Affect/
Affective Foundation of Opinion

Marc Jungblut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany
marc.jungblut@ifkw.lmu.de

Artur Lipiński, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań, Poland
artur.lipinski@amu.edu.pl

Asta Zelenkauskaite, Vilnius Tech, Lithuania & Drexel University, USA
az358@drexel.edu

Affect is a category employed by various (sub-)disciplines in the social sciences to refer to any form of subjective feeling or emotional state. Expressing one’s affect, either directly towards a given object (person, object event, or process), or in relation to discussions about one, constitutes one common form of evaluative opinion. Appraisal theory groups affect as that part of an evaluative process that relies on emotion, and it is used to refer to emotions as part of the evaluative process. Moreover, typically affect ranges from positive to negative polar opposites. Although linguistically affect can be realised by many lexical and grammatical expressions, the appraisal theory groups emotions into three major sets linked to un/happiness (manifestations of sadness, hate, happiness, and love), in/security (references to anxiety, fear, confidence, and trust) and dis/satisfaction (references to ennui, displeasure, curiosity, and respect). Affect is considered as one part of sentiment in numerous approaches and tools that aim to detect evaluative tendencies based on lexical indicators.

The affective base of opinions has been argued to impact the depth of cognitive processing, persuasive force, and recall, and potentially also behavioral responses: Specifically, the expression of affect-based opinions appears to stimulate others to express their opinions, as well, and contributes to virality on social networking sites. Moreover, studies also suggest that affective content can create behavioral responses: Political communication research, for instance, demonstrates that affective statements can stimulate the expression of political opinions and can thus trigger virality on social networking sites.

Affective opinionated statements have been used in empirical research from two perspectives. On the one hand, experimental research has focused on the persuasive power of affect-based opinion expressions. One salient example is research on the effects of fear appeals, notably in the context of health communication and propaganda. In this, affective statements are constructed as stimulus material and used as independent variables.

On the other hand, there is a prevalence of affect-based opinion expressions across various forms of communication. Content analytic research investigates how affective different forms of communication are. For instance, scholars have compared the affective quality of opinionated statements by populist and non-populist politicians, or different types of media outlets. A specific concern of public opinion research is affective polarisation, wherein members of competing societal groups or ideologies experience and potentially express their disdain toward one another and align their opinions with this ingroup/outgroup dichotomy. Similarly, affective publics has become a useful framework to define the state of publics where social media mediates public display of emotive reactions to a given phenomenon. Through such an effective process, audiences not only connect but also disrupt and mediate everyday politics.

Affect-based opinion expression is measured either using manual content analysis, or using automatic tools such as specialised dictionaries or sentiment analysis, which recognises affective expressions among other evaluative terms.

Keywords: affective polarisation, affective expressions, virality, affect as valence (positive/negative)

Related Entries: Communication, Emotions, Opinion, Public Opinion

References:
Chan, C. H., Bajjalieh, J., Auvil, L., Wessler, H., Althaus, S., Welbers, K., van Atteveldt, W., & Jungblut, M. (2021). Four best practices for measuring news sentiment using ‘off-the-shelf’ dictionaries: A large-scale p-hacking experiment. Computational Communication Research, 3(1), 1-27.
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