Carol S. Saunders

Prof. Carol S. Saunders, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus at the University of Central Florida. She is a LEO award winner for lifetime accomplishments to the IS discipline and an Association of Information Systems Fellow. She served on a number of editorial boards, including a three-year term as Editor-in-Chief of MIS Quarterly. She also served as General Conference Chair of a premier Information Systems (IS) conference, ICIS. Her outstanding research status is reflected in over 50 publications in top-ranked Information Systems, Computer Science, Management and Communications journals. She held a Distinguished Fulbright Scholar Chair at the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU) and further research chairs in New Zealand, Singapore, and the Netherlands. In 2012, she was guest professor at the Institute of Information Systems at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Using the Emotional-Cognitive Model (ECM) of overload the cognitive processing of stimuli created by new information or requests to adopt new technologies will be studied. ECM suggests that individuals’ cognitive systems differentially handle load as a function of cognitive and emotional schemata encoded in memory. Consequently, not everyone experiences overload in the same way – if at all. ECM may help explain the sometimes overwhelming cognitive and emotional consequences of dealing with information stimuli and requests to use new Information Technologies in today’s digital world.