  Many prominent lines of research on student's reasoning and conceptual change
within learning sciences and physics education research have not attended to
the role of learners' affect or emotions in the dynamics of their conceptual
reasoning. This is despite evidence from psychology and cognitive- and neuro-
sciences that emotions are deeply integrated with cognition and documented
associations in education research between emotions and academic performance.
The few studies that have aimed to integrate emotions within models of
learners' cognition, have mostly done so at a coarse grain size. In this
manuscript, toward the long-term goal of incorporating emotions into
fine-grained models of in-themoment cognitive dynamics, we present a case study
of Judy, an undergraduate electrical engineering and physics major. We argue
that a fine-grained aspect of Judy's affect, her annoyance at a particular kind
of homework problem, stabilizes a context-dependent epistemological stance she
displays, about an unbridgeable gulf she perceives to exist between real and
ideal circuits.
