Affect and Emotion
in Media

How does a media encounter move a body, shape a feeling and gather a public?

Suppose a film shows a commuter walking through an empty station. Footsteps echo. A low sound gathers beneath the scene. You lean forward and tighten your shoulders. A moment later, a familiar voice calls from the platform and the tension loosens.

The experience unfolds through sound, expectation, bodily adjustment and recognition. Affect and emotion research investigates these relationships: how media encounters acquire force, how feelings become meaningful, and how they travel through social life.

A news photograph may draw concern towards someone’s suffering. A melody may bring a remembered place close. A stream of shared posts may gather anger around an issue. Follow the encounter from its sensory form into the histories, relationships and institutions that give it weight.

Bring the body into the explanation

Media use involves posture, movement, breath, attention and changes in felt readiness. It also involves knowledge, memory, judgement and social expectations. An embodied approach investigates how these processes meet during an experience.

Think of a theatre before the curtain rises. The lighting, waiting, conversation and presence of other spectators help establish an atmosphere. The performance then changes that atmosphere, while the audience’s responses become part of the event.

Three connected questions

• Experience: what changes in bodily orientation, felt intensity and emotional understanding?
• Relation: how do other people, shared histories and environments enter the encounter?
• Power: whose feelings receive attention, which attachments endure, and how do institutions organise emotional experience?

In my lecture, I explore affect as an embodied and relational force. This chapter develops that discussion through distinct theoretical approaches, close media analysis and research designs that connect claims with evidence.

A useful vocabulary makes the experience easier to examine.

Researchers use several terms to describe affective life. Define each term within the approach you are using, then connect it with the experience and the evidence under discussion.

Qualia: the experienced character of feeling

Qualia refers to the subjective qualities of experience: what a sound, colour, sensation or feeling is like for the person experiencing it. The warmth of a remembered tune and the heaviness of disappointment can differ even when a single verbal label seems available.

Suppose a song recalls a childhood journey. One listener describes comfort; another describes longing; a third remembers an unwanted separation. Ask about the particular experience, its sensory qualities and the memories through which it becomes meaningful.

Experience, expression and interpretation

A person’s experience and its public expression enter different kinds of evidence. An interview records an account. A facial movement supplies an observable action. A heart-rate record supplies a physiological series. Explain how each contributes to the research question.

Use this vocabulary to sharpen a question. You might investigate how the station scene changes felt tension, how viewers interpret the source of danger, or how co-viewing shapes expressions of relief.

Affect research connects bodies, meanings and relations of power.

The affective turn names a growing interdisciplinary attention to bodily capacities, intensities, emotional life and relations, especially from the 1990s onwards. It brought philosophy, psychology, feminist and queer scholarship, sociology and cultural studies into new conversations.

Clough and Halley’s The Affective Turn (2007) gathers work across these concerns. The field developed through several intellectual routes, each with its own questions and vocabulary.

Spinoza and the capacity to act

In Part III of the Ethics, Spinoza connects affects with bodily changes that increase or diminish the power of acting and with ideas of those changes. This gives later theory a vocabulary for examining what an encounter enables or constrains.

For a media study, ask what becomes possible after an encounter: speaking, withdrawing, gathering, attending or seeking help. Describe the conditions through which the change occurs.

Deleuze and Guattari: relations and becoming

Deleuze and Guattari’s work, including A Thousand Plateaus, places capacities and transformations within changing relations. This directs attention towards arrangements of bodies, materials, practices and environments.

Suppose a public screening brings together a film, a neighbourhood square, loudspeakers, organisers and spectators. The encounter develops through that arrangement. Analyse how the elements make particular responses easier, harder or more likely.

Emotion and cognition as a research debate

Zajonc’s 1980 argument examined affective judgements that can occur with limited explicit recognition or extended inference. Lazarus’s 1982 response emphasised appraisal: an evaluation of what an encounter means for a person’s concerns, which can itself operate quickly and outside deliberate awareness.

Their disagreement helps formulate precise questions about timing, recognition and appraisal. A study can investigate particular processes while keeping its claims tied to the task and measures used.

Foundations: Spinoza; Deleuze and Guattari (1987); Clough and Halley (2007); Zajonc (1980); Lazarus (1982).

Different affects make different features of a situation matter.

Silvan S. Tomkins developed an affect theory in Affect Imagery Consciousness, whose first volumes appeared in 1962 and 1963. His approach gives affects a central motivational role and examines how experience builds patterns around them.

The nine-affect formulation distinguishes the following categories. Several names pair lower and higher intensities. Use the media examples to think about possible experiences to investigate.

From episodes to scripts

Tomkins’s script theory examines patterns through which people organise recurring affective scenes. Experiences can develop expectations about what happens, how it feels and how one should respond.

Suppose a student repeatedly encounters a presenter who turns uncertainty into a shared investigation. That pattern may encourage curiosity. Another presenter repeatedly mocks mistakes; a viewer may begin to anticipate exposure. Interviews can investigate the remembered scenes and the expectations attached to them.

Motivation and the attraction of difficult feelings

Tomkins’s framework gives importance to seeking positive affect and managing negative affect. Media experience also invites combinations: suspense can become enjoyable, sadness can support reflection, and a painful story can become valuable through understanding or connection.

Bartsch’s research on emotional gratification examines rewards associated with entertainment experiences, including thrill, empathic sadness and reflection. It helps explain why audiences sometimes choose material that brings difficult feelings.

Read Tomkins, the Tomkins Institute’s guide and Bartsch (2012).

An encounter can carry more possibilities than its settled emotional label.

Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995) examines bodily intensity and its relationship with conscious accounts. He distinguishes affective potential from emotion understood as an intensity given a socially recognisable, personal form.

His argument directs attention towards what remains open in an encounter: incipient movement, readiness and capacities that exceed the account a person can immediately give.

Before a settled description

Suppose the station scene shifts your posture before you describe yourself as anxious. A later revelation changes the felt situation. To investigate this encounter, follow its unfolding form, your bodily orientation and the account you subsequently offer.

Massumi’s emphasis on the prepersonal directs attention towards processes that help form an experience before it is stabilised as a person’s named emotion. His emphasis on potential concerns what could emerge from that encounter.

Autonomy as openness

In Massumi’s account, affect retains an openness that exceeds its particular actualisation in a named emotion or established function. This gives the autonomy argument its philosophical force.

A media analysis informed by this approach can examine rhythm, interruption, sensory intensity and readiness. It can then investigate how a particular account, action or attachment takes shape within the encounter.

Follow the same event through several kinds of evidence

Record the scene’s formal changes. Ask viewers about moments that stood out. Examine their descriptions of posture, attention and anticipation. If physiological measures serve the question, define exactly what they record and how the indicators will be interpreted.

Compare moments where the forms of evidence converge and where they diverge. A viewer may describe a scene as calm while a particular bodily measure changes. That difference opens a question about the measure, the experience and its description.

Core text: Massumi (1995).

Pleasantness, activation and meaning ask different questions.

A dimensional approach describes affective experience through coordinates such as valence and arousal. James A. Russell’s circumplex model examines relationships among affective descriptions using pleasure–displeasure and activation dimensions.

Valence and moral judgement

Positive valence refers to pleasantness; negative valence refers to unpleasantness. Moral evaluation concerns whether an action or representation is judged right, harmful, fair or justified. These questions can be investigated together.

Suppose a scene exposing corruption feels upsetting and also seems valuable. A polished advertisement may feel pleasant while its claims attract criticism. Record the experience and the judgement separately, then examine their relationship.

Specific emotions carry specific appraisals

Fear and anger can both feel unpleasant while orienting judgement differently. Lerner and Keltner’s research on risk examined differences associated with these emotions and the appraisals of certainty and control connected with them.

For a news study, ask whether viewers feel afraid of a danger, angry at a responsible actor, concerned for someone affected, or several of these together. Those distinctions can guide questions about what they wish to do next.

Nostalgia and mixed feeling

Nostalgia can combine warmth, longing, pleasure and loss. A remembered tune may gather these qualities together or shift between them. Invite a description of the experience and its object: a person, place, routine or imagined period.

Attunement and bracing

Attunement describes a developing responsiveness to another person or a situation. During co-viewing, people may adjust to laughter, silence or tension around them. Examine who responds, through which cues and with what differences.

Bracing names a preparatory bodily orientation towards an anticipated event. A viewer may stiffen before an expected impact. Follow the cue, the anticipation and the response as they unfold.

These terms direct attention towards processes to investigate. Attunement can accompany shared enjoyment, discomfort or disagreement. Bracing can occur while a person remains aware that the scene is a performance.

Dimensional foundation: Russell (1980). Appraisal and judgement: Lerner and Keltner (2001).

Sound, rhythm and narrative give an encounter its changing shape.

Media makers work with timing, proximity, emphasis and expectation. A held shot allows attention to settle. An abrupt cut interrupts it. A voice can invite confidence, distance or uncertainty. Analyse these choices in relation to the experience that develops.

Work through a sequence

Suppose the station scene initially holds a wide shot with distant footsteps. It then cuts to the commuter’s hand tightening around a bag. A sound continues across the cut. A second person enters and breaks the tension with a greeting.

Describe the formal changes first. Next ask viewers to identify the moment when their experience shifted. Compare the accounts: some may anticipate danger, others may recognise a familiar comic convention, while another viewer attends mainly to the setting.

Genre, learning and expectation

A sound acquires force through its place in a sequence and through learned associations. Familiarity with a genre may help viewers anticipate a surprise or enjoy waiting for it. A shared tune can carry personal and cultural histories into an advertisement or film.

Ask what the cue means to these viewers. A useful comparison might examine responses among people with different genre experience, language competence or connections to the depicted setting.

Suspense, sadness and appreciation

Entertainment can offer delight, excitement, reflection and emotional connection. Bartsch’s work examines how audiences find emotional experiences rewarding, including experiences involving empathic sadness and contemplation.

Suppose a film about a difficult separation leaves a viewer sad and grateful for the insight it offers. Investigate the sadness, the appreciation and the reasons for choosing the film. This connects immediate feeling with the value attributed to the experience.

Attention and memory

Emotion can shape what receives attention and what is later remembered. Kensinger’s review emphasises the importance of the type of detail and the quality of the emotional experience when investigating memory.

A news study could test recall for a central image, its source and surrounding facts separately. Compare the accuracy and confidence of those responses. This gives a clearer account of memory than a general question about whether the story “stayed with” the viewer.

Audience experience: Bartsch (2012). Emotion and memory: Kensinger (2009).

Feeling develops through encounters among people, media and environments.

A screening’s silence, a stadium’s excitement or a tense discussion can draw people into a shared atmosphere. Affect research examines how these situations emerge and how participants become responsive to them.

Brennan: porous boundaries

Teresa Brennan’s The Transmission of Affect (2004) challenges the picture of the self-contained individual. She develops an account of affect in ongoing communication between people and their physical and social environments.

Her approach invites attention to the atmosphere people enter and help sustain. Observe changes in pace, posture, interaction and the participant’s account of the situation. Explain which processes the evidence can illuminate.

Several processes can produce similarity

People may respond to the same event, take cues from others, imitate an expression, discuss an interpretation or adjust to expectations about appropriate conduct. A study can distinguish these possible relationships by following when and how responses occur.

Suppose laughter spreads during a screening. Some viewers may respond to the joke; others may respond to a companion’s laughter; another may smile to maintain an easy relationship. Observation and interviews can examine those differences.

Ahmed: emotions acquire force through circulation

In “Affective Economies” (2004), Sara Ahmed examines how emotions align people with communities and against others through circulating signs, figures and associations. Histories of repetition help make some associations feel immediate or self-evident.

Suppose reports repeatedly attach a word such as “threat” to the same place. Analyse the language, images and histories of association. Then investigate how different audiences encounter, adopt, contest or redirect that framing.

Follow transformation

A clip shared with concern can be reposted with sarcasm, anger or reassurance. Record the caption, audience, context and response at each stage. The object that circulates and the emotional relationship to it can both change.

Compare circulation with the participants’ own accounts. A widely shared story may produce enthusiasm in one group, fatigue in another and a critical discussion elsewhere. Such variation makes the social process visible.

Relational approaches: Brennan (2004); Ahmed (2004).

Media help organise who feels at home, exposed, recognised or excluded.

Representations offer audiences positions from which to feel about people, places and events. Admiration, concern, fear, shame and pride can enter the relationship between a story and the social world it depicts.

Examine whose experience becomes understandable, whose pain receives attention and which forms of belonging a representation invites. These questions connect emotional experience with power.

Ahmed’s cultural politics of emotion

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed examines emotions through bodies, language and social boundaries. Feelings can help orient people towards some others and away from others, sustaining or challenging relations of power.

Suppose a television debate invites pride in a neighbourhood while portraying its new residents as a source of danger. Analyse how the programme constructs the valued community, identifies an object of fear and makes particular relationships appear natural.

Audience research can then investigate identification and disagreement. A long-term resident may reject the portrayal; a new resident may experience its address as exclusion; another viewer may hear a different account through personal relationships.

Shame and the exposure of the self

Shame can focus attention on how a person appears to others and on threatened relationships. In media settings, public ridicule, unwanted visibility or a humiliating comparison can become part of the situation.

Follow the particular event and its history. Ask how the person understands the exposure, which relationships matter and which opportunities exist to respond. This grounds an account of shame in experience and context.

Sedgwick: ways of reading and possibilities of repair

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003) connects affect with queer theory, shame, performance, pedagogy and reading. Her discussion of paranoid and reparative reading examines different orientations towards knowledge and experience.

A reparative orientation can attend to nourishment, surprise and resources for living within damaged circumstances. This gives media analysis another question: what can people make from an encounter that helps them endure, connect or imagine possibilities?

Recognition as a question for evidence

Suppose a student sees a familiar accent treated with respect in a drama. Interview research can investigate recognition, pleasure or uncertainty and connect those accounts with earlier experiences. Compare the responses of several viewers, including those who interpret the scene differently.

Work across text and reception. Identify the invitation offered by the representation, then examine how actual people understand and use it within their lives.

Read Ahmed (2004) and Sedgwick (2003).

A promise can hold people through pleasure, difficulty and repetition.

Media offer images of desirable lives: security, achievement, recognition, adventure, intimacy or belonging. These promises can attach to a product, a creator, a character, a community or an everyday routine.

Ask what the object promises, which feelings sustain the relationship and how that attachment enters action over time. An attachment may offer comfort, practical resources or a language for hope. Its costs also deserve examination.

Berlant’s cruel optimism

Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) examines attachments in which something desired becomes an obstacle to flourishing. The object can sustain a person’s sense of possibility while the relationship helps reproduce an impasse.

The analytical task concerns the relationship: the promise, the conditions of pursuing it, its sustaining force and its obstructive effects.

Work through a mediated aspiration

Suppose a creator presents constant productivity as the route to a secure and admired life. A viewer finds encouragement in the videos, buys recommended tools and repeatedly extends working hours. Over time, the pursuit strains rest and relationships while the promised security remains elusive.

Investigate the support the content supplies as well as the costs of maintaining the attachment. Ask how work conditions, resources and social expectations shape the available choices. Examine changes over time before applying Berlant’s concept.

Advertising as the organisation of an association

An advertisement can connect a product with relief, confidence or connection through music, narrative, imagery and address. Trace the particular association and the action the advertisement invites.

Suppose a travel advertisement links a journey with returning to people who matter. Analyse how the sequence connects an emotional promise with a purchase. Then ask viewers what they recognised, felt, questioned and remembered.

Fans, characters and durable feeling

A long-running series can become part of a person’s week and a shared resource among friends. Its ending may bring gratitude, disappointment or grief at the loss of a familiar relationship. Examine the attachment through routines, conversation and the viewer’s account.

Compare what an institution offers with what audiences make of it. A commercial story may become a resource for friendship, creativity or criticism. The attachment develops through these uses as well as through the producer’s invitation.

Central reading: Berlant (2011).

Shared feeling can gather attention and help organise public expression.

Public communication connects events with concern, anger, hope, solidarity and other emotional orientations. News selects scenes and voices; audiences interpret and discuss them; platforms organise routes through which those responses become visible.

Affective publics

Zizi Papacharissi’s Affective Publics examines networked storytelling and public expressions of sentiment. People can connect around an unfolding issue through personal accounts, shared symbols and emotional expressions.

Suppose residents share accounts of a flooded street alongside photographs, frustration and offers of help. Follow how the posts connect people, organise an account of responsibility and direct attention towards possible action.

News and the orientation of concern

A disaster report may foreground immediate suffering, recovery, responsibility or mutual assistance. Examine its formal choices and its account of what matters. Audience research can investigate the particular concern, anger, hope or fatigue viewers describe.

Connect emotional address with information. Ask what viewers understand about the event, whom they regard as responsible and which responses they consider possible. This allows the study to examine feeling alongside knowledge and judgement.

Sharing, valence and activation

Berger and Milkman’s 2012 study of online sharing found a relationship more complex than pleasant versus unpleasant content alone. In their research, high-arousal emotions such as awe, anger and anxiety were associated with greater sharing, while sadness was associated with less sharing.

For a new setting, investigate audience relationships, practical usefulness, visibility and platform arrangements alongside emotional responses. Define the form of sharing and the period before comparing patterns.

A platform experiment and its measures

Kramer, Guillory and Hancock’s 2014 Facebook experiment changed the emotional content appearing in feeds and examined subsequent word use in users’ posts. It reported small changes in positive and negative expression associated with the manipulation.

What makes the feeling consequential?

Track whether expression leads to conversation, mutual support, attendance, institutional response or withdrawal. A visible emotional response supplies one part of that account. Follow the relationships through which it becomes consequential.

Key readings: Papacharissi (2015); Berger and Milkman (2012); Kramer, Guillory and Hancock (2014).

Follow a feeling through its form, situation and consequences.

For each situation, identify the theoretical question, the process you would investigate and the evidence you would collect. Open the discussion after developing your own account.

Case 1 · One scene, two soundtracks

Suppose a classroom compares two versions of a station scene. The images remain identical. One version uses an ominous musical pulse; the other uses only the recorded sounds of the station. Students report different expectations about what will happen.

Your task: explain how form, embodied orientation and interpretation could be studied together. Propose a comparison that addresses the contribution of the soundtrack.

Case 2 · Flood footage travels across a city

Suppose a video of a flooded Kolkata street circulates with a worried caption. A residents’ group adds a practical warning. Another account attaches an angry claim about responsibility. Volunteers share a version that includes a verified route to assistance.

Your task: trace the changing emotional address. Explain how circulation could become a question about power, public connection and action.

Case 3 · The promise of the perfect working life

Suppose a viewer follows a creator who presents relentless productivity as the route to freedom. The videos supply motivation and a sense of community. They also encourage purchases and longer hours. The viewer begins to describe exhaustion and disappointment.

Your task: examine attachment over time. Identify the evidence needed to assess whether Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism helps explain the relationship.

Listen for the movement between bodies, experiences and social relations.

Watch my lecture on affect theory and the power of emotions. Follow the discussion of embodied response, the affective turn, circulation, attachment and the ways media organise emotional encounters.

Watch my lecture on YouTube ↗

After watching, write a 200-word account of one media experience. Identify the formal cue, the felt response, the interpretation and the social conditions. End with a research question that could test or deepen the account.

Choose an explanation, then connect it with evidence.

Choose one answer for each question before opening the explanation. Use any uncertainty to identify the concept or distinction you wish to revisit.

Choose evidence that can answer the affective question you have asked.

Affect and emotion research can combine close analysis, audience accounts, observation, experiments and physiological indicators. Begin with the construct and the claim. Then justify how the selected evidence connects with them.

Activity 1 · Keep an affective viewing record

Choose a short, ordinary media sequence that you are comfortable analysing. Watch it once and record the moments that stood out. Watch again to describe the formal changes at those moments.

1. Describe the cue. Note sound, image, pacing, narrative and the viewing situation.
2. Describe the experience. Record felt qualities, bodily orientation and any emotional label you use.
3. Trace the interpretation. Explain expectations, memories and judgements that entered the encounter.
4. Connect the social setting. Note companions, interruptions, conventions and relevant relationships.
5. Choose a theoretical question. Use one author’s approach to identify a relationship worth investigating.

Suggested output: a sequence record and a 700-word analysis. Distinguish what you observed, what you experienced and what your interpretation proposes.

Activity 2 · Trace a circulating story

Choose a publicly available story and a small, defined set of versions. Compare captions, edits, timing and calls to action. Ask how the emotional address changes as the material reaches different settings.

Suggested output: a version table and a 900-word explanation using Ahmed or Papacharissi. If investigating actual audience experience, add an appropriate consent-based method and explain the sample.

Strengths and limits of the approaches

Close analysis reveals how a text organises an invitation to feel. Interviews reveal accounts and interpretations. Observation follows unfolding situations. Experiments can strengthen inference about a specified manipulation, while their setting and sample shape the scope of the result.

Physiological records add temporal detail about bodily processes, while interpretation depends on the indicator and context. Sentiment analysis classifies language under a model; inspect irony, quotation, language variation and classification errors when using it to study expression.

Conceptual and methodological judgement

A strong study identifies which sense of affect it uses. Philosophical intensity, reported pleasantness, a coded facial action and an emotional word count constitute different research objects. Explain their relationship where a design brings them together.

Consider rival explanations. Shared responses may arise through a common event, selection into a group, interpersonal influence or platform exposure. Match the strength of a causal claim with the design that supports it.

Reflexivity and ethical practice

Record how your own emotional response guides attention and interpretation. Seek participants’ accounts, inspect contrary cases and justify the route from evidence to explanation.

Use informed consent, appropriate review and a clear withdrawal process when working with participants. Select material proportionate to the question, protect sensitive disclosures and explain the use of recordings or physiological data.

Examination and seminar prompts

• Explain affect, feeling, emotion and mood through one media encounter.
• Compare Tomkins’s affect system with Massumi’s account of intensity.
• Discuss the contribution of Ahmed, Brennan, Sedgwick or Berlant to media analysis.
• Explain why valence, activation and specific emotion deserve separate attention.
• Analyse how sound and narrative organise an invitation to feel.
• Design a study of affective circulation that addresses interpretation and power.

Follow what a media encounter makes felt, possible and worth pursuing.

Key terms

Affect

A term used for affective states, intensity or capacities, with its meaning defined by the theoretical approach.

Emotion

An organised episode involving feeling, bodily change, appraisal and tendencies to act.

Feeling

The experienced or consciously registered aspect of an affective encounter.

Mood

A diffuse affective condition that can colour several encounters over time.

Embodiment

The bodily character of experience and its relations with action, meaning and environment.

Affective turn

Interdisciplinary attention to bodily capacities, intensities, emotional life and relations.

Capacity

What a body or arrangement can do within particular relationships and conditions.

Intensity

The force or potential of an encounter, given a specific philosophical meaning in Massumi’s account.

Preconscious

Operating before or outside conscious registration under the definition being used.

Prepersonal

In Massumi’s approach, processes preceding stabilisation as a person’s named emotional experience.

Autonomy of affect

Massumi’s account of affective openness exceeding a particular qualification or actualisation.

Actualisation

The emergence of a particular form, action or experience from a field of possibilities.

Affect system

Tomkins’s proposed differentiation of affects and their motivational functions.

Script

In Tomkins’s theory, a pattern for organising recurring affective scenes and responses.

Dissmell

A repulsion or avoidance response distinguished from disgust in Tomkins’s framework.

Valence

The pleasant or unpleasant quality of an affective experience.

Arousal

Degree of activation described through experience or specified physiological indicators.

Appraisal

Evaluation of what an encounter means for a person’s concerns or well-being.

Qualia

The subjective qualities of experience: what it is like for the person experiencing it.

Attunement

Developing responsiveness to another person, situation or atmosphere.

Bracing

A preparatory bodily orientation towards an anticipated event.

Atmosphere

A felt quality of a situation emerging through people, materials, practices and environments.

Emotional contagion

Similarity or change in emotional responses attributed to interpersonal exposure or influence.

Transmission of affect

Brennan’s account of affective relations across people and their environments.

Affective economy

Ahmed’s account of how emotions acquire social force through circulation and association.

Emotional address

The relationship and orientation towards feeling that a representation invites.

Attachment

An enduring investment in an object, relationship, practice or promise.

Cruel optimism

Berlant’s concept for a desired attachment that helps obstruct flourishing while sustaining a person.

Reparative reading

In Sedgwick’s work, an orientation attending to resources for nourishment, surprise and repair.

Affective public

A networked formation connected through public expressions of sentiment and storytelling.

Nostalgia

A relationship with a remembered or imagined past that can combine warmth, longing and loss.

Mixed emotion

An experience involving more than one emotional quality or orientation.

Empathic sadness

Sadness experienced in relation to another’s situation, including mediated characters or accounts.

Emotional gratification

A reward or valued outcome associated with experiencing emotions through media.

Sentiment analysis

Model-based classification of expressed language according to specified affective categories.

Psychophysiological indicator

A bodily measure used to investigate relationships between psychological processes and physiology.

Recontextualisation

The placement of content within a new setting, framing or relationship of meaning.

Reflexivity

Examination of how the researcher’s position, responses and methods enter the account produced.

Further reading

Read the theoretical traditions in their own vocabularies, then compare the questions they open. Use the empirical studies to examine how particular emotional processes become researchable.

1. Spinoza, B. (2003). Ethics (R. H. M. Elwes, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. (Original work published 1677) Read ↗Read Part III for affects, ideas and changes in the power of acting.
2. Tomkins, S. S. (2008). Affect imagery consciousness: The complete edition. Springer Publishing Company. (Original volumes published 1962–1992) Read ↗Study the affect system, motivation and the organisation of experience.
3. Tomkins Institute. (n.d.). Nine affects, present at birth. Read ↗A concise guide to the nine-affect formulation and its terminology.
4. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980) Read ↗Explore capacities, relations and becoming in an influential philosophical source.
5. Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31, 83–109. Read ↗Examine intensity, emotion and the openness of affective potential.
6. Clough, P. T., & Halley, J. (Eds.). (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Duke University Press. Read ↗Read across interdisciplinary approaches to bodies, technology and social life.
7. Brennan, T. (2004). The transmission of affect. Cornell University Press. Read ↗Investigate relational affect and the boundaries of the individual.
8. Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press. Read ↗Examine emotions, language, bodies and the making of social boundaries.
9. Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective economies. Social Text, 22(2 [79]), 117–139. Read ↗Trace circulation, association and the social force of emotion.
10. Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Duke University Press. Read ↗Explore shame, queer theory, pedagogy and reparative reading.
11. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Read ↗Examine sustaining attachments, ordinary life and obstacles to flourishing.
12. Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161–1178. Read ↗Study a dimensional approach to relationships among affective descriptions.
13. Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist, 35(2), 151–175. Read ↗Read an influential argument about affective judgement and cognition.
14. Lazarus, R. S. (1982). Thoughts on the relations between emotion and cognition. American Psychologist, 37(9), 1019–1024. Read ↗Examine appraisal and the question of what cognition means in emotion research.
15. Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2001). Fear, anger, and risk. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 146–159. Read ↗Investigate specific emotions, appraisals and judgement.
16. Kensinger, E. A. (2009). Remembering the details: Effects of emotion. Emotion Review, 1(2), 99–113. Read ↗Examine how emotional qualities and types of detail enter memory research.
17. Bartsch, A. (2012). Emotional gratification in entertainment experience: Why viewers of movies and television series find it rewarding to experience emotions. Media Psychology, 15(3), 267–302. Read ↗Study emotional rewards, empathic sadness and reflective entertainment experience.
18. Berger, J., & Milkman, K. L. (2012). What makes online content viral? Journal of Marketing Research, 49(2), 192–205. Read ↗Investigate the relationship of valence and activation with sharing.
19. Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford University Press. Read ↗Connect networked storytelling with public expressions of sentiment.
20. Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788–8790. Read ↗Examine the manipulation, word-use measures and findings alongside the journal’s editorial expression of concern linked in Section 11.

My lecture: The Power of Emotions: Affect Theory Explained ↗

Six statements to retain

1. Media experience unfolds through bodies, interpretations, histories and situations.
2. Affect research brings several theoretical traditions into conversation; define the vocabulary you use.
3. Formal choices invite emotional orientations that audiences encounter through their own experience and relationships.
4. Feelings acquire social force through circulation, representation and the organisation of belonging.
5. Attachments can sustain hope and practice while also imposing costs or obstructing flourishing.
6. Strong research matches the construct, the evidence and the scope of the claim.