Comments of Agneta Fischer

Find here what Agneta says about each of them:

Fischer, A. H. (2026). Emotions and societal changes: The nature and social functions of “neo-emotions”. Emotion Review, 18(3), 144-154.

'This is a special issue about ‘Neo-emotions’, referring to new emotion terms elicited by broad societal changes, such as climate anxiety, doom scrolling or fear of missing out. I discuss whether Neo-emotions are different from the classic categories of emotions and what the social and societal functions of these new emotions could be. Neo-emotions serve an affiliation and distancing function at the group level, strengthening bonds within one’s group or distance from other groups, in a similar manner as other emotions (see Fischer & Manstead, 2016). Neo-emotions serve an additional function at the societal level, because they connect individual emotions with societal challenges, thereby eliciting collective emotions and potentially boosting social movements and inspiring social change. The use of specific emotion language may help to confirm and demarcate group identities, but I do not think that the discrepancy between an adequate emotion vocabulary and the occurrence of new feelings is a necessary condition for neo-emotions to emerge.'

• Link to paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/17540739261441737

Fischer, A. H., & Duyvendak, J. W. (2026). The emotionalization of society and the politicization of emotions. In Osler & Szanto (Eds.),  For, against, together: Antagonistic Political emotion (pp. 26-46). Cambridge University Press.

'In this volume on political emotions, we introduce the role of political emotions, and argue that the increasing manifestation of emotions in political contexts is part of a broader societal trend, which we refer to as the emotionalization of society. We provide a theoretical framework on political emotions in the context of increasingly entangled private and public spheres, the growing emphasis on emotions in current society, and the group-based and enduring nature of political emotions. We argue that emotions have not only become a strategic tool in parliamentary politics but that emotions more generally have become important in politics at large, serving a moral function in political identities, judgments and actions, which further reinforces the emotionalization of society.'

• Link to book chapter: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/9781009493741%23bp3/type/book_part
• Also see the related AISSR lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlSLgnXt9PM

Jasini, A., & Fischer, A. H. (2026). How Hate Endures in a post-conflict Society. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1-20.

'There are not many empirical papers on hate, because it is difficult to study. The current paper sheds light on group-based hate in a post-conflict region. We report three studies with Kosovo Albanian participants. Across the studies, we found that hate was reported to be very intense, even decades after the war had ended. Hate, more than anger, was consistently characterized by the appraisal of bad character to the outgroup and the tendencies to exclude, force change or take revenge on the antagonistic group rather than tendencies to normalize relations. Moreover, hate was associated with negative stereotypes, negative relations and a lack of contact with the outgroup. A surprising finding was that the intensity of hate did not differ between participants who had experienced the war themselves or merely heard the stories from their family members. Finally, in all studies hate is hardly expressed to the outgroup, but on the contrary frequently shared with the ingroup. We argue that these characteristics contribute to the endurance of hate over time.'

• Link to paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-025-00798-5