Acta Universitatis Danubius. Communicatio, Vol 10, No 1 (2016)

“Sense and Sensibility” at an Event in Digital Media

Claudia Chiorean¹

Abstract: For thousands of years, people have been talking about emotions, from Plato and Aristotle’s theories till Ellis’s cognitive theory. Plato believes that emotions disturb the mind and Kant argues that emotions are diseases of the soul. Darwin integrates them into valuable adaptive behaviors and into evolutionary species, while JP Sartre considers them a way of keeping consciousness awake. Emotions constitute a significant component, dynamic-human energy of the psychic system. It reflects the subjective internal experience through social behavior, how to adapt to objective reality in which man lives. Current Man lives in a dense, predatory media environment; its adaptation to the objective reality is decisively influenced by the proximity media system. Reality of Media is contained in both the cognitive system, and in displaying the emotional and volitional, motivational symptom. Emotions themselves are processes in which the functions of consciousness are activated. They are the effect of the confrontation between the individual and the actual/presumptive needs of the environment. Emotions are pluritonal and they develop gradually. They are situational and they frequently occur as a result of satisfied or unsatisfied biological needs. Consequently, emotions can be experienced only in the cognitive context. Thus, we distinguish between provoked, evoked and anticipatory emotions. People are rarely surprised by the course of events. Normally, they try various methods to determine the course of events, without expecting something in particular to happen. Depending on how adequately they predict and how close they are to the reality in progress, they build their optimal scenario for each situation. The affective element is essential (attraction or repulsion, fear or fear of domination, a motivating feeling or a blocking effect). Perception, representation or thinking is images of the objects. Affective processes reveal the suitability / opposites between the data subject and the external world needs. It reflects the relationship between the individual and ambience events.

Keywords: media; affective processes; media environment

1. The Theories of Emotions

During the time they have emitted the various hypotheses about the workings of the emotional human psyche in the perspective affected. Trigger mode and operation of emotions was formulated during the period ancient philosophy. Each element has its importance and role in the whole emotional process. Thus they have outlined five categories of theories of emotions: intellectualist theories, theories peripheral physiological, physiological theories central cognitive-physiological theory and cognitive theory.

Some researchers have given priority to the cognitive or affective aspect. Each gave the arguments most relevant to research time. If the 1899 James and Lange maintained that emotion always occurs as a result of a transformation or reactions behavioral the intellectual theory by Herbart 1925 invalidate and propose a new interpretation: the emotion is generated by tension and clash mental representation of different situations (memory - representing the death of a dear beings we produce emotional pain). Later there was disjunction between psychological and physiological explanations, because today be seen in relation of complementarity.

Thus, we distinguish between provoked, evoked and anticipatory emotions. People are rarely surprised by the course of events. Normally, they try various methods to determine the course of events, without expecting something in particular to happen. Depending on how adequately they predict and how close they are to the reality in progress, they build their optimal scenario for each situation. The affective element is essential (attraction or repulsion, fear or fear of domination, a motivating feeling or a blocking effect).

Emotional state may be preparatory accompanying and final operators, determined by close of business, the evaluation result. They can be positive, negative satisfaction or dissatisfaction, mobilizing or demoralizing subject.

The theory underlying the research is called The Rational Emotive Behavior (REBT - Rational Emotive Behavior Theory) and was developed by Ellis in 1955. From this perspective, emotions are controlled and determined by cognition. People can also give internal or external interpretations of events which trigger these beliefs (Ellis, 1962).

This theory is based on the idea that emotions and behaviors arise from cognitive processes, especially as a consequence of the interpretation each individual gives each situation, and not as a result of the events. The theory behind these principles states that it is possible for people to change the emotions and behaviors they have, by altering their thoughts and ideas.

Emotion appears when the adaptation is hindered for various reasons. Affective processes are viewed from three perspectives: what the individual feels directly (six basic emotions: anger, disgust, joy, sadness, fear and surprise), as expressed through behavior and what construed as a personal experience. We can distinguish: a) primary emotional processes: organic provisions and impaired; b) actual emotions; c) affective disposition; d) sentiments.

2. How Does the Brain Process Emotions?

And the individual feel emotions and I felt like that as we feel does not feel any other person, it seems that our emotions are processed by the brain in a similar way. A new study demonstrates that the brain translates the emotions into a standard code that is similar to all people.

While happiness and sadness could be feel quite different to each person, in fact, the brain is these emotions in a way remarkably similar. It remains unclear, however, how the brain is objective external sensory events alongside our subjective impressions related to those events.

The information processing of emotional stimuli involves two types of access routes. The primary circuit, short embodies superficial categorical information, about stimulus receptors. It is a few synapses shorter than the indirect connection. For the walking it needed less than 20 milliseconds. It is characterized by “quick and dirty”. These emotions are unconscious.

emotional stimulus → thalamus → amygdala→ emotional response

The secondary long, laborious circuit, handle more complex and accurate categorical information about the input as a result of analyzes of the cerebral cortex. For the other emotions, emotional processing are mostly conscious (Lazarus's theory). Independently of their nature contemporary psychology could not separate the emotions of cognition.

emotional stimulus → thalamus → cortex (sensory, associative) → hippocampus/amygdala → emotional response

3. The Hypotheses of Research

1. Newspaper articles, infused with strong emotional elements, calls for quick thinking, irrational, heuristics, to the detriment of slow thinking, rationalization, analysis, comparison, synthesis, generalization, abstraction. Ex. irrational manifestations of thinking: “The availability bias” - the tendency to judge based on what comes to us easily in mind; “The anchor effect” - the effect of anchor - a “shortcut” of thinking.

2. Media events infused emotion easier triggers reactions, measurable behaviors: comment links, shares, street mobilizations... Emotional phenomenon translates into behavior. Emotional states has a relative power. Each emotion possess a high energy, a tension manifested in behavior. The feelings are motivational vectors of the behavior. The reaction is generated by emotion and result is of higher number of likes, comment links, shares, meetings, protests and street movements.

4. The Research Methodology

The content analysis follows several levels of analysis: the social environment to be selected the basic expressions, developing some and inhibiting others. The meaning of words and their significance is given by the positive connotation, negative or neutral receives the text and the frequency of their occurrence in the unit analyzed text and occurrence (distance between words) that is situated. The word order is governed by the dynamism of communication.

The propositional analysis of the significance of a sentence (sense spelling and sense logic) comply with certain stages of analysis: idiomatic expressions, the context that resolves the ambiguity of the structure of a sentence, the semantics factors that occur in the parallel interpretation of the syntax, the progressive introduction of information (sentence - stimulus = new information and variation information for sentence - context = previous information); the role of title, the text as a verbal unit.

Thematic heading facilitates understanding and retention of the essential information of a well-structured and understandable text and structure of the text easy disturb. The title operate as an anchor point for the integration of cognitive structures enabling the information of text. The title mobilize the necessary knowledge and to make the understanding process move forward by comparing new information with an internal model provoked by title. The effect of titles on the essential information is dependent upon what the reader knows about the subject and the attitude already formed.

Content analysis related to specific aspects: the three elements of the triad of communication (sender, message, receiver) can not be omitted from the analysis of discourse; psychological perspective and linguistic analysis gives a complete picture of text; the message is analyzed in its context (macro-context and micro-context); contexts can be found both at issuance (the message structure) and the reception (message context).

5. Study Application: The fire at the Colectiv Club

Last time brought public opinion in our country and around the world an intense emotional state. A too full of pain and suffering, that the media is trying to color in as strokes thicker and more visible. Year 2015 brings for Bucharest for Romania another as October / November bloodied. Almost 150 young people were affected fatally injured in the blaze or just one day of Friday, October 30, 2015 at a rock music club in the capital.

The emotional impact of the event is greater, as the connotations day (Day of the Dead) and listening to the rock music that young people were associated with divine punishment. If the victims of Christians in Syria, Christians (and others) across the world cry and pray to God with the belief that they will be heard if the death of an accident his crying relatives, friends, thinking of divine consolation the idea of divine punishment for these young aroused frustration, anger, rebellion, that man, in his infirmity, did not refer to a Divinity, but to the earthly authorities.

The websites were monitored Libertatea, agerpres, mediafax, two weeks after the accident. Through analysis of the content was compared the news about the fire in the Colectiv Club. The program sentiment analysis to centralized data referring to the positive, negative or neutral connotations of the emotional words.

Site www.libertatea.ro presented the event as follows: 2015, October 30. A large fire broke out Friday at a nightclub in Bucharest – Colectiv Club, located on the Tanners street no... It's incredible, a completely innapropriate space... Hundreds of people laid flowers and lit candles at the place where the fire took place Friday night at Colectiv Club.

5. Entities

6 Themes

Auto-categories

Mediafax

Presents the situation as follows: Claudiu Bogdan Istrate was only 22 years old and he was brought to the hospital being in a serious condition. He has been intubated at “Bagdasar-Arseni” Hospital from Bucharest... He had burns on the body and respiratory tract burns, according to medical sources... On Wednesday two injured people who had been transported abroad died: Alexandru Pascu, who has been transported with the Ministry of Internal Affairsʾs aircraft to a hospital in France – he died at the airport in Paris, and Roberto Vlăduţ Andy, who has been hospitalized in Sunday night to Monday in a hospital in Chelmsford, UK.

10 entities

6 themes

Auto-categories

The event has been related on site www.agerpres.ro as follows: November 13, at 10:32 p.m. - two weeks after the sacrifice of the young people: 55 people have died and dozens are still hospitalized. The fire was triggered by fireworks used during the concert, at 22:32:16, and the ceiling of the club located on Tanners street has been engulfed in violent flames in tens of seconds as described later in the statement of the Prosecutor of The High Court of Cassation and Justice (GPO). After tens of seconds, the surface of the ceiling was completely burnt and people were rushing out in great numbers at the door to leave the club, while, a dense smoke was spread throughout the entire club... Carbon monoxide poisoning, smoke and toxic gas was the main cause of the death of the fire victims on October 30, in Colectiv Club, according to preliminary results of autopsies. Within the next two weeks after the tragedy, 28 other people died, thus the number of deaths rised to 55 on Friday.

10 entities

10 themes

Auto-categories

The most frequent words reveal how to argue the analyzed statement. The program Sentiment analysis reveals the value of the positive, negative or neutral news.

Libertatea uses strong negative words, of the semantic family of the word death: tragedy, death, Injured. The coefficient -0.153 which measures capitalization is obviously negative.

AGERPRES uses, in addition to the specific terms of death, many words of semantic sphere of medical, to argue the seriousness of the situation and induce the tragic idea, the imminent and inevitable end. Suffering is scientifically explained. Because the document presents a record of deaths each day from 30 October 2015 it is negative (-0.510), much higher than Libertatea (-0.153) and mediafax (-0.399). The story of freedom has the most detailed presentation during the first two weeks of the event. It has 556,529 accesses.

Mediafax keep the medical register to accentuate and explain convincingly, argumentative, the tragic situation (-0.399). The story on this site is visible emotionally charged, despite trying to present as objective and impersonal each victim. Details are provided about the surface of the body affected by burns, age and occupation of everyone. The account has 4,999 hits, 19 photographs and one comment.

It's a real assault of death terms. The receiver cannot remain insensitive. Their repetition, their occurrence in the text, explains the significantly negative coefficient of each news-story from the three public media.

In the avalanche of terms with great affection, the reason works by a short rapid, irrational circuit. These thinking shortcuts lead public opinion to adopt extreme behavioral decisions after the event. It is when people went out in the streets accusing the state forces of incompetence and corruption. It calls for the resignation of Prime Minister Ponta (will resign) and mayor Piedone (resigning, too), the mayor in charge of the area where the event occurred. The young people went out in the streets with placards on that are written accusations of the state, administrative and even church authorities.

These manifestations are relevant to the forms of rational thinking – “The availability bias” which tend to judge based on what comes easily to mind. The authorities were the easiest accuse, the most available subjects of the frustration, pain, hatred, anger. Under “the anchor effect” - the “shortcut” of thinking trigger a movement of the masses. The solution offered in this context is: “only solution, own evolution”.

6. Conclusions

A word role is vital not only in the development of human cognitive system, but especially in the onset and progression of human emotions and behaviors event. If poetic expression suggests in the first place mental images and feelings with deep resonances, in journalism - in digital media - the cognitive, affective and behavior capacities are based on common elements, known by most of the users in order to clarify with maximum impact any confusion. Goethe’s Werther appearance triggered at that time a wave of suicides. The articles on the net today mobilize the masses, changes governments, consistently and persuasively shaping the cyberspace user’s identity.

7. Bibliography

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