Emotions, Media and Politics by Thomas Wetere Tulu

The role of emotion in media has been the subject of considerable research and media attention. But while stereotypes about the emotional profile of status updates — that they are overly-positive, or overly-angry — have solidified, evidence remains circumstantial and indirect. Further, although researchers have made numerous efforts to use the emotions we express in status updates to make inferences about our emotional lives — generating national happiness indices, predicting mental illnesses and evaluating emotional outcomes of experimental interventions. While the idea that emotional appeal is central to political persuasion may serve common intuition, the dynamics underscoring how and why this is so, remain underexplored. The study of emotion in politics has been active, especially as it relates to the personality of political leaders and as an explanation for how people evaluate significant features around them. Emotion's role in politics is pervasive both because emotion enables past experience to be encoded with its evaluative history and because emotion enables contemporary circumstances to be quickly evaluated. More recently still, theoretical models and supporting evidence suggest that there are multiple channels of emotional evaluations.

This book provides a summary of the existing media psychology literature regarding the role of emotions in media use and effects. Traditionally, emotions as an object of study from a media psychological perspective have largely been understood within the context of media entertainment research. General involvement mechanisms and affective dispositions of media users toward characters are addressed, as well as the effects of more specific displays of media violence, and frightening and otherwise disturbing materials. However, other branches of media-related emotion research can also be found, such as those related to persuasion and news effects. Most recently, emotions have become a hot topic, and an increased emphasis can be found on emotions as a mechanism underlying media use and effects. Likewise, studies in emotions have become omnipresent in online and computer-based communication, most notably including virtual humans expressing and detecting emotions. The newest trends in applying psychological emotion theories in modeling emotions in virtual humans are discussed. Although, this book goes beyond the boundaries of the extant knowledge base by raising new questions and providing innovative views on future research in media psychology.