Fresh Off The Boat Huangsgiving Case Study

The show that I had selected to watch is called ‘Fresh off the Boat, Huangsgiving’. This show is based off of a Chinese family that recently moved to Florida and are raising their family there. In this episode, the mother named Jessica was asked by her mother to host Huangsgiving when it was usually hosted by her sister (Connie). There has been an ongoing competition between the sisters of attention and therefore Jessica put a lot of effort and planning to try to ‘one up’ Connie to impress their mother. However, Jessica became overwhelmed with trying to make everything perfect and extravagant that through series of events, her night did not go as planned. Fortunately, with the help of Connie through mending their relationship, they were able …show more content…
The four-step process developed by MGrath can explain Jessica’s performance (Gentner, Module 07). Stage 1 was the environmental demand (Gentner, Module 07). She wanted to ‘one up’ her sister and therefore created expectations that were over the top that she could not fulfill. Stage 2 was her own individual perception of the environment (Gentner, Module 07). Though initially she thought everything could easily be taken care of, she slowly realized that this demand required too many things to be done and she was unable to do them all (Gentner, Module 07). In her mind, there were too many thing that needed to be done and she slowly felt that she was losing control of her environment. Stage 3 is her response to the stress. She felt all the somatic and cognitive signs of stress and anxiety from racing heartbeat to negative thoughts about her husband and her sister (Gentner, Module 07). This ultimately resulted to Stage 4 of behavioural consequences which was the negative performance outcome of the dinner. Luckily for Jessica, her stress levels were intervened by Connie after rekindling their relationship and lifting the load off Jessica which concluded to a great Huangsgiving