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Emotional Climate as Emotion Accessibility: How Countries Prime Emotions
Author(s) -
FernándezDols JoséMiguel,
Carrera Pilar,
De Mendoza Alejandra Hurtado,
Oceja Luis
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of social issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.618
H-Index - 122
eISSN - 1540-4560
pISSN - 0022-4537
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2007.00512.x
Subject(s) - priming (agriculture) , psychology , meaning (existential) , social psychology , emotional contagion , prime (order theory) , sign (mathematics) , emotion work , emotional expression , emotion classification , atmosphere (unit) , cognitive psychology , psychotherapist , mathematical analysis , botany , germination , mathematics , combinatorics , biology , physics , thermodynamics
Many everyday collective emotions are shared emotional conventions, that is, social practices with an attributed emotional meaning (e.g., complimenting as a sign of conventional love). Emotional conventions lead to a collective priming of some categories of emotion. For example, New Year Eve's emotional conventions prime words such as “happy.” We define emotional atmosphere and emotional climate as emotion accessibility caused by the priming of specific categories of emotion linked to emotional conventions. We report two sets of data in support of this approach: (1) the accessibility of categories of emotion in relation to unusual historical events (the 1992 World Expo in Seville and the March–April 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid), and (2) the differential priming of specific categories of emotion on the Internet in different countries. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this approach to “emotional climate.”