This work explores the travels of Ugandan Enoch Olinga, as an example of a person who enjoyed connections with global minorities across national boundaries and as a unique lens into the Black international experience in the mid-twentieth century. I examine his internationalist experiences through the lens of emotions to emphasize different dynamics of global racial identities and transnational diasporic connections during the 1950s–1970s, an era of decolonization and civil rights movements. I argue that Olinga, a prominent Baha’i who traveled worldwide during this era, advocated for unification among global minorities by emphasizing common racial and cultural heritages and expansive concepts of a politicized kinship. Through the Baha’i Cause, he articulated his own ideas about striving for global harmony and racial unity, with a connection to Africa serving as the linchpin. Emotional analysis provides insights into how Olinga invoked diverse notions of family and kin to arouse particular emotions amongst people of color both within and beyond the unity offered by the Baha’i Faith.

Captivity is a complex phenomenon in international politics with a broad range of purposes, functions, and consequences. Existing scholarship suggests that states use captivity, for example, to facilitate hostage or prisoner exchanges, to extract material rewards, or, in the case of human shields, for deterrence purposes. This article argues that states may use captivity to deter not only traditional military threats emanating from other states, but also perceived threats to regime security posed by non-state actors, including individuals, and that emotions are central to this process. The argument is illustrated through three empirical vignettes that show how the Chinese government has detained foreign academics, publishers, and NGO workers engaged in activities seen as threatening regime security. Detention is interpreted as attempts to deter such actors. While fear is often seen as key to successful deterrence, the article indicates that paying attention to other emotions can help better understand deterrence failure. Specifically, because captivity, and deterrence, involve the denial of the captive’s agency and may trigger feelings of humiliation and shame, it can backfire as the target of deterrence efforts might seek to act to regain agency.

Research problems are crucial in the sense that they provide new research with purpose and justification. So why, despite the abundance of guidance available from an extensive methods literature, do graduate students often struggle to develop compelling research problems? This article argues that the process of developing research problems epitomises the insecurity of doing research. We focus in particular on the anxiety that graduate students often seek to avoid or alleviate through a range of counterproductive coping strategies. The existing literature on research problems focuses predominantly on the technical aspects of doing research while neglecting how anxiety might affect the research process. This article seeks to rectify this shortcoming by providing advice on how graduate students can face such anxiety, and how professors can assist them in this endeavour. Drawing on theories about identity and anxiety, the article explains the allure of coping strategies such as gap-filling, while arguing that anxiety is not necessarily a negative emotion to be avoided at all costs, but integral to learning and creativity. It concludes by suggesting that compelling research problems can be constructed through the formulation of narratives that try to embrace anxiety, instead of seeking premature resolutions.

Emotion is recognized as essential in human service work. Despite a recent surge of research on emotions in organizations in the past 20 years, communication scholars, however, have paid inadequate attention to workplace emotions. Yet, one key to promoting sustainable identity-based organizing lies in crafting alignments among identity, emotion, and action. This gap motivates the current study to examine emotions across organizational positions within a pan-Asian nonprofit organization serving underserved Asians and Asian Americans. Specifically, this study mapped via sentiment analysis eight primary emotions identified by the National Research Council of Canada across three organizational positions (i.e., staff, volunteering members, and clients). The statistical analysis identified trust as the most prevalent emotion. Moreover, fear and sadness were identified as affected by organizational positions. These results demonstrate the usefulness, importance, and necessity of examining emotions in the context of identity-based organizing.

Memory for emotional information is greater than for non-emotional information and is enhanced by sleep-related consolidation. Previous studies have focused on emotional arousal and valence of established stimuli, but what is the effect of sleep on newly acquired emotional information? Figurative expressions, which are pervasive in everyday communication, are often rated as higher in emotionality than their literal counterparts, but the effect of emotionality on the learning of metaphors, and the effect of sleep on newly acquired emotionally negative, positive and neutral language, is as yet poorly understood. In this study, participants were asked to memorise conventional (e.g. ‘sunny disposition’) and novel (e.g. ‘cloudy disposition’) metaphorical word pairs varying in valence, accompanied by their definitions. After a 12-hour period of sleep or wake, participants were tested on their recognition of word pairs and recall of definitions. We found higher arousal ratings were related to increased recognition and recall performance. Furthermore, sleep increased the accurate recognition of all word pairs compared to wake but also reduced the valence of word pairs. The results indicate better memory for newly acquired emotional stimuli, a benefit of sleep for memory, but also a reduction in emotional arousal as a consequence of sleep consolidation.

The 2016 election serves as an important case study in understanding how gendered political contexts can shape emotional reactions and engagement, particularly among women. Two important features of that election, Trump’s treatment of women and Clinton’s historic run for office, influenced emotional reactions to politics in distinct ways. We used two experimental designs in which participants were randomly assigned to read vignettes about Trump’s treatment of women or Clinton’s historic run for office. Reading about the former led to higher anger, especially among Democratic women and men, while reading about the latter increased enthusiasm among highly educated women. These elevated emotions increased intended future engagement. We conducted a third study in which we induced anger about Trump’s treatment of women and found that it led to greater intended engagement.

Research has demonstrated that emotion modulates specificity in recollection of personally experienced events and the words individuals use during recollection reflect their psychological states. Here, we investigated the linguistic features of autobiographical memory (AM) of different specificity for different emotional events to address how emotion would modulate the psychological mechanisms underlying AM of different specificity. We analyzed 122 participants’ narratives of AM categorized as specific and general under happy, sad, angry, fearful and neutral cues. The use of three groups (emotional process, cognitive process and thinking style) of words was, respectively, compared between specific and general AM in each emotion condition. In retrieval of sad, angry and fearful events, general relative to specific AM contained more affective process words, notably negative words. General AM featured more cognitive process words than specific AM, regardless of emotion type (except neutral). When recalling happy events, general AM featured more analytic thinking words than specific AM, while in recollection of fearful events, general AM featured fewer such words than specific AM. General relative to specific AM about happy experiences contained more narrative thinking words. These findings suggest that the psychological mechanisms underlying top-down and bottom-up retrieval differ between particular types of emotion engaged in AM.

Digital technologies have transformed the way governments around the world maintain social and political order. However, the intrusive and often repressive nature of modern political control mechanisms, such as digital surveillance and digital censorship, is largely concealed from the public and becomes “normalized” by state propaganda, particularly in authoritarian regimes. Engaging with the political psychology literature on emotion, we examine how citizens respond emotionally to such control when exposed to relevant revealing information and how these emotions relate to shifts in attitudes toward authoritarian governments. Using a survey experiment and 50 in-depth interviews conducted in China, we find that exposure to revealing information about digital control slightly amplifies negative emotions but profoundly reduces positive emotions and significantly undermines public support for authoritarian digital governance. These effects are more pronounced in the context of digital surveillance than censorship and are most severe when individuals perceive control measures as personally targeted. Our findings underscore the political-psychological consequences of digital control, emphasizing the role of emotions in shaping public responses to digital authoritarianism based on new insights into the affective dimensions of digital repression.