Anger, Anxiety, and Selective Exposure to Terrorist Violence

We examine the political consequence of exposure to widely available video content of terror violence. In a two-wave survey of Americans, we assess who is exposed to, and seeks out, terror-related video content in the first wave and then observe who decides to watch raw video footage of the Boston marathon terror attack in the second. We focus centrally on anxiety and anger as differing emotional reactions to the threat of terrorism and document their influence on exposure to terror violence. Anxiety generates avoidance of violent terror content whereas anger increases its consumption. Moreover, we find that anger increases exposure to violent terror content and in addition enhances support for punitive and retaliatory anti-terrorism policy. We discuss the implications of our findings for the broader dynamics of terrorist violence and the emotional basis of selective news exposure.

C&RL Spotlight

Doing these Spotlights is actually one of the more pleasant aspects of my role as C&RL editor. It is a time to reflect on the works that authors have done and discuss common threads of trending topics. This particular issue is full of a number of compelling articles, so it was actually a little difficult to select a direction to riff on.That said, there are actually two articles that address anxiety, and given that the past year has been nothing but anxiety-inducing, it seems natural to focus on that. In addition, one of most viewed articles in C&RL (it has consistently been in the top three most viewed articles) is “Shame: The Emotional Basis of Library Anxiety” by Erin L. McAfee, which tells me that there is definitely a lot of interest in the topic.

Gdy słowo dzieli. Mowa pogardy i nienawiści w relacjach między ludźmi

Hate speech is defined as verbal abuse against minority groups. Its emotional basis is contempt which activates anger and revulsion. Therefore, it seems to be justified to speak of “contempt speech and hate speech” as a spreading social phenomenon, in effect resulting in a generalised deterioration in attitudes toward minorities. The media and public figures play a huge role in promoting hate speech, and it is also fostered by the sense of danger accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to stop this process, we should start to perceive hate speech as a serious social problem, the conditions and consequences of which should be the subject of reflection and scientific studies.

Czy miłość romantyczna jest emocją?

The aim of this article is to analyze Raja Halwani’s concept of “romantic love.” Her main thesis is that romantic love is an emotion. The author of the article tries to look at the concept from the perspective of the social sciences, juxtaposing it with selected notions of romantic love from the border of sociology, social philosophy, and theology. He considers that the approach according to which romantic love is presented as an emotional state may be interesting not only for the psychologist but also for the philosopher or sociologist. He points out that love as an emotion is not subject to moral judgments. Finally, he concludes that when considering romantic love from a sociological point of view, its emotional basis should not be overlooked, but closing the phenomenon in the purely emotional sphere seems to be a methodological error.

Emotional Eating and Obesity

The first time that terms such as food addiction and addictive eating were mentioned was in 1956, in an article by T.G. Randolph. Recently, from a psychosomatic point of view, some authors have linked obesity and food addiction. Along with the concept of food addiction (derived from the similarities between the consumption of certain foods and “substance addictions”), a couple of questions seem to arise: What if it’s not just the particular food (the substance) that we are addicted to? Could it be that we are addicted to something else that makes us eat it? Thus, the concept of eating addiction has its own set of particulars. It brings the attention back to the individual and not the external substance (the food or ingredient). The focus on confronting the obesity problem should be moved away from the food itself (the addictive substance) to the person’s act of eating (the addictive behavior). Undoubtedly, there are many links between emotions and overweight/obesity. This chapter aims to review the current state of this field of study which is the emotional basis of obesity (at least a particular case of obesity and weight-related disorders).

Altruistic Punishment: The Golden Keystone of Human Cooperation and Social Stability?

‘Altruistic punishment’ (i.e., costly punishment that serves no instrumental goal for the punisher) could serve, as suggested by the pertinent experimental literature, as a powerful enforcer of social norms. This paper discusses foundations, extensions, and, in particular, limits and open questions of this concept-and it does so mostly based on experimental evidence provided by the author. Inter alia, the paper relates the (standard) literature on negative emotions as a trigger of second party punishment to more recent experimental findings on the phenomenon of ‘spontaneous cooperation’ and ‘spontaneous punishment’ and demonstrates its (tight) emotional basis. Furthermore, the paper discusses the potential for free riding on altruistic punishment. While providing valuable insights into the understanding of social order, ‘altruistic punishment’ is thus not the golden keystone of social stability.

Amicitia

The question of what constitutes friendship—a true friend—is one that has been asked in many societies and historically contingent periods, and from a number of different vantage points. Just as the Romans interrogated themselves as to the precise nature of their amicitiae, so, too, have ancient historians and classicists investigated the vast field of that relationship. They have asked widely divergent questions: What was the philosophical or emotional basis of Roman friendship? How did Roman authors, from the comedies of the middle republic to later imperial works, discuss friendship? What role did it play in society, in economic or political contexts? How was the traditional notion of amicitia changed by the changing circumstances first of the imperial period and, more profoundly, by the advent of Christendom? Ancient historians and classicists have been attempting to answer these questions for a long time. Scholarly discourse can be broadly divided into two large fields, the first of which was (and is) concerned with the development of Roman philosophical thought on amicitia and, particularly, with Cicero’s famous treatise Laelius de amicitia. As the study of Roman amicitiae is rendered exceedingly complicated by the intentionally vague semantics of Roman terminology, which employs amicitia for a variety of social relationships, not all of which a majority of people would now term “friendships,” little consensus has been reached beyond strictly philological questions. In addition to these philological and philosophical enquiries, however, a second field emerged in the early 1980s, which emphasized the importance of Roman institutions of personal relationships for the study of Roman history, particularly in the field of politics. This perspective has been enlarged in recent years by a renewed interest in the role of amicitia in, e.g., the Roman economy and in the communicative and affiliative strategies that were essential in creating and maintaining amicitiae. Additionally, there appeared what might be called a “democratization” of friendship studies, with amicitia no longer seen as an exclusive phenomenon between elite Roman males. The advent of Christianity (but also of new philosophical schools) in Late Antiquity was accompanied by a distinct rethinking of amicitia from a Neoplatonic and Christian perspective. Schramm 2013 and White 1992 (both cited under General Overviews) offer exemplary approaches and further references, but the changing interpretations of amicitia in the later Roman world make this a distinctly different subject and consequently this period is excluded from this bibliography.

Exploring an Emotional Basis of Cognitive Control in the Flanker Task

The emotional basis of cognitive control has been investigated in the flanker task with various procedures and materials across different studies. The present study examined the issue with the same flanker task but with different types of emotional stimuli and design. In seven experiments, the flanker effect and its sequential modulation according to the preceding trial type were assessed. Experiments 1 and 2 used affective pictures and emotional facial expressions as emotional stimuli, and positive and negative stimuli were intermixed. There was little evidence that emotional stimuli influenced cognitive control. Experiments 3 and 4 used the same affective pictures and facial expressions, but positive and negative stimuli were separated between different participant groups. Emotional stimuli reduced the flanker effect as well as its sequential modulation regardless of valence. Experiments 5 and 6 used affective pictures but manipulated arousal and valence of stimuli orthogonally The results did not replicate the reduced flanker effect or sequential modulation by valence, nor did they show consistent effects of arousal. Experiment 7 used a mood induction technique and showed that sequential modulation was positively correlated with valence rating (the higher the more positive) but was negatively correlated with arousal rating. These results are inconsistent with several previous findings and are difficult to reconcile within a single theoretical framework, confirming an elusive nature of the emotional basis of cognitive control in the flanker task.

Becoming a strategist: The roles of strategy discourse and ontological security in managerial identity work

What is the managerial identity work involved in becoming a “strategist”? Building on a rich, longitudinal set of interviews, we uncover three tactics through which managers mobilize the strategist identity. The self-measurement tactic uses strategy discourse as a normative measuring stick for evaluating the individual as a manager. The self-construction tactic uses strategy discourse as a blueprint for realizing career aspirations. The final self-actualization tactic uses strategy discourse as an emotional basis for crafting meaning into work. We find that strategy discourse can play both disciplinary and emancipatory roles, influenced by managers’ sense of ontological security. The article highlights the importance of social-psychological processes in strategist identity work and discusses implications for the contemporary opening up of strategy and for other similarly loosely structured occupational groups.