AUTHOR=Jiménez-Aleixandre María Pilar , Brocos Pablo 

TITLE=Emotional Tension as a Frame for Argumentation and Decision-Making: Vegetarian vs. Omnivorous Diets

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.662141

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.662141

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Argumentative discourse has a complexity that is not entirely captured by purely structural analyses. In arguments about socio-scientific issues a range of dimensions are mobilized besides scientific knowledge, such as values, ethical concerns, cultural habits or emotions. The relationship between argumentation and emotions is now drawing attention from researchers. Our focus is on the dynamic interactions among emotions, scientific evidence, and dimensions such as cultural identities or ethical concerns. We draw from Plantin (2011), who proposed that emotions are mobilized as argumentative resources, alongside knowledge. The goal of our study is to examine in which ways emotive resources contribute to the construction of arguments about vegetarian versus omnivorous diets by a group of four pre-service teachers. The research question is twofold: how are emotive resources intertwined with evidence in the evaluation of decisions about vegetarian versus omnivorous diets, and in which way does the emotive framing drive participants' orientation to the argumentative decision. The results suggest that the interactions between participants' emotive positioning and the evaluation of evidence drive a change towards a decision that would be emotionally acceptable. Participants attended to the epistemic dimension, weighing evidence and values about the choices, but the emotional framing overtook. We suggest that the analysis of this emotive framing may be a fruitful approach for sophisticated studies of argumentation about socio-scientific issues.