs, attitudes and emotions’, Cobb et al (1989) used the appraisal theory of emotion to show that the generation of affect in a classroom situation emanated partially from the social context and that teachers could assist pupils in regulating their emotions by managing a classroom’s social norms. While much of the research in this period assumed that affect had a negative effect on cognition, Marshall (1989) and others showed that a wide range of short-term and long-term emotional responses might be induced by specific facets of a classroom situation.

The rise of emotion research in the 1990s ensured that an increasing number of investigations focused on trait and state emotions rather than on beliefs and attitudes. While mathematical anxiety became identified as the main trait emotion and continued to be investigated using quantitative methods, state emotions were analysed with respect to an enlarged range of theoretical frameworks, including psychological constructivist and linear dynamic theories. Although many qualitative studies of state emotions continue to rely on self-report questionnaires and description of subjective feelings through interviews and computer-coding labels, Goldin et al (2011) have focused on

characterising ‘engagement’ structures and other patterns of emotions evinced in the classroom. At the same time, a more nuanced view has developed regarding the relationship of affect and cognition, which is no longer seen simply as one of cause and effect.

The research that has been undertaken in psychosocial studies also focuses on emotion but takes another approach entirely. This research domain asserts that there are no firm boundaries between affective and cognitive processes and that, because affect may be instigated by a wide variety of unconscious internal and external anxiety determinants, teachers and learners may not be fully aware of its operation during the teaching and learning process. Researchers who carry out investigations using object relations or Lacanian psychoanalytically-informed methodology understand that much of the emotional expression in the classroom relates to teachers’ and pupils’ needs for love and affection and seek to characterise the unconscious determinants of affect by paying close attention to the nuances, ambiguities and contradictions which pervade participants’ discourses and behaviours. There are no a priori suppositions regarding the relationship between affect and mathematical problem-solving: Black et al (2009) and others have used the concept of the ‘defended subject’ and certain aspects of Klein’s object relations theory to demonstrate that learners’ conflicting attitudes toward mathematics are related to their unconscious anxieties and destructive urges and suggest that teachers can improve learning outcomes by ‘containing’ them.

Up until now, however, possibly because many mathematics education researchers have been reluctant to conflate social scientific methodologies with clinical psychoanalysis (Bibby, 2018), only a minority of studies in the psychosocial area have ventured formally to expose the unconscious psychic operations which underpin the inconsistencies in

participants’ discourse and behaviour in empirical data. In nearly all the individual case studies reviewed above, the data analysis does not afford clear distinctions between empirical instances of irrationality, emotional oscillations and varieties of heteroglossia and their unconscious psychodynamic counterparts. In the studies which focus on groups, examinations of affective expressions and characterisations of identity are often grounded disproportionately in analyses of participants’ observable engagements in dominant discourses and socially-interactive positionings. When psychoanalysis has been employed to characterise affect, its application has generally been restricted to the interpretation of the face-value aspects of participants’ narratives and classroom performance in terms of psychoanalytic themes and constructs.

However, the capacity to differentiate conscious and unconscious elements of affective expressions and cognitive processes could be increased significantly if the application of psychoanalysis was extended to characterise these in terms of defence mechanisms, the unconscious operations which are carried out by the ego to protect a person’s psychic and biological integrity against overwhelming anxiety and/or unacceptable or harmful impulses and detected in patients in clinical settings through analyses of discourse and behaviour. As I will show in Chapter 3, although different schools of psychoanalysis approach the classification of defence mechanisms in diverse ways, the analysis of a defence mechanism in every psychoanalytical theoretical framework enables the specification of the mechanism that is operating to suppress an individual’s unconscious thoughts and feelings, the exploration of those unconscious thoughts and feelings, and the identification of the anxiety determinants which are instigating the unconscious operation. In object relations psychoanalysis, expressions of defence mechanisms in individuals are characterised in terms of Klein’s delineations of constellations of defences

and anxieties, or states of mind, while collective expressions of defence mechanisms in groups are characterised with respect to Bion’s observations of group mentalities.

It follows that, while this thesis is positioned in the epistemological approaches of the psychosocial domain, it seeks to extend the literature on affect in a number of ways. One of its objectives is to develop a theoretical framework that incorporates a wider radius of Klein’s and Bion’s object relations theory, in order to undertake a deeper examination of the unconscious determinants of affect on the individual level, the relationship of unconscious affect to mathematical self-concept and attainment, and the role of the social context in the unconscious instigation of group mentalities. In addition, it outlines a methodological approach which incorporates an analytical process that derives from the clinical methodology of object relations psychoanalysis and that has the capacity to reconcile observations in the mathematics education, emotion research and psychosocial domains. Finally, it seeks to enable teachers to more effectively manage lesson deliveries by providing insights into the ways in which individual and collective manifestations of defence can mediate the teaching-learning process.

3 Object Relations Theory for Classroom