HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Participation
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1570686
This article is part of the Research TopicA Reflection on Conceptions and Theories of Emotion across Three Disciplines: Psychology, Political Psychology and Political ScienceView all 3 articles
An Emotion System Theory to Address Gaps in Affective Intelligence Theory and Conceptualization of Emotional Phenomena
Provisionally accepted
- Rutgers University Camden, Camden, United States
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How can emotions, and their influence on individuals and groups, be best conceptualized and studied by psychologists and political scientists? Empirical work indicates that psychological theories, and research conducted by psychologists about emotions, are not only relevant but indeed important for understanding and predicting political phenomena. Building on a recent article by Marcus (2023), gaps are identified in Affective Intelligence Theory (AIT) and other theories of emotion that he reviews, and an alternative, more comprehensive theory is delineated. The Emotion System Theory, here referred to as EST (see Roseman, 2011Roseman, , 2013Roseman, , 2018) ) encompasses a wider range of emotions and emotion-eliciting appraisals, and makes predictions that differ from AIT about the determinants of political information processing and specific pollical behaviors. For example, in addition to fear and anger, EST specifies causes, correlates, and consequences of emotions such as surprise, contempt, love, and pride (which are not discussed in detail by AIT), and the present paper discusses when and how they influence political information processing, attitudes, communication, candidate evaluation, voting, and political participation. As distinct from AIT's focus primarily on 3 emotions, EST defines and distinguishes among 16 positively-or negatively-valenced emotions plus the neutral-valenced emotion of surprise; proposes 5 ways in which they can be measured; and discusses their wide-ranging and often powerful impact. Together, these emotions constitute a coherent set of general-purpose response strategies for coping with crises and opportunities, within and outside of the political domain.
Keywords: Emotions, Appraisal (evaluation), Functions, system, Affective intelligence theory
Received: 04 Feb 2025; Accepted: 16 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Roseman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ira J Roseman, ira.roseman@rutgers.edu
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