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Emotional anchoring and objectification in the media reporting on climate change
Abstract
Using the framework of social representations theory--more precisely the concepts of anchoring and objectification--this article analyses the emotions on which the media reporting on climate change draws. Emotions are thereby regarded as discursive phenomena. A qualitative analysis of two series in Swedish media on climate change, one in a tabloid newspaper and one in public service television news, is presented showing how the verbal and visual representations are attached to emotions of fear, hope, guilt, compassion and nostalgia. It is further argued that emotional representations of climate change may on the one hand enhance public engagement in the issue, but on the other hand may draw attention away from climate change as the abstract, long-term phenomenon of a statistical character that it is.
... To understand these processes, we draw on Durkheimian theory, more specifically the theory of representations (Durkheim 1995;Moscovici 2000), including the concepts of anchoring and objectification (Moscovici 1984;Höijer 2011). All of these, we propose, should be incorporated into the theoretical toolbox of cultural criminologists, narrative criminologists and others interested in the meaning-making processes involved in crime and crime control. ...
... While overlooked in criminology, the theory of representations is widely used in psychology and sociology and has proven particularly effective for examining how people react to new, threatening phenomena such as the climate crisis (Höijer 2010) and the Covid-19 pandemic (Páez and Pérez 2020). It sheds light not only on cognitive dynamics but also on how emotions imbue all meaning-making processes, informing people's every decision and directing their Social Representations of the Jihadist • 3 actions. ...
... Another closely related process that creates representations is 'objectification', which is a mechanism that transforms the unfamiliar or unfathomable into something familiar by reducing it to something concrete that can be immediately accessed through the senses (Höijer 2011; see also Berger and Luckmann 1991: 39-40). For example, the overwhelmingly complex phenomenon of jihadism is commonly portrayed in the media through pictures of menacing men with weapons. ...
Over the last two decades, the social identity of the jihadist has become a central part of street culture. Depictions of jihadists can be found in popular music, movies and media reports. Propaganda celebrating or condemning jihadism circulates online, and a significant number of individuals with a background in street crime have flirted with or converted to jihadism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, this article analyses how Muslims involved in street life and crime construct and relate to the social identity of the jihadist. The Durkheimian theory of representations is employed to show how the joint construction of this identity shapes the ways in which people on the street make sense of themselves, their enemies, and the actions they take towards jihadi extremism. In conclusion, we argue that the theory of representations, including the concepts of anchoring and objectification, should be incorporated into the analytical toolboxes of cultural criminology and narrative criminology to deepen our understanding of how meaning-making unfolds in cultural context.
... This concept implies that SRs may be thought of as both products and processes of emotional experience. The study of SRs as cognitive-emotional processes can then be approached from two different perspectives (for a review, see Piermattéo, 2021): first, a top-down line of research corresponding to how SRs, as cultural pre-constructs and shared knowledge about a specific reality, potentially influence individual emotions (Bouriche, 2022;Wagner et al., 1996); and second, a bottom-up line of research corresponding to how emotions are involved in SRs' genesis and evolution (Bouriche, 2014;Höijer, 2010;Smith & Joffe, 2013), and in the dynamics of SRs as components of the representational field (Bouriche, 2022;Piermattéo, 2021). Our research affiliates the second line of research. ...
... At the same time, associating Trump or Thunberg (both being non-Hungarians), global consequences, and connecting responsibility to politics might be an attempt to distance the phenomenon (Smith & Joffe, 2013;Whitmarsh et al., 2011). Several words referring to emotions associated with climate change before have been identified as contents in the representation: fear, anxiety, anger, worry, sadness, and hope (Breakwell, 2015;Brosch, 2021;Flores & Amigón, 2018;Harth, 2021;Höijer, 2010;Piermattéo, 2021). As Breakwell (2015) argued, fear and anxiety can be integral parts of SRs of hazards, and accordingly, fear and anxiety were most frequently associated with global climate change. ...
... To conclude, we agree with Baquiano and Mendez (2015): based on the results thus far, respondents perceive climate change similarly, which indicates a cross-culturally emergent representation of climate change. This often does not necessarily stem from direct encounters with the issue, but from information conveyed by the media (Höijer, 2010(Höijer, , 2011. At the same time, differences in the content and organization of the representation might be observed due to specific contexts, for instance, in our sample, focusing on human-related aspects and emotions attached to the representational object. ...
... One of the widely used means of communication is television [1,8]. Television's unique attributes-visual narratives, emotional storytelling, and brand reach, interact with anchoring phenomena in distinctive ways [9,10]. Understanding the factors leading to anchoring effects within television can illuminate how audiences perceive non-profit organizations' altruistic communications. ...
... Anchors are critical in information processing because they affect attention and the information receiver's perception of what is valuable and what is not. Information congruent with anchors is considered essential and valuable [10]. In the media and corporate world, communicators use anchors for their benefit. ...
... Emotional anchoring is the communicative process by which a new idea is attached to wellknown emotions [10]. Emotional anchoring is embedded in the verbal and visual illustrations used during communication to enhance communication effectiveness [10,36]. ...
Altruistic communication by non-profit organizations plays a crucial role in shaping individuals’ perceptions and beliefs about altruism. One of the indicators of effective communication is the anchoring of the messages. Therefore, understanding the underlying determinants of anchoring in altruistic communication is essential. Despite the importance of anchoring in the communication of altruism, extant research has not done much to examine the determinants of anchoring in altruistic communication. This paper investigates the determinants of anchoring in non-profit organizations’ altruistic communication through the lens of the dual process theory. It applies the Fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (F-DEMATEL) method to analyze the causal and effect factors. Data were gathered from 12 social communication experts based in Taiwan. Out of the 12 proposed determinants, three factors, namely consistency, cultural consideration, and emotional anchoring, were established as significant causal factors. Consistency had causal effects on five other factors, namely, the use of metaphors, the use of antinomies, thematic anchoring, understanding the cognitive ability of the audience, and crafting engaging information. Cultural consideration had causal effects on feedback, naming, use of antinomies, thematic anchoring, emotional anchoring, and repetition. Emotional anchoring had causal effects on thematic anchoring, use of antinomies, use of metaphors, consistency, naming, feedback, understanding the cognitive ability of the audience, and repetition. On the other hand, feedback, naming, and use of antinomies were established as significant effect factors. The study’s findings offer crucial contributions to the social communication literature and provide important insights for social communication practitioners.
... Data visualization is widely used to explore data about the climate crisis and communicate its implications [1]. Climate journalism is a genre of reporting focused on making the consequences of the climate crisis visible and understandable to lay audiences [2]. In recent years, data visualization has assumed a central role in climate journalism. ...
... The usage of visualization to present the negative results of climate change helps make abstract data tangible for readers. Nonetheless, the emphasis on the negative implications of climate change can also induce feelings of fear, anxiety, and lack of agency in readers [2,[4][5][6]. Yet, climate change cannot be reduced to its ecological and social consequences-connected topics such as climate protection are highly relevant and need to be communicated as they have the potential to orient readers toward a political and cultural shift. Climate protection refers to the institutionalized effort of applying short and long-term strategies to reduce greenhouse emissions generated through human activity [7]. ...
... When presented with large-scale visualizations, readers struggle in understanding the impact of climate change on their daily lives. Feelings of helplessness and the fear induced by negative messages [2] undermine the influence of climate reporting on newspaper readers. Data visualization can play an important role in emphasizing the personal and emotional components of climate change. ...
We present a multi-dimensional, multi-level, and multi-channel approach to data visualization for the purpose of constructive climate journalism. Data visualization has assumed a central role in environmental journalism and is often used in data stories to convey the dramatic consequences of climate change and other ecological crises. However, the emphasis on the catastrophic impacts of climate change tends to induce feelings of fear, anxiety, and apathy in readers. Climate mitigation, adaptation, and protection-all highly urgent in the face of the climate crisis-are at risk of being overlooked. These topics are more difficult to communicate as they are hard to convey on varying levels of locality, involve multiple interconnected sectors, and need to be mediated across various channels from the printed newspaper to social media platforms. So far, there has been little research on data visualization to enhance affective engagement with data about climate protection as part of solution-oriented reporting of climate change. With this research we characterize the unique challenges of constructive climate journalism for data visualization and share findings from a research and design study in collaboration with a national newspaper in Germany. Using the affordances and aesthetics of travel postcards, we present Klimakarten, a data journalism project on the progress of climate protection at multiple spatial scales (from national to local), across five key sectors (agriculture, buildings, energy, mobility, and waste), and for print and online use. The findings from quantitative and qualitative analysis of reader feedback confirm our overall approach and suggest implications for future work.
... Originally advanced by Moscovici (2001;1973) as a psychoanalysis theory, the Social Representation Theory (SRT) has gained traction in media studies as a means of studying how the media create collective cognition in their audiences (Höijer 2011). This is due to the fact that the SRT advances the representation mechanisms of objectification and anchoring that can help in explaining and understanding how scientific phenomena are communicated about and integrated into common knowledge. ...
... Through these mechanisms, the theory strives to explain how social thinking is created, maintained or transformed (Polli & Camargo 2015). It has therefore been extensively employed in various empirical studies to explain how communication affects the organization of collective thought in populations (Höijer 2011). ...
... The mechanism of anchoring aids in meaning creation by relating a phenomenon to familiar concepts that audiences can relate to. Through objectification, a phenomenon is made common knowledge when it is transformed into a concrete concept that the audience can perceive and understand (Markova 2003;Höijer 2011). Objectification may take the form of a symbol, person, or metaphor, while anchoring classifies and assigns names to a phenomenon, thereby giving it meaning that the audience can relate to and enable them to understand it. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to be a phenomenon intersecting different parts of the world. The East African Community which prides itself for enabling socio-economic, political and cultural integration between its member states has had to deal with uncertainties caused by misinformation about the pandemic, which in turn threaten to derail its objectives. In line with this, The East African newspaper stands out as a leading provider of information concerning each of the countries in the community. And although a report in the MarketWatch (2023) indicates that the World Health Organization expects to declare end of the pandemic some time in 2023 as the virus has become more like seasonal flu, The East African newspaper which has established itself as a leading provider of information covering the five (5)
member states of the East African Community has continually reported on the pandemic. How this publication represents the pandemic can influence how its readers understand it. Thus, guided by the Social Representation Theory (SRT) and employing a critical content analysis approach, this paper examines how the newspaper uses imagery in creating social representations about the pandemic. This study contributes to the discourse of media representations of pandemics.
Keywords: Coronavirus, Pandemic, Social Representations, East African Community, Critical Content Analysis
... The theory of social representations proposes two basic mechanisms in our socio-communicative practices that generate social representations: anchoring and objectifying (Hoijer, 2010;Hoijer, 2011). As a communicative mechanism, anchoring refers to a common practice of making the unknown known by locating the new phenomenon within a well-known socio-cultural sphere that allows us to compare and make sense of it. ...
... The editorial content of the selected articles included news, features, and commentaries. Our method of analysis is informed by the theory of social representations, particularly the method developed and used by Birgitta Hoijer (Hoijer, 2010(Hoijer, , 2011. Employing this method, our analysis focuses on the anchoring and objectification mechanisms in the Botswanan print media coverage of climate change. ...
... The representation of climate change in the Botswanan print media involves a strategic approach of placing climate change in a frame that is familiar to members of the public. In the context of social representation and the production of knowledge, this is known as an anchoring mechanism (Moscovici, 1984;Moscovici, 2000;Hoijer, 2010;Hoijer, 2011). In essence, anchoring is about "placing an object in a frame of reference" (D' Alessio, 1990, p. 71). ...
... The theory of social representations proposes two basic mechanisms in our socio-communicative practices that generate social representations: anchoring and objectifying (Hoijer, 2010;Hoijer, 2011). As a communicative mechanism, anchoring refers to a common practice of making the unknown known by locating the new phenomenon within a well-known socio-cultural sphere that allows us to compare and make sense of it. ...
... The editorial content of the selected articles included news, features, and commentaries. Our method of analysis is informed by the theory of social representations, particularly the method developed and used by Birgitta Hoijer (Hoijer, 2010(Hoijer, , 2011. Employing this method, our analysis focuses on the anchoring and objectification mechanisms in the Botswanan print media coverage of climate change. ...
... The representation of climate change in the Botswanan print media involves a strategic approach of placing climate change in a frame that is familiar to members of the public. In the context of social representation and the production of knowledge, this is known as an anchoring mechanism (Moscovici, 1984;Moscovici, 2000;Hoijer, 2010;Hoijer, 2011). In essence, anchoring is about "placing an object in a frame of reference" (D' Alessio, 1990, p. 71). ...
... Public health officials and the media emphasized the risks, using emotional stories to win public support and ensure that alcopops were perceived as an important public health issue. Hoïjer [51] highlights the role of emotional anchoring, whereby individuals attach affective responses to representations associated with the problem. Emotions serve as powerful anchors that shape perceptions, attitudes, and responses to social issues. ...
... Emotions serve as powerful anchors that shape perceptions, attitudes, and responses to social issues. For instance, the emotional anchoring of fear and urgency can mobilize public attention and resources toward addressing a problem, such as a public health crisis or environmental degradation [51]. In the case of alcopops, the problem emerged through the denunciation of the drink's alcohol content and enticing aspects to young people by key social actors, which induced a strong emotional response in the public. ...
Alcopops are malt-based or spirit-based sugary beverages whose consumption has led to numerous policies in different Western countries. This article examines the representational and socio-political dynamics surrounding the sale of alcopops that led to restrictive policies in Canada (2017–2020). Using qualitative methods during this period, including interviews with key players in the field of alcohol policy, analysis of press articles and review of legislative documents, we trace the evolution of public and political discourse on alcopops. We shed light on the role of social actors—mainly public-health organizations and the alcohol industry—defending their own interests to influence policy-making. A multi-theoretical framework is used to analyze how alcopops emerged as a public problem. This framework integrates Herbert Blumer's theoretical perspective on social problems, Serge Moscovici's social representation theory and Stevens and Zampini’s political constellation model. Through an analysis of the socio-political context in Quebec, we reveal the complex interplay between public health imperatives and the interests of the alcohol industry. This should serve as a model to study public problems that lead to public policies implementation.
... In this article we consider that emotions are discursive phenomena that never exist alone, but are natural and necessary parts of all meaning-making, important in all kinds of social representation. Also we can consider that emotions are cultural-cognitive products related to value and social norms and that representations held by individuals as well as textual and visual objects carry emotions as an inseparable part of them [42]. So there is an interest in bridging SRs and emotions because both are socially constituted, constitutive and sensitive to context immediacy [43]. ...
... These two processes occur as two sides of the same story [52] intertwined and partially simultaneous [53]. To these two processes (anchoring and objectification), Höijer [42] added emotional anchoring and objectification, that refers to communicative processes by which a new phenomenon is attached to well-known positive or negative emotions, in the case of this research we are talking about a social mobilization that anchored and objectified strong and negative emotions in the image of Bolsonaro. ...
Aiming to debate the the power of the counter-mobilization that emerged on Twitter during the coronavirus pandemic in Brazil, we carried out a documental study on Twitter collecting texts and images associated with the #BolsonaroGenocida hashtag, between March 13 and June 6 of 2021, a period in which intense public demonstrations took place against the Bolsonaro’s government in the country. We analysed 1243 tweets and 503 images, identifying the main contents anchored and objectified by the hashtags, revealing the various dimensions that compose the social representations associated with Bolsonaro and his management during the pandemic. The tweets’ contents comprehend the social and political demonstration arising from part of the Brazilian people against the actions taken by the president of Brazil during the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to thousands of deaths that could have been avoided; regarding the images, the results point out an emotional anchoring of Bolsonaro’s image to death. It is therefore important to demarcate the nature of Twitter as an specific platform for the mobilization of SR through the sharing of images and texts, which ends up evoking emotions that contribute to accentuating the social identity of the group that is expressed.
... They explain and orient practices, facilitate communication between actors, and define the identity of an individual or a group-all this to create a feeling of belonging. Social representations have social (Jodelet, 2003;Moscovici, 1961), cognitive (Abric, 1994), linguistic (Jodelet, 1989(Jodelet, , 2003, and emotional dimensions (Höijer, 2010). Polymorphic social representations can associate various semantic categories, such that group members are constantly negotiating the meaning of the object in question (Moliner, 1996). ...
... Polymorphic social representations can associate various semantic categories, such that group members are constantly negotiating the meaning of the object in question (Moliner, 1996). Research on people's understanding of climate change has developed over time using SRT; initial studies were published in the early 2010s targeting either the social representations of specific populations (Bohn Bertoldo and Bousfield, 2011;Caillaud and Flick, 2013;Smith and Joffe, 2012) or those driven by media discourses (Höijer, 2010;Jaspal et al., 2014;Olausson, 2011). They highlight some evolution in the temporal distance to climate change, such as one study that showed Germans felt the threat closer to them than French (Caillaud and Flick, 2013). ...
As population-related climate change research increases, so does the need to nuance approaches to this complex phenomenon, including issues related to cultural and linguistic translations. To explore how climate change is understood in understudied societies, a case-study approach is taken to address social representations of climate change by inhabitants of a Maore village in the French island of Mayotte. The study explores how local fishers understand the issue when considering observed environmental changes. Based on analyses of 30 interviews, the study found that social representations and related climate change discourses are not well established, except for individuals in close contact with French institutions. Issues regarding local culture and language reveal the importance of understanding the different components of climate change. Climate change communication and awareness-raising on the island are explored, as well as considerations of culturally and linguistically complex settings with a Global North/Global South interface.
... In this sequence, the appraisal process provides, on the one hand, knowledge about the object(s) involved in an emotional experience, and, on the other hand, emotional valence. Some scholars referred to this process when they stated that "emotions are thoughts somehow felt" (Rosaldo, 1984, p. 143), "beliefs are part of emotions" (Frijda & Mesquita, 2000, p. 52), thought-filled feelings (Ratner, 2000) or parts of meaning-making (Höijer, 2010). The nature of the emotion experienced will be related to the intensity and polarity of the tension (emotional charge) generated by the dissonance (Carver & Scheier, 1990 the socio-genetic perspective, derives from the evaluation of the concrete object and its status in an individual's mind. ...
... It is then at an intersubjective level that a functional sequence of production of meaning can take place. This intersubjective functional sequence of meaning revision following situations of social sharing of emotion will reflect the psychosocial or sociological positioning toward an object, i.e., an emotion-driven psychosocial or sociological anchoring (Guttiérez Vidrio, 2019;Höijer, 2010Höijer, , 2011Pivetti et al., 2017). ...
One of the main focuses of the theory of Social Representations (SRs) consists of examining its sensitivity to context immediacy. Arising from everyday life, emotions could be particularly relevant to this aim as they could constitute modalities through which SRs can emerge, be reinforced, or be transformed. The inherently unstable nature of reality requires a signaling system of this variability. The general assumption is that emotions provide, at an individual level, a signaling function of the relevance of SRs in the social integration of reality. Triggering this signal function, the role of tension lies at the heart of the process. With the emotion-driven tension, we approach SRs as cognitive-emotional processes of construction, conservation, and transformation of social knowledge. We, therefore, situate the study of the relationships between SRs and emotions in a conceptual approach to the dynamics of stability and change. Considering SRs as dynamic objects of social change, this article proposes to conceptualize SRs as cognitive-emotional processes by promoting an integrative model grounded on a socio-constructivist as well as a discursive perspective. In this model, emotions are addressed as individual dispositions at the service of the sociogenesis of SRs. Occurring from individual experience, they contribute through their sharing to the construction of social knowledge. Implications of this conceptual proposal for SR theory are discussed.
... Indeed, our findings revealed that sympathy was most effective in persuading viewers to recognize climate change as a serious problem that demanded conscious efforts to determine the solution. According to Höijer (2010), sympathy involves cognitive beliefs that the suffering is painful, and that the victim does not deserve the suffering. This belief that the victim is innocent has been found to be significant in driving audiences' reception and recognition of violence and other catastrophes such as climate change. ...
... In addition to this individual-level guilt, our selected videos may have also evoked collective guilt among the viewers. Collective guilt is usually triggered and intensified through referring to our apologies to next generations (Höijer, 2010), as exemplified by our selected video "Dear Future Generations: Sorry." By pointing out that it was "our [collective] wrongdoing" that posed a threat to our future generations, the YouTube video may have triggered a feeling of collective guilt among viewers. ...
This study examines how emotionally evocative viral videos on climate change may promote Generation Z’s actions addressing climate change. Through an online survey of 583 participants, this study provides empirical evidence supporting the conceptual framework incorporating problem recognition, involvement recognition, and motivation mediators to understand the mechanism underlying the effects of emotions on advocacy behaviors from passive information seeking, to proactive willingness to speak out, and willingness to alter behavior to mitigate climate change. Results of the study provide guidelines for environmental nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups on how to educate Generation Z on the climate change issue and engage this young generation to mitigate climate change.
... Bu durum iklim değişikliğinin olumsuz etkilerini zihinsel düzeyde azaltmasına yol açarak, iklim değişikliği inkârını pekiştirebilir. Dolayısıyla, iklim değişikliğinin olumsuz etkilerini azaltmada sürdürülebilir bireysel ve kolektif bir kimlik oluşturmak için sadece olumsuz duyguları değil, aynı zamanda olumlu duyguları (umut, şefkat gibi) da tetikleyecek bir iletişim örgüsü kurmak yararlı görünmektedir (Höijer, 2010). Yukarıda ana hatlarıyla özetlenen bu çalışmanın sonuçları iklim değişikliği temsillerinin bu değişikliğin etkileri ve nedenlerine odaklandığını göstermektedir. ...
Bu araştırmada, iklim değişikliğinin olumsuz etkilerini azaltmak amacıyla çevre dostu davranışlar sergileyen ve sergilemeyen insanların sosyal ve bilişsel süreçleri Sosyal Temsiller Teorisi perspektifiyle incelenmiştir. İç içe karma araştırma modelinin kullanıldığı çalışmaya, kolay örnekleme yoluyla 384 üniversite öğrencisi (Kadın = 231, Erkek = 153) katılmıştır. Veriler, çeşitli istatistiksel analizlere, prototip analizine ve içerik analizine tabi tutulmuştur. Sonuçlar, katılımcıların iklimsel koşulların değiştiğini fark ettiklerini, iklim değişikliğini yetkin bir şekilde bilmeyen birine tarif edebileceklerini, bu konuda ortalamanın üzerinde bilgi sahibi olduklarını düşündüklerini ve iklim değişikliğiyle ilgili güncel gelişmeleri dikkatle takip ettiklerini göstermektedir. Ayrıca, katılımcılar iklim değişikliği ile ilgili haberlere sıklıkla internet ve televizyon aracılığıyla ulaştıklarını belirtmektedirler. Ancak, çoğu katılımcının iklim değişikliğiyle ilgili bilimsel, felsefi veya sanatsal etkinliklere katılmadıkları ve iklim dostu bir yaşam tarzına geçmedikleri görülmektedir. Prototip analizi ve içerik analizi sonuçlarına göre, çevre dostu davranış sergileyenler ile sergilemeyenlerin iklim değişikliğine ilişkin sosyal temsilleri ve bu konudaki duyguları arasında önemli ölçüde benzerlikler görülmektedir. Her iki grup iklim değişikliğini, bu değişikliğin etkileri (örn., kuraklık, mevsim değişikliği, hastalıklar) ve nedenleri (örn., fosil yakıtlar, sanayileşme, bilinçsizlik) aracılığıyla temsil etmektedir. Bu konudaki çözüm önerilerine ise değinmemektedirler. Ayrıca her iki grup iklim değişikliğinin antropojenik nedenlerini (örn., çevre kirliliği, hava kirliliği, kirlilik) ve iklim değişikliğinin aslında doğrudan gözlenemeyen nedenlerini (örn., sera gazları, karbondioksit, ozon tabakasının delinmesi) vurgulamaktadır. İklim değişikliğinin katılımcılarda uyandırdığı duygular incelendiğinde; çevre dostu davranış sergilediğini bildiren katılımcılar için en sık ifade edilen duygular, kötü, üzüntü, korku, endişe ve kaygı iken; çevre dostu davranış sergilemediğini bildiren katılımcılar en sık kötü, korku, üzüntü, kaygı, endişe duygularını ifade etmişlerdir. Bu sonuçlar, sosyal temsiller literatürü çerçevesinde sosyo-bilişsel düzeyde tartışılmıştır.
... Emotions play a crucial role, especially in communication through the media, where they serve as a vital tool for conveying the scientific and technical dimensions of policy matters, such as climate change, to the general populace. When emotions are embedded into the media's portrayal of these issues, they can bolster public engagement and foster the development of collective identities (Hoijer, 2012). Past studies of emotional responses to renewable energy projects show how they play a significant role in oppositional activism and how emotions can shape public perceptions of renewable projects (Cass & Walker, 2009). ...
This paper builds on the burgeoning literature of emotion analyses in the policy process by examining how emotions are used and portrayed in locating a contentious renewable transmission line in Southern California, US. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) as the theoretical guide, this paper finds evidence that actors experience similar emotions about beliefs to those within their coalition and dissimilar emotions about beliefs to actors in rival coalitions. This trend holds for diffuse (positive/negative) and most, but not all, discrete (e.g. anger, dismay, affinity) emotions expressions. Negative emotions also tend to define coalitions more strongly while positive emotions have varied patterns. The conclusion lays out future research directions to further our understanding of emotions and beliefs in policy and politics.
... Emotion may also be key in directing attention, alerting us to what is important or to things which we should give more careful assessments (Curtis, 2010;Leder et al., 2004). It is also linked to aspects such as self-relevance or a feeling of importance for one's own ideals and existence (Hoijer, 2010;Keltner & Oatley, 2022;Swim & Bloodhart, 2015;Weber, 2006), and, thus, via these aspects as well, is connected to directed behaviors (i.e., helping of others, self-protection, reparation; Devoldre et al., 2010;Wilson & Arvai, 2006;see Swim Bloodhart, 2015 for review) or otherwise to providing meaning for information and context. Emotion is also argued to be particularly important in navigating social situations, providing, as put by Oatley (2022, see also Stamkou, 2022; see also Oatley et al., 2018) "a grammar of social life" that "help[s] us understand the moral framework of situations," and is, in turn, suggested to touch even more basic discussions of empathy and understanding of others (Gerger et al., 2018;Singer & Lamm, 2009). ...
We offer first, exploratory evidence into a design element employed by artists and curatorsto maximize impacts of art interventions towards attitude change. In two exhibitions involvingrefugee acceptance (Study 1, N = 41) and climate (Study 2, N = 49), we collected curator/artist-provided profiles of intended emotions, which were matched to viewer reports and to changes inattitude measures via a pre-post design. In both studies, viewers felt more intended emotions andwere proficient at identifying how they were intended to feel, and with, in Study 1, a significantrelation between the former and agreement that the exhibition had caused one to reflect aboutoneself. In Study 2, feeling more intended emotions, as set by the curator but not the artist,correlated to changes in nature connectedness and hedonic values. However, feeling more emotionsin general, regardless of intentions, was consistently the strongest driver of effects, raising newimplications for emotion, arts-based, and intervention research.
... The conclusion drawn from the study emphasizes that public support for climate action is not solely driven by scientific consensus but is deeply intertwined with broader societal attitudes encompassing morality, politics, economics, and culture (Höijer, 2010;Norgaard, 2011). The effectiveness of visual communication, particularly on platforms like Instagram, holds promise in engaging the public due to its ability to provoke understanding and involvement. ...
Climate crisis is one of the most serious threats to Earth and its inhabitants. There are attempts to engage individuals and groups in taking action to reduce climate crisis and images are an increasingly significant part of these attempts. Research regarding the use of images indicates that they are capable of affecting a viewer’s thoughts about climate crisis. This research study is an attempt to understand how climate activists use social media platforms to conduct advocacy. Using a visual social semiotic approach, the researcher has studied how still visuals uploaded on Instagram feed helps climate activists to reach out their respective audience. This research is qualitative in nature and the theoretical framework is drawn on Stuart Hall’s Representation Theory. Data interpretation has been carried out using Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s understanding of visual social semiotic analysis. The findings show that social media is used for primarily triggering consciousness and action among the users or viewers, and draw attention of the policymakers, government, and media. The photographs posted on the platforms of a global social movement in an Indian state that combat climate crisis, are more of infographics, instructional guides, illustrations, rather than actual photographs that document climate crisis. The representational meaning of a photograph posted by a climate activist is different from the constructional meaning of that photograph.
... Images play an important role in constructing that relation and dealing with this tension (Hansen 2010). First, what is relatively abstract, such as statistical data and future scenarios, can be translated and presented as concrete and familiar (Höijer 2010). Second, risks and dangers, relatively distant both in space and time, can be brought closer and rendered as requiring urgent action (Smith and Joffé 2009). ...
We argue that the evaluation of multimodal arguments needs to take into account the semiotic resources used to communicate them as well as the context in which they are produced and interpreted. Thus, in addition to the critical questions pertaining to the scheme that help assess the internal cogency of the argument and thereby its reasonableness, we propose asking questions regarding the cognitive and rhetorical dimensions of the argument in order to assess how effectively the semiotic design helps the addressee to process it and how effectively it is adjusted to the audience and context. To illustrate our proposal for a three-dimensional evaluation of multimodal argumentation, we analyze comparatively three environmental campaign posters that present in varying degrees of semiotic complexity the negative consequences of not taking action regarding the protection of the environment.
... Media often illustrates the reality in society (Azni & Mahmud, 2020). According to Höijer (2010) and Wagner et al. (1999), audiovisual media represents phenomena in society, and thus can be seen and felt directly. Korean dramas are a type of communicative media in audiovisual form that illustrates the social reality that is present in society (Lee, 2018;Meidina, 2016;Xoun et al., 2022). ...
Purpose: The objective of this study is to investigate how Korean dramas portray stereotypical images of accountants, which is expected to provide literature that explores popular culture in accounting research.Method: This research used a qualitative approach with the thematic analysis method. Four Korean dramas were selected based on ratings and the role of the accountant profession in the dramas for both main and supporting characters. Findings: The results of the study showed that accountants are described as professional, intelligent, and honest beancounters. Positive and negative stereotypes in Korean dramas as popular culture might influence the career option of becoming accountants. This research has been unable to explain why there has been declining interest in the accountant profession. Future studies could involve examining the effect of accountant stereotypes as portrayed in Korean dramas on their viewers.Originality/Value: The visualization of accountants in Korean dramas is considered a new and interesting topic to be investigated. Some previous studies had involved this topic, and there is still some room for improvement. This study is expected to improve some areas, particularly the methods and findings of related topics.
... Además, existen estudios en los que el análisis de sentimiento es una buena manera de investigar el trasfondo subyacente de la información extraída (Höijer, 2010), como el trabajo de Bernabé Loranca et al. ...
El reconocimiento de la presencia y relevancia de la información sobre cambio climático en los medios de comunicación es un tema primordial de cara a nuevos objetivos y desafíos globales, como la Agenda 2030 para el Desarrollo Sostenible. Estamos presenciando una configuración de la opinión pública a través de las redes sociales, especialmente Twitter, por lo que su análisis puede ser relevante para abordar los desafíos de la información ciudadana, construyendo un espacio interactivo de opinión pública. El objetivo de este trabajo es revisar la presencia de mensajes sobre cambio climático en Twitter en España y analizar el contenido publicado en 2022, atendiendo al emisor, el mensaje, los enfoques y el tratamiento, comparándolo con análisis similares desarrollados en los tres años anteriores (2019, 2020, 2021) incorporando una perspectiva longitudinal. Con una metodología cuantitativa, este estudio aplica un protocolo de análisis de contenido, con 35 variables, ejecutado por codificadores humanos, sobre una muestra final de 753 tweets, publicados entre los meses de marzo y junio de 2022. Las conclusiones orientan sobre quienes son las voces más activas, los temas principales, la visibilidad de los jóvenes y los efectos más comentados, a la vez que se aprecian las consecuencias del conflicto armado con relación a la transición ecológica, como el retorno y la dependencia económica de los combustibles fósiles, el efecto de las sanciones internacionales sobre la energía, el replanteamiento de las políticas de suministro, la reducción de alimentos y las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero en Europa. También se consideran variables nuevas para incluir en futuros estudios, como la perspectiva ética de la información y el discurso de odio y negacionismo hacia el cambio climático presente en esta red.
... Eco-anxiety may result in high levels of stress that wear away an individual's ability to act, resulting in lower engagement in individual and collective pro-climate behaviors (Stanley et al., 2021;Kurth and Pihkala, 2022). Additionally, eliciting emotions such as hope, interest, compassion, and worry have been found to increase public engagement and act as predictors of climatefriendly policy support (O'Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009;Höijer, 2010;Harth et al., 2013;Lu and Schuldt, 2016;Feldman and Hart, 2017;Nabi et al., 2018;Goldberg et al., 2020;Brosch, 2021). Some kinds of positive emotions have resulted in "impactful actions", such as high impact behaviors like reducing meat consumption or on low impact like changing a light bulb to LED (Schneider and van der Linden, 2023). ...
Introduction
Reaching the public and engaging them in addressing climate change could be effectively motivated by film and television. Unfortunately, to-date, there is limited understanding regarding the mechanisms by which such media motivates behavior change to address climate. In this research, we sought to investigate how media exposure can motivate climate and environmentally-conscious behaviors by assessing how emotional responses of viewers or demographic characteristics affected subsequent behavior over weeks following exposure.
Methods
Participants ( N = 352) were recruited online and randomly assigned to watch one of three video segments. In surveys before and 4 weeks after viewing, they reported on specific environmentally friendly actions they had taken in recent weeks. Using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) adjusted for actions reported at baseline, we assessed whether the number of actions reported at follow-up differed by assigned video. Two ANCOVA models were pre-specified, one with video only and one with backwards selection on a list of demographic factors and emotions experienced while watching the videos.
Results
In the multivariable model, a higher level of action was associated with self-reported joy ( p < 0.001) and fear ( p < 0.01).
Discussion
These findings suggest that climate communication that engages audience members in a joyful emotional state or, to a lesser degree, a frightening experience may be most effective in increasing climate action.
... and easily recognizable pictures of wild animals, contextualized as innocent victims of global warming" (Höijer 2010). Beside the publications that attempt to position alternative proteins as better than meat and dairy, Instagram is full of publications that seek to position these products as being as good as their animal counterparts. ...
This article is concerned with the dynamic of social change in the domain of food consumption and seeks to understand the role played by social representations in the transformation of daily food practices. It rests on a model of change that hinges on the processes of cultivation and naturalization of new components of practices. Social representation theory is used to enhance the understanding of the ways that representations contribute to these processes of cultivation and naturalization. Using a visual and multimodal framework for analyzing online environments, the research looked at 984 Instagram posts published by 34 actors who have an interest in promoting alternative proteins in the Canadian context. Results show an emergent subfield of food consumption defined by representations of alternative proteins actively and fluidly intertwined with those of their meat and dairy counterparts. This interplay emerges as being confrontational in the cultivation phase of the model for changing practices –where alternative proteins are presented as being better than meat and dairy – but becomes much more conciliatory during its naturalization phase, in which alternative proteins are presented as being as good as meat and dairy.
... Para abordar los acuciantes retos relativos al cuidado de nuestro planeta son necesarias estrategias comunicativas adecuadas, como indican investigadores de diferente procedencia disciplinar, que no usen únicamente narrativas enfocadas a dar una visión fatalista o excesivamente catastrofista (Höijer, 2010; Garcés, Ramos y Redondo, 2020) y que den cuenta de las alteraciones presentes que están sufriendo los ecosistemas en la actualidad (sequías, inundaciones, etc.) y las que en un futuro cercano existirán si no somos todos partícipes de un cambio de hábitos. ...
La urgente necesidad de impulsar, promover y conseguir una transición ecológica, entendida como “un proceso de cambios en los sistemas de producción y consumo, así como en las instituciones sociales y políticas y en las formas de vida y los valores de la población” (García, 2018: 87), es uno de los grandes retos del siglo XXI. Debemos hacer frente a la crisis de la biodiversidad, la contaminación y la transición energética con el fin de conseguir una sociedad sostenible acorde con los recursos disponibles en nuestro planeta.
... Two series in Swedish media on climate change, one in a tabloid newspaper and one in public service television news, were investigated by a (Höijer, 2010) study to find out the presence of emotional anchoring and objectification in their coverage. Findings showed that the news coverage in both selected samples pointed out the threat of climate change, confirming the presence of frames because of emotional anchoring and objectification. ...
... Indeed, as various studies have highlighted, images (especially moving images) play a fundamental role in our perception of the environment Burgos, E. From Cowspiracy to Seaspiracy: Discursive Strategies in Contemporary Vegan Advocacy Documentaries (Cox, 2013) and our understanding of its problems (O'Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009;Moser & Dilling, 2012;Ahmad et al., 2015;Shen, Sheer & Li, 2015;Brereton, 2015). This is because we connect to environmental issues in a markedly visual way (Leiserowitz, 2006;Höijer, 2010;Doyle, 2011;Howell, 2013;Smith & Joffe, 2013) that has the power to elicit intense emotional engagement (Hill, 2004;Joffe, 2008;Olson et al., 2008;DiFrancesco & Young, 2010;Graham & Abrahamse, 2017;Binti Mat, 2019;Finkle & León, 2019;Ahn, 2020;Weik von Mossner, 2022;León, Negredo & Erviti, 2022). ...
Guided by the qualitative approach of film analysis, this article examines the discursive strategies used in the films Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret and Seaspiracy, while identifying contrasts with the rhetoric of other pro-vegan and environmentalist documentaries. The analysis of both films together serves to highlight: a) the prominence they give to environmentalist reasons for veganism; b) their different way of portraying violence against animals; c) their use of a detective plotline to articulate the narrative; d) their emotional use of first-person narration; and e) the emphasis they place on global responsibility for the environmental impact of animal-based food production and their proposal of specific, feasible solutions to reverse the situation. The study finds that Cowspiracy and Seaspiracy stand as evidence of the vegan advocacy documentary’s contributions to the environmentalist non-fiction genre to which it belongs, while highlighting the strategies used in both films (avoiding audience revulsion and promoting positive feelings; integrating fictional elements and fostering identification in order to seduce the audience; appealing to commitment and conveying proactive messages rather than a sense of helplessness) that enable the cognitive and affective dimensions to feed into each other for the purpose of persuading viewers and promoting individual and social change.
... In fact, recent findings show that direct anti-climate change arguments may be strategically concealed to avoid public confrontations that might affect the commercial interests of companies and/or governments 37,38 , which could be a possible explanation for the central position occupied by some climate change denialist authorities within the community that believes in climate change and promotes actions to combat it (Fig. 4). This hypothesis seems to be supported by previous studies showing that, in general, there is greater support for climate change on Twitter from academia, governments that promote campaigns to combat this problem and news agencies that frequently include this issue in their agenda, resulting in a greater following and support from individual private users 39 . These findings also reinforce the idea of greater openness towards mutual understanding between polarised communities around the climate debate. ...
Social polarisation processes have become a central phenomenon for the explanation of population behavioural dynamics in today's societies. Although recent works offer solutions for the detection of polarised political communities in social media, there is still a lack of works that allow an adequate characterization of the specific topics on which these divides between social groups are articulated. Our study aims to discover and characterise antagonistic communities on Twitter based on a method that combines the identification of authorities and textual classifiers around three public debates that have recently produced major controversies: (1) vaccination; (2) climate change; and (3) abortion. The proposed method allows the capture of polarised communities with little effort, requiring only the selection of some terms that characterise the topic and some initial authorities. Our findings show that the processes of social polarisation can vary considerably depending on the subject on which the debates are articulated. Specifically, polarisation manifests more prominently in the realms of vaccination and abortion, whereas this divide is less apparent in the context of climate change.
... News reporting about climate change often emphasizes people's emotions, including fear, hope, guilt, compassion, and even nostalgia (Höijer, 2010). Similarly, thinking about climate change evokes an array of emotional responses in people (Smith and Leiserowitz, 2014), even though, as a scientific topic, climate change "possesses few features that generate rapid, emotional, visceral reactions" (Weber, 2006;Markowitz and Shariff, 2012). ...
Introduction
As emotions are strong predictors of climate policy support, we examined multiple discrete emotions that people experience in reaction to various types of information about climate change: its causes, the scientific consensus, its impacts, and solutions. Specifically, we assessed the relationships between four types of messages and five discrete emotions (guilt, anger, hope, fear, and sadness), testing whether these emotions mediate the impacts of information on support for climate policy.
Methods
An online experiment exposed participants ( N = 3,023) to one of four informational messages, assessing participants' emotional reactions to the message and their support for climate change mitigation policies as compared to a no-message control group.
Results
Each message, except the consensus message, enhanced the feeling of one or more emotions, and all of the emotions, except guilt, were positively associated with policy support. Two of the messages had positive indirect effects on policy support: the impacts message increased sadness, which in turn increased policy support, and the solutions message increased hope, which increased policy support. However, the solutions message also reduced every emotion except hope, while the impacts, causes, and consensus messages each suppressed hope.
Discussion
These findings indicate that climate information influences multiple emotions simultaneously and that the aroused emotions may conflict with one another in terms of fostering support for climate change mitigation policies. To avoid simultaneously arousing a positive motivator while depressing another, message designers should focus on developing content that engages audiences across multiple emotional fronts.
... To effectively employ this mechanism, the media often use personalities with whom their audiences can identify or are familiar with (Allern, 2002). Thus, how the public understands the phenomenon is based on how they perceive and appreciate the personalities (Allern, 2002;2011). ...
The media play a central role in disseminating information with the aim of creating awareness of topical issues, including legal issues. Various studies have established that news from the media is a popular source of information on current events. Similarly, the public’s knowledge, beliefs and attitudes towards legal systems are largely shaped by the media information they receive, thus, the need for examining the content and nature of information being disseminated by the media. Correspondingly, the Social Representation Theory (SRT) offers a framework for studying how the media communicates about issues through the mechanisms of objectification and anchoring, with the aim of creating awareness and promoting understanding. It is against this backdrop that this study examined how two leading Kenyan newspapers used elements of objectification and anchoring to represent the ICC process involving six Kenyans accused of being key perpetrators of the 2007/08 Post-Election Violence. Guided by the tenets of the SRT, this study used an analytical research design to identify and describe elements of objectification and anchoring used in the coverage of the Kenyan ICC confirmation of charges hearing proceedings by the two leading daily newspapers in the country: Daily Nation and The Standard. It was established that the newspapers used various elements of representation that were fused with ideological undertones and sensationally designed to arouse emotional reactions in readers, especially when the ICC process was represented as an aggressive struggle or war between the prosecution team and the Kenyans who were facing charges at the court.
... Moscovici's study of the communication of scientific knowledge in society made it possible to examine the relations between the common-sense system of thought and the scientific system of thought. The theory of social representations subsequently inspired a plethora of researchers ( [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] to name just a few) who sought to better understand the problem of the relationship between scientific theory, learned knowledge, expert knowledge and common-sense knowledge [26]. This interest has led to a redesign of the framework used for analyzing the transformation of abstract scientific categories, which are limited to the reified domain of researchers, into objects that are recognizable in everyday social reality. ...
Workaholism, a term borrowed from the language around alcoholism, first appeared in academic writing in the late 1960s. This article addresses the following questions: How has the concept of workaholism evolved in scientific literature and in society? How do people who identify as workaholics represent and communicate work addiction, and how do they identify it as their lived reality? Drawing on the concept of naturalization as a process of social representation, we argue that workaholism has been constituted as a naturalized object, and we consider the ways in which it is reproduced in everyday life through communication and experience. We situated the definition of workaholism within the scholarly literature. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with eleven individuals who self-identify or have been diagnosed as work addicts. Our research shows that representational naturalization began when workaholism first became a recognizable reality as a result of changes in the world of work. Naturalization was then achieved by eliminating contradictions through the process of decoupling the positive features of workaholism from the overall concept. Our results demonstrate how this naturalized representation of workaholism is reproduced through the communication and lived experience of “workaholics.”
... Several studies have dealt with the affective dimension of SR and its importance (e.g., Banchs, 1996;Gutiérrez, 2013;Höijer, 2010). The interpretation of the discourse remains a problem in its collection. ...
The catering industry sector has been strongly affected by the health crisis, explaining an important turnover since the first lockdown. We have used the Theory of Social Representations (TSR) in order to illustrate the meaning given to the "catering" object, and to understand the position of professionals. Two groups of 30 professionals from the catering sector were compared with the particularity of having or not having undergone retraining. The protocol is based on face-to-face interviews and the use of a mixed methodology (qualitative and quantitative). Results show both with qualitative and quantitative methodology that it is not the same social representation. This illustrates the impact of practices on the meaning given to the object and the impact of the health crisis.
... It has been argued that the media is key to raising awareness about "the environment," which is a quite abstract object and thus difficult to apprehend (Dryzek, 2005). Given the long-term, worldwide impact of the environmental crisis, the social media could play an important part in informing the public about the multiple issues and aspects that they cannot directly perceive, as suggested by several message-centered or small-scale audience studies (Hautea et al., 2021;Höijer, 2010;Olausson, 2009;Terracina-Hartman et al., 2013). Large-scale, direct measures of public perception have also confirmed the positive relationship between individual environmental concern and media consumption in general terms or, alternatively, news media use in particular (Harring et al., 2011;Ahern, 2012;Takahashi et al., 2017;Udalov & Welsens, 2021). ...
Using data from the Latinobarómetro (Latin Barometer) survey of 2017 to analyze the effect of social network site usage on climate change awareness in 18 Latin American countries, this article makes three contributions. First, it offers results on the socioeconomic determinants of climate awareness in a region of the world where there is scant published evidence in this regard. Second, it shows the effect of social media consumption on climate change awareness by assessing the role of each of the most popular sites: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Tumblr. Third, it assesses the effects of multi-platform consumption. The results show that YouTube has the strongest and most robust positive and statistically significant effect on climate change awareness, followed by Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp, while being a multi-platform user also has a positive and statistically significant effect on climate change awareness. The implications of these findings for understanding the role of social media in the development of environmental awareness are discussed.
... From this perspective, pictures speak louder than scientific reports because they are direct and intuitive. Höijer (2010) has previously argued, based on analyses of newspaper coverage, that emotional representations can serve to enhance engagement with the climate issue, but also draw attention away. While Laura's representation resonates with the former, Bjørg seemed to illustrate the latter. ...
This article analyses how people use social media to make sense of climate change, exploring climate issues as part of everyday communication in media-saturated societies. Building on prominent themes in the environmental communication literature on social media, such as mobilisation and polarisation, we respond to calls for more qualitative and interpretative analysis. Our study therefore asks how people use social media in everyday life to make sense of climate issues, and it expands on previous findings in the field through a qualitative typology of everyday social media use. The empirical data stems from in-depth interviews with Norwegians who are engaged in climate issues, with informants ranging from activists to declared sceptics, although we find widespread ambivalence across group positions. Our findings contribute to disentangling contradictory findings in the field through a discussion of how climate change is part of everyday communication.
... Given the fact that sections of society have also local media, the imagery may vary widely within a society. (Weingart et al., 2000;Wagner et al., 2002;Lorenzoni et al., 2006;Höijer, 2010;Moloney et al., 2014 ;Luke, 2015;Nerlich, 2015) ( Figure 2). ...
In this paper I discuss how the issue of climate change becomes a social phenomenon and a social object. This process follows the model of how the public comes to represent scientific issues in the course of discursive and media events. The process unfolds from communal forms of discourse through institutionalisation, uptake by mass media and political intervention to a reified discourse. The reified discourse, at the end, is characterised by ideological markers and by barring alternative voices. Resumo Neste artigo, discuto como a questão das mudanças climáticas se torna um fenómeno social e um objeto social. Esse processo segue o modelo de como o público chega a representar questões científicas no curso de eventos discursivos e mediáticos. O processo desenvolve-se a partir de formas comuns de discurso através da institucionalização, absorção pelos meios de comunicação social e intervenção política para um discurso reificado. O discurso reificado, no fim, é caracterizado por marcadores ideológicos e por barrar vozes alternativas.
... Produksi sampah di Indonesia sebesar 67,8 juta ton di tahun 2020 (KLHK, 2020 (Höijer, 2010). Media terbukti memiliki kekuatan untuk melibatkan masyarakat dalam masalah lingkungan (Zhao, 2009 Sumber: Hollweg et al., (2011), Potter (2012, Rahmawati (2016), Khuzaifah (2019), dan Sujata (2019) Hubungan antara empat variabel tersebut; ...
Permasalahan sampah di Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta (DIY) tak kunjung usai, salah satunya dikarenakan masyarakat tidak menyadari masalah yang timbul dari sampah-sampah yang mereka hasilkan dalam jangka waktu panjang, terlihat dari ketidakpedulian mereka terhadap pengelolaan sampah masih tinggi. Media memegang peranan penting menginformasikan kepada publik mengenai hal tersebut, selain media, potensi lain pengentasan masalah sampah di DIY adalah pemuda sebagai aktor pembangunan. Kabupaten Sleman merupakan salah satu daerah yang menghasilkan sampah terbesar di DIY, namun demikian mereka juga memiliki pemuda dengan jumlah terbanyak yang dapat dilibatkan untuk mengentaskan masalah sampah. Fokus kajian ini yaitu menganalisis pengaruh peranan media sosial terhadap kompetensi literasi sampah generasi muda di Kabupaten Sleman. Jenis penelitian ini adalah deskriptif analisis dengan pendekatan kuantitatif survei. Lokasi penelitian berada di Kabupaten Sleman, populasinya adalah pemuda anggota karang taruna di Kabupaten Sleman. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan terdapat tiga jalur pengaruh positif peranan media sosial terhadap kompetensi literasi sampah yaitu jalur langsung tanpa perantara, jalur tidak langsung melalui sikap, dan jalur melalui pengetahuan dan sikap. Sementara itu, jalur tidak langsung melalui pengetahuan tidak terbukti signifikan. Hal ini dikarenakan pengetahuan yang dimiliki generasi muda tidak cukup komprehensif untuk merespons isu sampah. Berdasarkan tiga jalur pengaruh yang signifikan, jalur pengaruh langsung memiliki nilai korelasi yang paling kuat. Namun, peranan media sosial tersebut belum dirasakan secara optimal oleh generasi muda karena berada pada kategori kadang-kadang, sehingga pemanfaatannya masih perlu dioptimalkan.
... Come sottolineato da Moscovici (1981), in quanto sistemi di concetti, affermazioni e spiegazioni che hanno origine dalla vita quotidiana attraverso la comunicazione interpersonale, le rappresentazioni sociali degli individui sono fortemente influenzate sia dalla comunicazione informale che dai media. Höijer (2011), per esempio, ha dimostrato che quando i mass media veicolano emozioni forti nelle rappresentazioni verbali e visive del cambiamento climatico, permettono alle persone di abbinare tali emozioni a quelle generate da altri fenomeni più noti e riconoscibili, calando così il cambiamento climatico nelle loro esperienze quotidiane. Allo stesso modo, Smith e Joffe (2013) hanno osservato che le persone interpretano il cambiamento climatico in base alle proprie esperienze personali, rielaborando le immagini del riscaldamento globale ad alto impatto emotivo proposte dai media mainstream. ...
Il libro affronta il tema dell’attivismo climatico giovanile a partire dall’esperienza deə attivistə di FridaysForFuture, analizzandone le rappresentazioni sociali del cambiamento climatico e le pratiche d’uso dei social media. Esso dà conto dei risultati di una ricerca qualitativa condotta con/su il gruppo romano del movimento, adottando una postura epistemica solidale che invita a una riflessione su pratiche di lotta e di ricerca.
Attingendo alla teoria delle rappresentazioni sociali, le autrici analizzano il modo in cui ə “Fridays” percepiscono il cambiamento climatico: come una crisi socio-ecologica che viene da lontano e ha effetti sul futuro, che riguarda tutto e tuttə; ma anche come un problema generazionale i cui costi ambientali, sociali ed economici saranno pagati soprattutto daə giovani. Inoltre, guidate dalla letteratura sull’attivismo digitale, le autrici esplorano il modo in cui ə attivistə abitano i social media: come ambienti costitutivi dell’attivismo, in cui prassi politiche e mediali si definiscono a vicenda; ma anche come ambienti propri deə giovani, caratterizzati da stili comunicativi differenziati per età.
Le due esperienze legate al cambiamento climatico e agli usi politici dei social media influiscono l’una sull’altra dando vita a un movimento giovanile per il clima inedito, che ci racconta delle trasformazioni in corso nell’attivismo giovanile, ambientale e digitale.
... Most importantly, perhaps, tomatoes were not invented for the purpose of representing public ideas about biotechnology.They were around long before people started to worry about genetic engineering. So were melting ice floes, polar bear cubs, storms, floods, and heat waves, which figure in the social representation literature as examples of how climate change is objectivated in media(Höijer, 2010;Moloney et al., 2014;Smith and Joffe, 2013). Devine-Wright and Devine-Wright's (2009) study of how people tend to visually represent electricity network technologies as A-shaped pylons is another case in point. ...
The core question of this dissertation is how conflicts between people about wildlife or nature are related to the representations they have of the natural environment. Negotiations over wolf conservation and the meaning of biodiversity are the prime cases. Conservation conflicts are often examined in light of socio-demographic segmentation or statistical variation in values and attitudes. However, previous research also points to contrasting meanings attributed to nature and antagonisms between forms of knowledge as important conflict dimensions. There is a need to clarify what these knowledge conflicts reside in and how they can be approached analytically.
To this end, the empirical studies contained in this dissertation take as their point of departure Moscovici’s neo-Durkheimian theory of social representations. Based on qualitative analyses of focus group discussions and individual interviews, the empirical studies suggest that people’s position in conservation conflicts are not necessarily related to their representations of wildlife or nature in an intuitive way. As a case in point, one of the studies showed that negative attitudes to wolf conservation were not mirrored in a negative image of the animal itself. This implies, among other things, that local resistance to wolf conservation is not rooted in cultural images of the “Big Bad Wolf”.
Even if the empirical investigations indicate that adversarial positions in conservation conflicts are not always accompanied by divergent representations of the subject of controversy, they do show that nature representations play other important roles in debates about nature governance. First, representations constitute powerful symbolic boundaries between groups with antagonistic views on the protection of species or landscapes. Second, they frame conservation conflicts by determining both the topics of discussion and the non-negotiable premises underlying negotiations. Identifying implicit presumptions about nature in conservation debates is important because they influence political priorities and delimit the scope of possible action. Third, social representations of nature are sometimes actively turned into rhetorical instruments for knowledge resistance, as when non-experts appropriate scientific conceptualizations of nature to increase the legitimacy of their own arguments.
The empirical studies demonstrate that research on social representations, usually associated with consensus formation, can also shed light on conflict mechanisms. Applied to the study of human– nature relations, they illustrate the impact of collective cognitive phenomena on human–nature interactions. This confirms the relevancy of the theory of social representations to the study of knowledge conflicts in the area of nature and the environment. However, to strengthen the position of the Moscovici school within the sociology of knowledge, future studies of social representations need to better account for social structure and overcome the common sense–science gap inherent to this school.
... Studies like these have mentioned a habit-breaking mechanism that could help reduce emissions in the mobility sector 52 . It is also found that emotionally anchoring and objectifying climate change in media communications can enhance public engagement in the issue and form collective identities based on a mixture of emotions 53 . Furthermore, a vast pool of evidence exists on behavioural interventions for emissions reduction in buildings encompassing a range of initiatives like monetary incentives involving financial rewards to nudges and non-monetary interventions information visualisation, feedback, and social norms and motivation [54][55][56] . ...
The building and construction sector accounts for around 39% of global carbon dioxide emissions and remains a hard-to-abate sector. We use a data-driven analysis of global high-level climate action on emissions reduction in the building sector using 256,717 English-language tweets across a 13-year time frame (2009–2021). Using natural language processing and network analysis, we show that public sentiments and emotions on social media are reactive to these climate policy actions. Between 2009–2012, discussions around green building-led emission reduction efforts were highly influential in shaping the online public perceptions of climate action. From 2013 to 2016, communication around low-carbon construction and energy efficiency significantly influenced the online narrative. More significant interactions on net-zero transition, climate tech, circular economy, mass timber housing and climate justice in 2017–2021 shaped the online climate action discourse. We find positive sentiments are more prominent and recurrent and comprise a larger share of the social media conversation. However, we also see a rise in negative sentiment by 30–40% following popular policy events like the IPCC report launches, the Paris Agreement and the EU Green Deal. With greater online engagement and information diffusion, social and environmental justice topics emerge in the online discourse. Continuing such shifts in online climate discourse is pivotal to a more just and people-centric transition in such hard-to-decarbonise sectors.
This paper analyses the coverage and socio-contextual representation of the single-use plastics ban by two mainstream newspapers in Malawi, The Daily Times and The Nation Newspapers, between January 2019 and December 2022. Single-use Plastics are one of the most significant environmental issues threatening the ecosystem and inducing climate change, with substantial costs to Malawi’s tourism industry, agriculture, and health. Informed by the social representations theory and thematic analysis, the study established political and expert indexing that reproduced the views of those in power. The dominant themes from the newspapers included policy and court proceedings, demonstrating the heavy contestation of the issue. In its discursive strategies, the news media employed criminal and monster metaphors to portray single-use plastics as a villain in environmental degradation. Given this, the article argues that though the single-use plastic ban is a rational idea, apparent alternatives that resonate with the general public directly dependent on single-use plastics should be provided for effective implementation and enforcement. The article concludes that newspapers’ threatening representation and reliance on government and experts’ views while marginalising the public directly involved with single-plastic use offers no urgent and pragmatic positive solutions in the face of increasing plastic waste.
This paper asks how people make sense of climate issues in the news. As part of a study in Norway, with repeated interviews and open-ended questionnaires, we invited people to share their thoughts on three real and recent news stories. The examples were related to climate change on local, national and global scales, with varying levels of conflict and different narrative frameworks and visual components. We find that news articles with different characteristics invited three modes of sense-making: inconclusive reasoning, moral stance-taking, and reiterating climate discourse. Our study contributes to untangle central questions about how journalism with various forms of anchoring might mitigate low engagement with climate news. Methodologically, the study provides innovation in the form of a qualitative study with real news examples. In concluding, we discuss why the most important aspects of climate change make the least sense as news.
Straipsnyje siekiama identifikuoti ir moksliškai interpretuoti Lietuvos spausdintinėje ir internetinėje žiniasklaidoje vykstantį klimato kaitos diskursą. Remiantis autorių 2011–2012 m. atliktos žiniasklaidos tekstų turinio analizės duomenimis, analizuojama klimato kaitos diskurso tvarka, turinys bei pagrindiniai veikėjai. Rezultatai rodo, jog spausdintinėje žiniasklaidoje klimato kaitos diskurso tvarka rečiau sutrikdoma, o diskurso turinys labiau politizuotas nei internetinėje žiniasklaidoje. Tiek internetinėje, tiek spausdintinėje žiniasklaidoje politinio bei akademinio sektoriaus atstovai išryškėja kaip pagrindiniai veikėjai, pasižymintys diskursų įgalintu semantiniu dominavimu.
The paper aims to explore the consensual and dissident social representations of “anti-national” that has re-entered the media lexicon in India post an alleged “anti-national” student protest in Jawaharlal Nehru University in the capital city of Delhi, India on February 9, 2016. The Social Representation Theory (SRT) is used to analyze the selected media reports of six daily newspapers, three each in English and Hindi language for a period of one year subsequent to the event. Results of thematic anchoring and anchoring by antinomy, a methodology used by Birgitta Höijer, are reported. The results reveal how the intergroup tensions and ideological differences in the polity constitute the conflicting social thinking on the referent. The paper has global implication for opening the possibilities of negotiation and transformation of social meanings related to nationalism and anti-nationalism.
In 2004 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten made a series of long-form investigative reports on environmental changes in places such as Tuvalu, Delhi and Copenhagen. In 2019 the newspaper repeated the reporting by revisiting the same places spanning five different continents. The new series of long-form digital productions named “The Climate Tour 2019” was produced by the same journalists as the 2004 reporting series, but the 2019 series naturally, made further use of new digital storytelling tools. This chapter delivers a comparative analysis of the Jyllands-Posten between the 2004 and 2019 reports focusing on the use of digital elements to create a cohesive and immersive experience.
The phenomenon of climate change is fast gaining attention among the peoples of the world, especially now that Covid-19 has been described by World Health Organisation as having no threat. Several nations and governments are taking actions and making plans to mitigate the effects of this phenomenon or see how they can circumvent the various ways climate change affects their people, particularly that the deadline of Sustainable Development Goals target draws near in 2030 and having environment at the heart of Goal 15. At different times, there had been discussions at governmental, organizational and group levels. At the individual level, the discussion is also common even among people with little or no familiarity, particularly on the social media. This study sought to know how Twitter, now X, a major social networking site, has been advancing the climate change discussion. A content analysis of trends of discussion on topics bordering on climate change on X was undertaken to examine how trendy these topics are. The period of January to June 2022 was chosen as the duration. It was found that X was used very heavily to spread information about climate change and that majority of the tweets centred on its effects on people around the world.
Η έρευνα εξετάζει πώς τα παιδιά νοηματοδοτούν τον νέο κορωνοϊό και αν οι νοηματοδοτήσεις τους διαφοροποιούνται με την ηλικία και τον τρόπο έκφρασης. Ζητήθηκε από 460 παιδιά ηλικίας 4-6 ετών να περιγράψουν και να σχεδιάσουν τον κορωνοϊό. Η ανάλυση περιεχόμενου των δεδομένων ανέδειξε το πώς τα παιδιά αντιλαμβάνονται τον κορωνοϊό, καθώς και 3 επιπλέον θέματα σχετικά με τις Υγειονομικές, τις Ψυχολογικές και τις Κοινωνικές διαστάσεις της πανδημίας. Τα αποτελέσματα αντανακλούν την αξιοσημείωτη ενημερότητα των συμμετεχόντων για τον SARS-COV-2 και την COVID-19 και την πολυπλοκότητα των νοηματοδοτήσεών τους. Η ηλικία των παιδιών διαφοροποιεί τις λεκτικές περιγραφές του κορωνοϊού, ενώ ο τρόπος έκφρασης διαφοροποιεί την έμφαση σε διαφορετικές διαστάσεις της πανδημίας. Η δημοσιότητα του νέου κορωνοϊού και της πανδημίας μπορεί να προσφέρει το κατάλληλο πλαίσιο για το σχεδιασμό και την υλοποίηση εκπαιδευτικού υλικού και παρεμβάσεων σχετικά με τους ιούς και την ενδυνάμωση των παιδιών προκειμένου να συμμετέχουν στη διαχείριση παρόμοιων μελλοντικών κρίσεων.
Undergraduate biology educators strive to understand how to best teach students the concepts of climate change. The root of this understanding is the establishment of what students know about climate change. This research aims to describe undergraduate biology students’ conceptions of climate change and their argument practices and associated cognitive biases in how they think about the topic. We used qualitative conception interviews to obtain data from 26 American biology undergraduate students who predicted how climate change would affect a forested ecosystem after an average of 1° increase in Fahrenheit (0.5°C change) over 25 years. Through deductive coding, we found the majority of students’ predictions agreed with expert ideas. However, the students used various argument strategies (i.e., Reasoning and Cognitive Biases) in defending their choices, including Ecological Explanations, Observations, Anchoring, and Contrast Effects.
Climate change is one of the core challenges of humankind – and legacy news media continue to be important sources of information about the issue for many people around the globe. Accordingly, how news media portray climate change is important for public awareness and perceptions of the issue. The labeling of the topic – which may rely on more neutral terms like “climate change” or “global warming” or more alarming terms like “climate crisis”, “climate emergency” or “global heating” – is an important facet in this respect. In step with the increasing importance of the issue, outlets such as the British “Guardian” have switched to these more urgent terms in their coverage of climate change. But it is unclear, so far, how pronounced this switch is, and which media have followed suit. Relying on an automated content analysis of climate change coverage from 16 news outlets in eight countries around the world between 1996 and 2021 (N = 89,887), our study investigates the use and proliferation of “climate change compounds” such as “climate crisis”, “global heating”, or “global warming” used to describe the phenomenon. We find that news media still use neutral terms – especially “climate change” – more often than alarming labels. However, the use of the latter has increased strongly since 2019, presumably due to country-specific events and changes in editorial guidelines of national outlets.
This study unpacks socially shared meanings of internal displacement as illustrated in Philippine media, using a social representations approach. Following our theoretical framework, we identified processes of symbolic coping about internal displacement from among 422 media articles published between 2006 and 2020. Philippine media uses anchoring and objectification in socially representing forced migration. It associates internal displacement with events in Philippine history and links it with everyday emotions like anger, anxiety and fear. It describes involuntary migration using metaphors such as hell on earth, chicken in a coop and canned sardines. It uses symbolism, such as footwear and doll, to demonstrate evacuee empowerment and personifies the internally displaced as Muslims or Indigenous Peoples who are fleeing for their lives while carrying their possessions. Our findings point to internal displacement as a space not only for suffering and deprivation but also for sustaining oneself and demonstrating human agency. Our study shows that beyond the dire circumstances surrounding internal displacement are structural issues that need to be dealt with: armed conflicts, terrorism, violence and disaster management.
What is activism? The answer is, typically, that it is a form of opposition, often expressed on the streets. Skoglund and Böhm argue differently. They identify forms of 'insider activism' within corporations, state agencies and villages, showing how people seek to transform society by working within the system, rather than outright opposing it. Using extensive empirical data, Skoglund and Böhm analyze the transformation of climate activism in a rapidly changing political landscape, arguing that it is time to think beyond the tensions between activism and enterprise. They trace the everyday renewable energy actions of a growing 'epistemic community' of climate activists who are dispersed across organizational boundaries and domains. This book is testament to a new way of understanding activism as an organizational force that brings about the transition towards sustainability across business and society and is of interest to social science scholars of business, renewable energy and sustainable development.
The need for effective communication, public outreach and education to increase support for policy, collective action and behaviour change is ever present, and is perhaps most pressing in the context of anthropogenic climate change. This book is the first to take a comprehensive look at communication and social change specifically targeted to climate change. It is a unique collection of ideas examining the challenges associated with communicating climate change in order to facilitate societal response. It offers well-founded, practical suggestions on how to communicate climate change and how to approach related social change more effectively. The contributors of this book come from a diverse range of backgrounds, from government and academia to non-governmental and civic sectors of society. The book is accessibly written, and any specialized terminology is explained. It will be of great interest to academic researchers and professionals in climate change, environmental policy, science communication, psychology, sociology and geography.
The debate on climate change and anthropogenic influence on climate has a long history, which involves more than just scientific findings and meteorological observations. In this paper, the question of how the scientific concept of climate change has been communicated to the public, in the past and at present is studied using pictures and historical analyses. Publications popularising climate change today are sometimes illustrated with pictures showing palm trees and glaciers together in one scene. This is nothing new: the motif of palm trees and glaciers was used for the same purpose early in the 20th century. Several examples of such illustrations are presented and discussed in a historical context. The basic meaning of such pictures is that palms stand for warm climate and glaciers for coldness, and both together signify climatic change. The use of this motif to illustrate climate change originates in the popularisation of the theory of ice ages and climates in Earth's history, which took place towards the end of the 19th century. At about the same time, the motif of palms and glaciers was also used in tourist advertisement for certain alpine destinations. In this case, the motif stands for the variety of the alpine landscapes, which offer spectacular high-mountain scenery and exotic flora close to each other. It is suggested that the use of this motif to illustrate climate change in the early 20th century expresses an ambivalence towards climate change, consisting of age-old concerns about extremes of climate on the one hand and tourist illusions of a warm climate on the other. Towards the end of the 20th century, the motif appears in context with the popularisation of the concept of anthropogenic global warming. The ambivalence has given rise to a clear negative value judgement. Today, photos of recent extreme weather events are used more often than palm trees and glaciers to illustrate climate change.
This paper integrates literature from the social sciences and humanities concerning the persuasive impact of visual material, highlighting issues of emotion and identification. Visuals are used not only to illustrate news and feature genres but also in advertising and campaigns that attempt to persuade their target audiences to change attitudes and behaviours. These include health, safety and charity campaigns, that attempt to socially engineer change in people’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. With the increasing presence of such visuals comes a more emotive media environment with which people are forced to engage, and, under certain circumstances, disengage.
Recently within media research, there has been an intensified discussion on the notion of ritual and the relationship between ritual and the mass media. This article offers a comparative historical perspective to this debate. We look at events that have been publicly signalled as 'national tragedies' within movie newsreels and public broadcaster's news from the 1950s to the 2000s, to see how media reporting of mourning rituals has changed. We ask how have the mourning rituals reported in the media been involved in 'joining us together' and what kind of 'sacred centres of society' have been constructed through the reporting of mourning rituals? Our study suggests that the media constructs mourning rituals, whether religious, civic or national, as inclusive and affirmative, constituting the church and the state as well as itself as key centres of society.
The present investigation identifies the key images that British newspapers use to represent climate change risks. In doing so, it widens the scope of the burgeoning literature analysing textual content of climate change media information. This is particularly important given visual information's ability to arouse emotion, and the risk perception literature's increasing focus on the importance of affect in shaping risk perception. From a thematic analysis of newspaper images, three broad themes emerged: the impact of climate change, personification of climate change and representation of climate change in graphical form. In particular, the depiction of climate change as an issue affecting domestic populations rather than just other areas of the world brings the threat closer to home. Challenging the perception that climate change is still a long‐term and future‐orientated threat, visual images concretise the risk by providing viewers with tangible examples of climate change's impact.
Nature Reports: Climate Change is an online resource from Nature providing in-depth reporting, comment and analysis on climate science and its wider implications for policy, society and the economy.
I argue that an activity theory—which regards emotions as interdependent and interpenetrating with other cultural phenomena—is central for the cultural psychology of emotions. Activity theory maintains that the cultural characteristics, development and functions of psychological phenomena are shaped by social activities and cultural concepts. I present evidence that activity theory is central for the cultural psychology of emotions. I also explain the relation of biological to cultural factors in shaping the characteristics and development of emotions. Evidence is presented which shows that biological processes—hormones, neurotransmitters, autonomic reactions— underlie (mediate) but do not determine emotional qualities and expressions. Particular qualities and expressions are determined by cultural processes and factors.
Dangerous climate change" has entered the lexicon of environmental science and policy through its status in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as helping to define the ultimate objective of global climate management. But dangerous climate has always been an aspect of human experience and society, manifest through weather hazards. There are different ways in which the idea of dangerous climates can be communicated and this paper identifies three: through pictures, through scenarios and through probabilities. These communication devices are used by different agencies and actors in society, depending on the respective target audiences and the perceptions of efficacy of the different forms of communication. All three approaches play differentiated roles in the social construction of dangerous climate change; and these roles will need to be understood as part of the process of agreeing how the idea of dangerous climate change should contribute to the future evolution of the international climate policy regime. The paper also suggests that an icon-based approach to portraying dangerous climate change may have some potency.
Images of melting glaciers have come to dominate the pictorial language of climate change. This paper argues that photographs of melting glaciers engender a representational problem in the communication of climate change as they depict the already seen effects of climate change. Given the dominance of the photograph within Greenpeace campaigns, the paper examines this adherence to visual immediacy by analysing Greenpeace climate change campaign literature since 1994. Identifying five representational phases over the last decade, the analysis shows how a symbolic pictorial language of climate change was being created, and the ways in which risks were communicated as actual rather than potential. Understood retrospectively however, this visualisation calls attention to the problems of communicating environmental issues of a temporal (long term) and unseen nature through a medium of representation which privileges the ‘here and now’.
Psychology after World War II became a science largely devoted to healing. It concentrated on repairing damage using a disease model of human functioning. This almost exclusive attention to pathology neglected the idea of a fulfilled individual and a thriving community, and it neglected the possibility that building strength is the most potent weapon in the arsenal of therapy. The aim of positive psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life. To redress the previous imbalance, we must bring the building of strength to the forefront in the treatment and prevention of mental illness.
Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like geological upheavals in a landscape, they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain and prone to reversal. Are they simply, as some have claimed, animal energies or impulses with no connection to our thoughts? Or are they rather suffused with intelligence and discernment, and thus a source of deep awareness and understanding? In this compelling book, Martha C. Nussbaum presents a powerful argument for treating emotions not as alien forces but as highly discriminating responses to what is of value and importance. She explores and illuminates the structure of a wide range of emotions, in particular compassion and love, showing that there can be no adequate ethical theory without an adequate theory of the emotions. This involves understanding their cultural sources, their history in infancy and childhood, and their sometimes unpredictable and disorderly operations in our daily lives.
Emotion and addiction lie on a continuum between simple visceral drives such as hunger, thirst, and sexual desire at one end and calm, rational decision making at the other. Although emotion and addiction involve visceral motivation, they are also closely linked to cognition and culture. They thus provide the ideal vehicle for Jon Elster's study of the interrelation between three explanatory approaches to behavior: neurobiology, culture, and choice.
The book is organized around parallel analyses of emotion and addiction in order to bring out similarities as well as differences. Elster's study sheds fresh light on the generation of human behavior, ultimately revealing how cognition, choice, and rationality are undermined by the physical processes that underlie strong emotions and cravings. This book will be of particular interest to those studying the variety of human motivations who are dissatisfied with the prevailing reductionisms.
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Bradford Books imprint
Four essential modifications in my affect theory are presented. First, an ambiguity in the concept of affect as amplification has been revised so that the affect is now considered to be an analogic amplifier in much the same manner as pain is an analogic amplifier of the injury it amplifies. Second, I now view the skin of the face as more essential than its musculature in providing the feedback which we experience as motivating. It is shown also that the skin in general is a powerful motivational organ in sex, pain, and sleep. Third, I now view innate affect as essentially suppressed and backed up in the adult, exacting a price whose cost is yet to be precisely determined. The mechanism by which this is achieved is through suppression of vocalization of affect. Fourth, I now view the affect as amplifying not only its activation but also the response to the affect, because it coexists with and thereby imprints its form on whatever response follows it.
french translation In S. Moscovici (2013). Le scandale de la pensée sociale. Paris, Editions de l'Ehess.
1. Introduction The study of emotion Types of evidence for theories of emotion Some goals for a cognitive theory of emotion 2. Structure of the theory The organisation of emotion types Basic emotions Some implications of the emotions-as-valenced-reactions claim 3. The cognitive psychology of appraisal The appraisal structure Central intensity variables 4. The intensity of emotions Global variables Local variables Variable-values, variable-weights, and emotion thresholds 5. Reactions to events: I. The well-being emotions Loss emotions and fine-grained analyses The fortunes-of-others emotions Self-pity and related states 6. Reactions to events: II. The prospect-based emotions Shock and pleasant surprise Some interrelationships between prospect-based emotions Suspense, resignation, hopelessness, and other related states 7. Reactions to agents The attribution emotions Gratitude, anger, and some other compound emotions 8. Reactions to objects The attraction emotions Fine-grained analyses and emotion sequences 9. The boundaries of the theory Emotion words and cross-cultural issues Emotion experiences and unconscious emotions Coping and the function of emotions Computational tractability.
Serge Moscovici first introduced the concept of social representations into contemporary social psychology nearly forty years ago. Since then the theory has become one of the predominant approaches in social psychology, not only in continental Europe, but increasingly in the Anglo-Saxon world as well. While Moscovici's work has spread broadly across the discipline, notably through his contributions to the study of minority influences and of the psychology of crowds, the study of social representations has continued to provide the central focus for one of the most distinctive and original voices in social psychology today.
This volume brings together some of Moscovici's classic statements of the theory of social representations, as well as elaborations of the distinctive features of this perspective in social psychology. In addition the book includes some recent essays in which he re-examines the intellectual history of social representations, exploring the diverse ways in which this theory has responded to a tradition of thought in the social sciences which encompasses not only the contributions of Durkheim and Piaget, but also those of Lévy-Bruhl and Vygotsky. The final chapter of the book consists of a long interview with Ivana Marková, in which Moscovici not only reviews his own intellectual itinerary but also gives his views on some of the key questions facing social psychology today.
The publication of this volume provides an essential source for the study of social representations and for an assessment of the work of a social psychologist who has consistently sought to re-establish the discipline as a vital element of the social sciences.
In recent years, Earth systems science has advanced rapidly, helping to transform climate change and other planetary risks into major political issues. Changing the Atmosphere strengthens our understanding of this important link between expert knowledge and environmental governance. In so doing, it illustrates how the emerging field of science and technology studies can inform our understanding of the human dimensions of global environmental change.
Incorporating historical, sociological, and philosophical approaches, Changing the Atmosphere presents detailed empirical studies of climate science and its uptake into public policy. Topics include the scientific, political, and social processes involved in the creation of scientific knowledge about climate change; the historical and contemporary role of expert knowledge in creating and perpetuating policy concern about climate change; and the place of science in institutions of global environmental governance such as the World Meteorological Organization, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Together, the essays demonstrate fundamental connections between the science and politics of planet Earth. In the struggle to create sustainable forms of environmental governance, they indicate, a necessary first step is to understand how communities achieve credible, authoritative representations of nature.
Contributors
Paul N. Edwards, Dale Jamieson, Sheila Jasanoff, Chunglin Kwa, Clark Miller, Stephen D. Norton, Stephen H. Schneider, Simon Shackley, Frederick Suppe
The article focuses on the development of a global discourse of compassion, which has grown in the intersection between politics, humanitarian organizations, the media and the public. In the media there is a growing focus on distant victims of civil wars, genocide, massacres and other violence against civil populations. In the critical media debate it is a common view that the audience is left unmoved by the pictures of distant death and pain. The article presents audience studies, which show a two-sided effect of global compassion on the one hand and indifference on the other. It is shown that compassion is often a more female reaction while indifference is more common among male audiences. It is further shown that there are different forms of compassion as well as different forms of indifference. The results challenge or strongly modulate the thesis about a pronounced compassion fatigue among people in general.
Much research on the discursive construction of Europe in national news media has quantitatively focused on the presence of ‘EU topics’. The more frequently EU topics appear, the better the breeding-ground for a sense of European community, it is argued. This article tackles the question of a European identity from a different angle. Guided by theories on collective identity and power, and utilizing qualitative discourse analysis of the reporting on climate change in a tabloid newspaper and public service television news in Sweden, this article discerns a budding European political identity, discursively embedded and ‘hidden’ in the reporting as the natural order of things. When turned into common-sense knowledge, the European realm as a representative of ‘Us’ is accorded spontaneous legitimacy as a relevant political power in the making of meaning on climate change.
Moscovici, S. (1984). The phenomenon of social representations. In R. Farr & S. Moscovici (Eds.), Social representations (pp. 3-69). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Discursive psychology is defined and illustrated in terms of how people describe and invoke emotions in everyday talk and text. Materials from counselling sessions and newspaper texts show how emotion descriptions are used in narrative accounts and explanations, both in building and in undermining the sensibility of a person’s actions. It is suggested that, rather than stemming from fixed cognitive scenarios that define what each emotion word means, emotion discourse deploys a flexible range of oppositions and contrasts that are put to service in the situated rhetoric of description and counter-description, narrative and counter-narrative. The rich variety and situated uses of emotion words and metaphors suggest a set of rhetorical affordances in which different parts or potentials of meaning, even contrasting ones for the same word, may be worked up and deployed. The article works with a tentative list of 10 rhetorical contrasts.
The relationship between thinking and feeling has puzzled philosophers for centuries, but more recently has become a dominant focus in psychology and in the brain sciences. This second edition of the highly praised Cognition and Emotion examines everything from past philosophical to current psychological perspectives in order to offer a novel understanding of both normal emotional experience and the emotional disorders. The authors integrate work on normal emotions with work on the emotional disorders. Although there are many influential theories of normal emotions within the cognition and emotion literature, these theories rarely address the issue of disordered emotions. Similarly, there are numerous theories that seek to explain one or more emotional disorders (e.g., depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and phobias), but which rarely discuss normal emotions. The present book draws these separate strands together and introduces a theoretical framework that can be applied to both normal and disordered emotions. It also provides a core cognition and emotion textbook through the inclusion of a comprehensive review of the basic literature. The book includes chapters on the historical background and philosophy of emotion, reviews the main theories of normal emotions and of emotional disorders, and includes separate chapters organised around the five basic emotions of fear, sadness, anger, disgust, and happiness. Cognition and Emotion: From Order to Disorder provides both an advanced textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in addition to a novel approach with a range of implications for clinical practice for work with the emotional disorders.
The American Diabetes Association currently recommends that all youth with type 1 diabetes over the age of 7 years follow a plan of intensive management. The purpose of this study was to describe stressors and self-care challenges reported by adolescents with type 1 diabetes who were undergoing initiation of intensive management. Subjects described initiation of intensive management as complicating the dilemmas they faced. The importance of individualized and nonjudgmental care from parents and health care providers was stressed. This study supports development of health care relationships and environments that are teen focused not merely disease-centered and embrace exploring options with the teen that will enhance positive outcomes.
Previous studies concerning the association between macrosocial worries and well-being have shown diverse results. In this study a person-oriented approach was employed. Two subgroups of adolescents experiencing a high degree of worry about environmental risks but displaying varying levels of subjective well-being were identified. One scored low on well-being while the other scored high. Thereafter, the assumption that the two subgroups would differ on theoretically relevant comparison measures was investigated. The group high on both worry and well-being scored significantly higher on meaningfulness, trust in environmental organizations, and on anger and hope in relation to environmental risks than the group high on worry but low on well-being. Finally, environmental worry was mainly predicted by biospheric and altruistic values, but also by high levels of trust in science and environmental organizations. These results are discussed in relation to existential, emotion, and identity theories.
The publication in English of Serge Moscovici's Psychoanalysis, Its Image and Its Public (version of 1976 book in french) is an event of singular importance for social psychology. For the first time, English-speaking readers will have access to one of the most influential books published in the discipline in the past 30 years.
Moscovici's development of the theory of social representations has long been recognised as a major contribution to social psychology, but discussion of the theory has been limited been by the unavailability in English of the text in which he provides his most extensive presentation of the theory and demonstrates its fecundity through his empirical study of representations of psychoanalysis in France. Psychoanalysis is in many ways the founding text of the theory of social representations and is, as such, a modern classic. As well as tracing the ways in which knowledge of psychoanalysis is transformed as it is reconstructed by different social groups in French society, Moscovici provides an extensive analysis of the representations of psychoanalysis within the mass media, showing how different interests structure such communication through the different forms of propaganda, propagation and diffusion.
This book will be an indispensable text for students and scholars of social psychology. It will also be of interest to psychologists, sociologists and cultural theorists concerned with mass communication, and to all those with an interest in current perspectives in the social sciences.
Hopeful thought reflects the belief that one can find pathways to desired goals and become motivate to use those pathways. The authors proposed that hope, so defined, serves to drive the emotions and well-being of people. The aim of positive psychology is to catalyze change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life. The field of positive psychology at the subjective level is about positive subjective experience: well-being and satisfaction (past); flow, joy, the sensual pleasures, and happiness (present); and constructive cognitions about the future--optimism, hope, and faith. At the individual level it is about positive personal traits--the capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, futuremindedness, high talent, and wisdom. At the group level it is about the civic virtues and the institutions that move individuals toward better citizenship: responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work ethic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Proposes that society creates the roles of health or illness which people play. Open interviews with middle-class and professional people are analyzed with respect to their concepts of health, sickness, and death, and how they are concerned with relationships between individuals and society and between society and nature. (67 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Tested a hypothesis based on F. Davis's (1979) argument that nostalgia helps individuals construct identity continuity. Davis predicted that people whose lives feature discontinuity will be more likely to become nostalgic—in particular, that males will be more nostalgic than females. The present study developed analogous hypotheses for race and geographic and occupational mobility and tested them through a secondary analysis of 4 national sample surveys: The National Senior Citizens Survey (1968), a National Council on Aging study (1974), a mental health survey (1976), and the General Social Survey (1980). Results do not support the discontinuity hypothesis. Nonwhites were more nostalgic than Whites, but otherwise discontinuity did not have the predicted effects. It is concluded that while analysis of survey results cannot provide a conclusive test of Davis's hypothesis, it calls the argument into question. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The journalistic norm of 'balanced' reporting (giving roughly equal coverage to both sides in any significant dispute) is recognised as both useful and problematic in communicating emerging scientific consensus on human attribution for global climate change. Analysis of the practice of this norm in United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) newspaper coverage of climate science between 2003 and 2006 shows a significant divergence from scientific consensus in the US in 2003–4, followed by a decline in 2005–6, but no major divergence in UK reporting. These findings inform ongoing considerations about the spatially-differentiated media terms and conditions through which current and future climate policy is negotiated and implemented.
The main aim of this paper is to examine how the recent themata developments in Social Representations Theory can be linked with the classical process involved in the construction of social representations—anchoring—, as well as with the communicative modalities that are part of the theory since its inception. This was done through a study of the representation of GMOs in the Portuguese press, taken as an opportunity for addressing the issues related to the role played by old categories in rendering new meanings and in establishing new categories.
A further objective of the study, more applied in nature, was to explore whether the central characteristics of the representations of biotechnology in European countries were also present in Portugal.
All articles that included the expressions Genetically Modified/Genetic Modification/Manipulation or Transgenics, were collected, in five Portuguese newspapers, during the years of 1999, 2000 and 2001. Content analysis of the 239 articles collected showed that their thematical organisation re-constitutes the Red/Green dichotomy found in most European countries. The Red/health discussion is structured around such themata as health/disease, risk/safety, benefits/problems, and anchors in categories like science and progress. The nature/culture opposition emerges, in turn, in the Green/food discussion, which anchors on categories like ideology and employs Propaganda as a communicative modality—a set of indicators configuring a more polemic debate. The conclusions discuss the relevance of linking themata with anchoring and the importance of devising more fine-grained tools for the analysis of Diffusion.
The theory of social representations occupies a place apart in social psychology both by the problems it raises and the scale of the phenomena with which it deals. This provokes many a criticism and misunderstanding. Such a theory may not correspond with the model of social psychology as it is defined at present. One attempts however to show that it answers important social and scientific questions, in what it differs from the classical conception of collective representations and, from the very beginning, adopts a constructivist perspective which has spread in social psychology since. Several trends of research have confirmed its vision of the relations between social and cognitive phenomena, communication and thought. More detailed remarks aim at outlining the nature of social representations, their capacity to create information, their function which is to familiarize us with the strange, according to the categories of our culture. Going farther, one insists on the diversity of methodological approaches. If the experimental method is useful to understand how people should think, higher mental and social processes must be approached by different methods, including linguistic analysis and observation of how people think. No doubt, social representations have a relation with the more recent field of social cognition. But inasmuch as the former depend on content and context, i.e. subjectivity and sociability of people, they approach the phenomena differently from the latter. Referring to child psychology and anthropology, one can contend, despite appearances, that it is also a more scientific approach. There is however much to be learned from criticisms and there is still a long way to go before we arrive at a satisfactory theory of social thinking and communication.
Based on Moscovici’s (1961) classical study on the cultivation of psychoanalytic ideas in France in the 1950’s and our own research on modern biotechnology, we propose a paradigm for researching social representations. Following a consideration of the nature of representations and of the ‘iconoclastic suspicion’ that haunts them, we propose a model of the emergence of meaning relating three elements: subjects, objects, and projects. The basic unit of analysis is the elongated triangle of mediation (SOPS): subject 1, object, project, and subject 2, captured in the image of a ‘Toblerone’. Such social units cultivate, that is produce, circulate and receive representation which may be embodied in four modes–habitual behaviour, individual cognition, informal communication and formal communication–and in three mediums–words, visual images or non-linguistic sounds. We propose an operational definition of a ‘social representation’ as the comparison of four characteristics of communication systems: the content structures (anchorings and objectifications; core and peripheral elements), the typified processes (diffusion, propagation, propaganda etc.), and their functions (identity, attitude, opinion, resistance, ideology etc.), within the context of segmented social milieus. Seven implications for research on social representations are outlined: (1) content and process; (2) segmentation by social milieus rather than taxonomies; (3) cultivation studies within social milieus; (4) multi-method (mode and medium) analysis; (5) time structures and longitudinal data; (6) the crossover of cultural projects and trajectories; (7) the disinterested research attitude. This ideal type paradigm leads to an operational clarification to identify new research questions, and to guide the design and evaluation of studies on social representations.
We are living in a climate of fear about our future climate. The language of the public discourse around global warming routinely uses a repertoire which includes words such as ‘catastrophe’, ‘terror’, ‘danger’, ‘extinction’ and ‘collapse’. To help make sense of this phenomenon the story of the complex relationships between climates and cultures in different times and in different places is in urgent need of telling. If we can understand from the past something of this complex interweaving of our ideas of climate with their physical and cultural settings we may be better placed to prepare for different configurations of this relationship in the future. This paper examines two earlier European discourses of fear associated with climate – one from the early-modern era (climate as judgement) and one from the modern era (climate as pathology) – and traces the ways in which these discourses formed and dissolved within a specific cultural matrix. The contemporary discourse of fear about future climate change (climate as catastrophe) is summarised and some ways in which this discourse, too, might be dissolved are examined. Conventional attempts at conquering the climatic future all rely, implicitly or explicitly, upon ideas of control and mastery, whether of the planet, of global governance or of individual and collective behaviour. These attempts at ‘engineering’ future climate seem a degree utopian and brash. Understanding the cultural dimensions of climate discourses offers a different way of thinking about how we navigate the climatic future. However our contemporary climatic fears have emerged – as linked, for example, to neoliberal globalism, to ecological modernisation and the emergence of a risk society, or to a deeper instinctive human anxiety about the future – they will in the end be dissipated, re-configured or transformed as a function of cultural change.
This paper draws from the resources of Iris Murdoch''s moral philosophy to analyze the ethical status of the emotions at two related levels of reflection. Methodologically, it argues that a recovery of the emotions requires a revised notion of moral theory which affirms the basic orientation of consciousness to some notion of value or the good. Such a theory challenges many of the rationalist premises which in the past have led moral theory to reject the role of emotions in ethics. In particular, it acknowledges the centrality of moral psychology to ethics and reclaims the notion of consciousness rather than the will as the primary mode of human moral being. At a second, more substantive level, the paper explores the relation between the emotions and consciousness. Specifically, it defends a cognitivist and reflexive theory of the emotions which affirms a strong relation between the emotions and our evaluative beliefs. On this view, the emotions reflexively mediate our relation to objective value. In order to earn their cognitive status, however, the emotions must be tested in relation to a critical principle in order to guard against the egoistic tendencies of consciousness to build up images of reality to serve its own purposes. Therefore, a theory of the Good must be part of the critical content of a reflexive theory of the emotions.