The goal of this chapter is to answer the question: what is emotion? We begin by presenting a brief overview of the early history of emotion studies, charting a trajectory from the study of emotions from Aristotle in classical times through to the work of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and from Descartes to Hume. and We then move on to those thinkers who are, arguably, responsible for the very beginnings of modern enquiry into emotion study: Charles Darwin and William James. We offer a summary of the three main theoretical approaches to affective science that exist today: the so-called basic emotion view, the psychological-constructionist view and appraisal theory. We will claim there are a number of reasons to favour the appraisal theory account, one of the principal of which is of these being that there are good reasons to suggest it is the one that marries most successfully with relevance theory, the pragmatic framework we adopt. As such, it offers a route ahead for genuinely interdisciplinary research involving those working in pragmatics and those working in affective science.

Mayr investigates song lyrics (proibidão) glorifying gang leaders in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. With her CDA approach and her use of Appraisal Theory she argues that proibidão, in fact, serves ideologically to recontextualise gang violence and legitimise favela criminals.

This chapter surveys recent research about the effects of discrete emotions in politics and international relations. We first examine the appraisal theory of emotions in psychology and discuss its categorisation of contacting, distancing, attack, and rejection emotions. Next, we review Affective Intelligence Theory (AIT) and its impact on the study of political psychology. For the remainder of the chapter, we discuss the basic traits and general effects of the most important emotions in politics: anger, anxiety, contempt, disgust, enthusiasm, fear, guilt, hope, and shame. Topics from recent studies are highlighted for each emotion, including political participation, public opinion, social media, ideology, partisanship, gender, race, political extremism, nationalism/national identity, foreign policy, authoritarianism, immigration, populism, human rights, terrorism, and security studies. Finally, the chapter closes with a brief look at two group-orientated perspectives on emotions: moral emotions and collective emotions.

Discusses emotion, introducing Appraisal Theory to show how emotions and emotional language can be analysed, with a case study looking at multilingual correspondence within a community of European Catholic missionaries in nineteenth-century Australia.