Emotional Strategies Of War Images

Photography is one of the most crucial tools of war and conflict reporting.The images of war are often full of violence,destruction,pain and even death,with strong visual stimulation.Such war images can easily inspire readers’ large degree of emotional reactions.Emotions are the motivations that can evoke psychological activities and behaviors.Thus,the emotional stimulation of war images has played an important role in scaling and guiding the public’s attitude towards the news events,followed by arousing the public emotions and then forming the public opinion.Emotional arousal is extremely powerful in war and anti-war propaganda,making emotional construction a vital part of the production of the news photos.Within the horizons of emotional cognition theory,this study uses Hoffman’s cognition mediated emotion theory as the theoretical framework.Taking the news photographs of the Syrian Civil War represented by the United Nations News and The New York Times as the research object.Using visual grammar and visual framing as analytical tools for the content analysis.This study aims to explore how emotions are constructed in war photography and the differences of the emotional strategies among alternative media sources which adopt different visual frames.Therefore,this study provides a systematic theoretical tool for analyzing the emotional strategies of the news images,and guides the strategies of emotional mobilization while using the news images by the media.Findings indicate that the precondition of emotional construction of war images is the use of interactive resources of visual grammar to establish imaginational social relationships between participants and the viewer.In the emotional response induced by the matching of stimulus and appearance,the emotion is directly transmitted through emotional empathy;in the emotional response induced by the stimulation of meanings,the emotion is transmitted indirectly through the classification of emotional schema and the evaluation of emotional attribution.The study also found that the media’s visual coverage frame and its emotional strategies are causal to each other,and there are significant differences in the emotional strategies of visual coverage in peace journalism and war journalism frames.The UN News with the peace journalism frame is good at mobilizing interactive resources that facilitate positive emotional expression,emphasizing positive emotional empathy and adopting emotional schemas of happiness and trust orientation,highlighting attribution of achievements;the New York Times using the war journalism frame mobilizes interactive resources that sensationalize negative emotion expressions,emphasizing negative emotion empathy and adopt sad and fear oriented emotional schemas,highlighting attribution of responsibility.