Abstract
This chapter explains the theoretical foundations underlying the emotion research reported in this book. It discusses general approaches to studying emotions across the disciplines and examines the growing research in political science. Erisen pays particular attention to conceptualizations of emotions and introduces the three specific emotions studied throughout the book. The chapter examines in detail debates concerning the theoretical foundations of anger, fear (or anxiety), and enthusiasm, and discusses attitudinal and behavioral findings from previous emotions research. Finally, the chapter reviews the foundations of emotion induction methods and measurement tools employed in contemporary experimental studies and survey research.
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Notes
- 1.
While indicating that emotions have been considered secondary to reason, we should note that this is a normative rather than an empirical claim.
- 2.
I am using the terms emotion and affect more or less interchangeably throughout the book, while in essence the terms represent different aspects of the affective systems. Affect primarily refers to the valence approach where emotions could be categorized on a single dimension, from negative to positive. Emotion, on the other hand, mostly refers to distinct appraisals on three separate dimensions as discussed in this chapter.
- 3.
It is this conception that led to the invention of feeling thermometer scale as the affective measurement tool toward various political objects.
- 4.
Here I am referring to face-to-face surveys where the goal is to capture public opinion on a topic. Online surveys on the other hand could accommodate various types of experiments and survey experiments to manipulate emotions.
- 5.
An alternative to context-related material is the use of out-of-context visual material, such as images from the International Affective Picture System (Lang et al. 1999) or facial expressions (Ekman and Friesen 1978). These datasets include visual material that was pretested numerous times in relation to specific emotions exogenous to any political or social context.
- 6.
The difficult task in emotion induction is whether one can in fact induce one emotion (e.g., anger) without also inducing another (like anxiety). Especially with regard to similarly valenced emotions such as anger and anxiety, it is very difficult to raise a specific emotion independent of another related emotion. I explore this topic further in the empirical chapters.
- 7.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an online platform across various countries matching researchers with interested participants. MTurk workers, the participants, opt in participating different types of online surveys in exchange of (mostly very small) financial contributions. MTurk provides a convenience sample closer to the general population repeatedly used in previous research (Berinsky et al. 2012; Mullinix et al. 2015; Erisen et al. forthcoming).
- 8.
In addition to human coders in exploring the usage of emotions, computerized methods of sentiment analysis for written text offer important opportunities (Hu and Liu 2004; Moussaïd et al. 2015; Nielsen 2011). These techniques significantly increase the ability of replication and automation with precision.
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Erisen, C. (2018). Theory of Emotions. In: Political Behavior and the Emotional Citizen. Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58705-3_3
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