Title: Understanding hate speech: Why negative emotions are so successful?
Speaker: Manuel Alcántara-Plá (Autonomous University of Madrid)
Abstract:
Hate speech plays a significant role in today's communication and this success is often explained by the characteristics of the new -digital- media. However, these characteristics are not enough to explain why hate and other negative emotions are so attractive for us.
In this session, we will delve into how emotions work in communication and into the special characteristics of hate speech. We will take a constructionist approach to study the strategic use of emotions in political discourses. Most of existing research focuses on the categorization of emotions (hate, fear, hope…); however, we will see that categories by themselves do not tell us much about why emotions work so well in populist and polarizing discourses. In order to understand it, we need to analyze emotions as rational constructions involved in the evaluation of risks and opportunities. We will do so in the session using real messages taken from social media.
