A Study Of The Emotional Factors On American Policy In The Middle East

The core issue touched upon in this dissertation is how the emotional factors affect the Middle East policies of the George W.Bush administration and the Obama administration,and by comparing the emotional factors in the Middle East policies of the two administrations,it could be found that the continuity and volatility of their situations.Emotion exists widely in human activities,and the research on emotion goes much deeper with the development of neurology and psychology,and finally breaks through the traditional concept which is the opposition between emotion and reason.Emotion becomes an independent conception.Emotion is the inner feeling people have in response to external stimuli,it is also the psychological component in the process of emotional expression.Emotions are changeable but stable,as well as infectious and practical.Based on the two dimensions of arousal and valence,the classification of emotions forms a circular model.After getting rid of the shackles of rationalism,the emotional research in the international relations has developed into an independent research approach.Following the different subjects of emotion expression,emotion research can be divided into three levels: leaders,the public and the state.With the help of arousal and valence dimensions,the writer sets the four emotional agendas: affective orientation,directed emotional response,affective climate,and indiscriminate emotional response,and sets the emotional agendas in the leaders’ decision-making process: anticipated emotion,decision process emotion and post-decision emotion.Following the established emotional agendas,this dissertation selects the two administrations of George W.Bush and Obama as the observation objects to explore the affect of emotional factors in the formulation,implementation and change of American Middle East policies.The micro-foundation of observing the national policy activities is leader’s emotional orientation.The president George W.Bush considers him self-righteous,above the crowd and deeply hostile to the evil.President Obama insists optimism idealism,maintains sympathy for minorities and courageous to the political innovation.Emotional orientations of the two presidential policies in the Middle East show distinct difference.The September 11 th and the Arab spring movement caused different directed emotional responses,which shape the diverse affective climates of the two administrations.The social affective climate of George W.Bush administration changes from revenge on support for the war to the calm introspection.The social affective climate of Barack Obama strengthen the anti-war sentiment,but the Arab spring suspended American strategic shrink.The two presidents’ emotional orientations and the affective climates,combined with the changes of these emotional factors in the process of policy,jointly shaped their different national identity cognition and preferences.The feedback of policy will reconstruct the affective climate and become the external factors that the future president and his administration must take into consider when making policies.President Donald Trump,the successor of Obama,has adjusted his Middle East policy with an obviously rectified mood,which partly verifies the views of this dissertation.Emotion is the most common affective factor in political activities.As a result of the conflicts in research paradigm,theoretical concept and research methods,the emotion research’s explanatory power and range of validation are very limited.But emotion has always been an inevitable research object when researchers want to get close to the reality.