When emotions run high: affective responses to crises in Europe

The multimodal construction of political personae through the strategic management of semiotic resources of emotion expression

“…A variety of approaches covers the emotion-politics nexus, whether we are talking about the role of emotions in political campaigns and political marketing (Schweiger and Adami 1999;Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000;Engelken-Jorge, Güell, and del Río 2011;Scammell 2014;Grüning and Schubert 2022), the political sociology of emotion (Demertzis 2020), the convergence between political cognition and emotion (Westen 2007;Lakoff 2008;Castells 2009;Lakoff [1996] 2016), the emotional and moral basis of politics (Haidt 2012), how emotions sustain certain ideologies (Breeze 2019;D'Arcens and Waldek 2021;Verbalyte, Bonansinga, and Exadaktylos 2022), or the politics of emotions in international relations (Gustafsson and Hall 2021). Therefore, political cognition is "emotionally shaped" (Castells 2009, 146).…”

Pride and Compassion: How Emotional Strategies Target Audiences in Political Communication?

“…Emotions regulate political communication as they increase social mobilization and provide a tool for targeting audiences (Kazlauskaitė & Salmela, 2022). Stronger emotions promote the effectiveness of simplified arguments, reducing and adding bias to information assessment and helping populist movements utilize anger, shame, disappointment, resentment, and pride as instruments of political influence (Verbalyte et al, 2022). Salmela and von Scheve (2017) identify two main strategies, how populists successfully target vulnerable audiences, transforming anxiety and repressed shame into Populists reduce emotional communication to negativity and hostility, engaging their audiences in politics of anger (Rico et al, 2017).…”

The EU at Crossroads: 2022 as a Turning Point Year?

“…Such outcomes potentially have a knock‐on effect in future elections that could see an overall change in the balance of power within national and supranational political systems. This is an important observation as such polarised environments favour affective rather than rational thinking (Verbalyte et al, 2022), especially when it comes to public policy interventions or when choosing certain measures of action (Zahariadis et al, 2023).…”