Traditional approaches to information have tended to highlight the rationalistic and the cognitive. This has entailed relegating emotions‐centred and affective aspects of information behaviour to the sidelines. In recent decades, work by writers as far apart as Belkin and Ingwersen, Kuhlthau and Schneiderman has alerted practitioners and researchers in the field of information behaviour to the importance of emotion.
The apparent dichotomy between the cognitive and the affective extends further than information into philosophy, with its debates (see Plato on the place of the emotions in society and see Kant on the aesthetic for instance) about truth and method, and into contemporary research method (see hermeneutic approaches in Habermas and Gadamer and the growing recognition of phenomenological and ethno‐methodological approaches in information and organizational research). This shift also reflects a rethinking of conventional “hard‐soft” distinctions in the social and managerial sciences.
In a sense, the emotions have been staring information specialists in the face right from the start. One only has to identify factors like satisfaction and frustration in information gathering, for example, or the anxiety a student has about what is enough research for an assignment, or the challenges faced by health‐care practitioners when interpreting and explaining information in contexts of stress, or the challenges faced by people isolated for one reason or another from mainstream communal life, to realise how pervasive the emotional dimension of information is. This information is, furthermore, not merely the specialized information retrieved or needed by researchers or professionals, but also everyday information needed by parents at home or information (and advice, something ignored by this book) for children and young people. For all these reasons, then, this new book, Information and Emotion, is relevant and timely.
Diane Nahl, one of the contributing editors, is known in the field for her work, and it would be useful to start with the idea that there are things like self‐confidence, satisfaction and comfort in information that are positives, and things like confusion and frustration that are negatives. She does not stop there and nor should we, and nor in fact do the 15‐or‐so contributors (all US researchers) either, with studies of specific issues, contexts and respondent groups. Following through this emotional strand enables us, at various points in the book, to pick up on where emotion matters. Dervin suggests that challenge and confusion, and dealing with the familiar and with the contradictory, are sources or triggers of emotional behaviour in information situations, and her essay explores sense‐making (another growth area where information studies and organizational studies have drawn on insights from anthropology) among university students.
Other essays deal with emotional points and states where students believe that they have enough information for assignments and have done enough work (including that in the library) for them (criteria include what is optimal, levels of understanding, perceptions of completion and types of satisfaction), and with rogue users (a fascinating piece this on a theme that merits much more work), where abuse and excessive contact with administrators, privilege‐seeking and self‐importance all reveal emotional dimensions of information behaviour.
Further essays examine stay‐at‐home mothers (information might increase or mitigate worry, trust is critical), people with visual handicaps (acceptance and denial, support and separation, indifference and independence), and what children think of books when they review them online. Links between emotional information behaviour and reading, and with information literacy, are rightly discussed here, and a familiar but valuable issue, that of correlations between social‐emotional behaviour and information literacy, is reopened (the conclusion of the essay here is that there is indeed a connection, mainly on a meta‐cognitive level).
Understandably, any such approach as this is predicated on cross‐disciplinary assumptions (such as the view that cognitive psychology legitimately provides insight into information practices like human–machine interfaces) and borrowings (so there is a range here of debate about theoretical frameworks from the socio‐biological one to those associated with reception and reading). By that token, much of the catchment area for applied research (and several essays take this form) is the context or ecology of the student (university, college and school).
For anyone interested in information and emotion and children, this will be a useful book. Wider still, it is a book for inclusion in any good collection supporting information studies. It is also a book worth dipping into for the busy practitioner, who can eclectically pluck out the essay he/she most wants to read – for the implications for the reader services and user education librarian are plain to see, even though these are only indirect concerns of the book. Well‐documented and edited references allow readers to follow‐up a wealth of appropriate current sources. A useful book, with enough coverage to command respect and one that keeps what might have turned into pretentious jargon and theorizing well under control. Notice its discounted price for members of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, in conjunction with whom Information Today have issued the book. It is one, also, in the ASIST&T monograph series.
