The January 6th insurrection at the U.S. capital was an eye-opening moment for many Americans. With the 2024 election cycle in swing, members of the Democratic Party are using January 6th as a rallying call for the need to protect democracy. But were the events of January 6th viewed equally among liberals? We argue that the events of January 6th resonate for a particular demographic well-informed liberal White voters. We argue that liberal minority voters will feel the racial undertones of January 6th more than White liberals. Furthermore, we examine how voters of different races viewed the events of January 6th and how views on race relations impact their perceptions of January 6th. We find that White liberals are less angry about race relations in the aftermath of January 6th, and while they viewed January 6th as an insurrection and blamed Trump and Republicans in Congress for their role, they are less likely to say that racism and White Supremacy motivated the insurrectionists. This paper indicates that race plays a key role in political perceptions, even among those who hold similar political ideologies.

This article investigates the lexicon of dispute settlement in early modern Inner Austria, exploring the broadest legal, social, and emotional dimensions of the concept of “enmity” to better understand the nature of dispute settlement and social relations in coeval Central Europe. In particular, the article examines how litigants and courts understood and used “enmity” and its cognates, and how changes in criminal law impacted its usage. The article focuses on interpersonal conflicts and violence among nonnobles, who constituted the vast majority of Inner Austria’s population. It demonstrates that well into the 1700s among local urbanites and peasants, “enmity” and its key synonyms expressing ill-will, discord, or hatred—as opposites of love, concord, and friendship—signified a social state of mutual hostility closely related to violent retribution rather than unrestrained feeling.

This article analyses how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) created and spread new forms of subjectivity and social belonging in the formative years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (1949–present). Specifically, it examines how the CCP blended medical and emotional discourses to foster communal hatred of narcotics users and promote social cohesion. Building on scholarship that conceptualizes hatred as a way of producing and animating subjectivity, the article argues that the CCP saw it as a key tool of unification, bringing people together to commit acts of emotional and physical violence against drug users and traffickers. Propaganda officers and police forces worked hard to persuade people to hate drug users and traffickers, writing anti-narcotics songs, plays, and skits to make hating an entertaining and interesting activity for audiences. The article underscores how the CCP encouraged mass participation in the ostracizing and killing of narcotics producers, consumers, and traffickers to spawn a shared social hatred of them, and shows how people responded to state efforts to incite hate. To conclude, the article considers the unlikely agency of some accused drug criminals who resisted the tides of public and state pressure, and challenged their accusers.

Ethicists frequently suppose that suffering has special moral significance. It is often claimed that a main goal of medicine—perhaps its primary goal—is the alleviation of human suffering. Following Eric Cassell and others, this essay considers suffering understood as the experience of distress—negative emotions—in response to threats to something that one cares about. It examines whether, on this value-based account of suffering, we should accept the claim that suffering has special moral significance. It argues that we should not: suffering does not add significantly to the value of other human interests and rarely changes our moral obligations itself; it merely seems to have strong moral relevance because it often attends to interests that matter. This is because negative emotions themselves have only limited moral significance, which is due to the fact that their primary mental role is to indicate to us the relative importance of non-emotional goods.

The article explores the metaphorical conceptualization of emotions. Conceptual metaphors are understood here as frames (i.e., structures of knowledge in long-term memory) in their own right. For modeling both the source and target domains of metaphors, the CoMetNet (Conceptual Metaphor Network) project uses frames documented in the German FrameNet-Constructicon project in spite of ad hoc created domains in previous literature. By doing so, it strives for a more empirically motivated description of conceptual metaphors. Drawing on a specialized corpus, it is shown that (1) our frame-semantic approach permits addressing the status of emotion concepts in the conceptual and linguistic system. More specifically, it shows that (2) frame elements (FEs) reflect adequately which aspects are relevant in the conceptualization of emotions and that (3) the complexity of emotion concepts can be thought of as an interplay between (different types of) frames. However, there are still some challenges for CoMetNet, e.g., the frame-semantic description of emotion metaphors that draw on highly schematic and scalar source domains.

Metaphors, arguments and emotional appeals have considerable persuasive power in political discourse, yet they are rarely studied together. To explore the interactions between these interrelated phenomena, we employ three methods of analysis: Metaphor Identification Procedure, Inference Anchoring Theory, and lexicon-based sentiment analysis. Our data come from Polish political debates broadcasted during the 2019 pre-election campaign. We test hypotheses about the frequency of the associations between metaphors, arguments and emotional appeals. Hypothesis 1 predicts that arguments containing metaphors are more frequent than arguments without metaphors, hypothesis 2 predicts that arguments containing emotional appeals are more frequent than arguments without them, and hypothesis 3 predicts that arguments with metaphors and emotional appeals are more frequent than any other combination. The results show that metaphorical arguments do not outnumber non-metaphorical ones (H1 is falsified), and arguments that are both metaphorical and emotional do not outnumber the sum of all other types (H3 is falsified). Emotional arguments are more common than non-emotional ones (H2 is verified). We suggest that when political actors articulate their arguments, they often choose a particular metaphor to evoke positive or negative emotions in their audience.

This study is designed to understand embarrassment in the second/foreign language (L2) context. Following a mixed-method design, in Phase 1, a sample of 141 tertiary-level Austrian English language learners were asked to write a narrative about their experiences of embarrassment in their language learning histories. Analyzing the narratives showed that L2 embarrassment is a multidimensional construct that is frequently experienced by a range of language learners. In Phase 2, we developed and validated an L2 classroom speaking embarrassment (L2CSE) scale among a sample of 402 international English language learners drawing on the literature and analysis of the narratives. Data showed that L2 embarrassment is best represented by a bifactor exploratory structural equation model, capturing both general and specific aspects of L2 embarrassment. We found that a supportive classroom environment and fostering a growth mindset can decrease the risk of L2 embarrassment. As expected, L2 embarrassment was a negative predictor of willingness to communicate and self-perceived language proficiency. These initial findings suggest that L2 embarrassment could be an important and influential emotion in the language learning classroom context which requires further research.