emotions
Definition
Emotions refers to dynamic psychological states that continually change, unfold, fluctuate, synchronize, and influence one another over time, rather than functioning as stable traits that switch on and off. In the context of political communication, they are operationalized through facial expression recognition scores capturing the intensity of happiness, excitement, hope, anger, fear, and sadness across video segments. These scores form a two-dimensional network structure in which positive and negative emotions show distinct patterns of co-occurrence and change. Anger, in particular, exhibits greater autonomy from other emotions, and this autonomy is more pronounced in leaders with higher levels of populist rhetoric, while happiness becomes more contingent on co-occurring positive emotions in those same leaders.
Sources: Tomašević & Major (2024)
Related Terms
- network analysis (1 shared article)
- exploratory graph analysis (1 shared article)
- populism (1 shared article)
- affective dynamics (1 shared article)
- computational social science (1 shared article)
Applications
Emotions and Populist Rhetoric
Populist leaders express emotions more frequently in public performances, with a particular emphasis on negative ones. Network psychometric analysis of facial expression data shows that as populist rhetoric increases, anger becomes less connected to other emotions and more autonomously expressed, while happiness grows more dependent on the co-expression of other positive emotions, suggesting strategic shaping of emotional display rather than spontaneous affective response.
Sources: Tomašević & Major (2024)
Emotions and Facial Expression Recognition
Facial expression recognition provides a non-verbal index of emotional content in political speeches, capturing the intensity of discrete emotion categories across time. Although individual facial expressions carry low signal value for identifying a specific emotional state at any given moment, the patterns they form over time are informative about the latent affective structure of a speech, including whether a segment is characterized by positive or negative sentiment.
Sources: Tomašević & Major (2024)
Emotions and Political Communication
The dynamics of emotional expression during speeches follow the sentiment structure of the content, with speakers remaining within positive or negative affective registers for extended periods before transitioning, a pattern detectable through computational analysis of video footage.
Sources: Tomašević & Major (2024)
