engleski

Extreme political attitudes and emotionally based strategic communications

Group based dominant emotional maps characterized by long lasting negatively valenced emotions, such as fear, anger, hatred or humiliation may elicit strong extreme political attitudes, actions and behaviors, as well as massive posttraumatic stress disorders. The impact of these dominant negatively valenced emotions on political attitudes, actions and group behavior can be referred as toxic power of negatively valenced emotions. Persistent negatively valenced group based dominant emotions may be also used as quantitative statistical measure and the most relevant early warning indicator of potential terrorism and violence among respected group members. The toxic power of extreme political attitudes, actions and behavior might be reduced by Emotionally Based Strategic Communications (EBSC) as a communication method for transforming negative dominant emotional maps into more positive ones. EBSC is conceptualized as the positively valenced stimulation of a negatively emotionally affected group by an appropriate communications strategy, in order to influence extreme political behavior of a targeted group. We argue for significant potential of EBSC to prevent the arousal of intense negative emotions within human collectives and groups, as well as mitigate the toxic power of negatively valenced emotions. Prevention and reduction of negative emotions may ease social and security tensions in politically polarized, culturally fragmented, or economically stratified social settings, and prevent political terrorism by facilitating harmonization of diversified communities. The extreme political attitudes, and related dominant negatively valenced emotions have their neural representation in specific changes on biochemical and molecular levels of related limbic and prefrontal cortical structures of affected brains. Societal enrichment based on positively valenced EBSC might have positive social impact eliciting various positive neuronal responses and changes in the brains of affected people, ranging from different biochemical to neural structural changes like neurogenesis, synaptic plasticity, dendritic arborization, increase of synapse-to-neuron ratios, axonal growth, neurotransmitter changes etc. We regard EBSC “soft power” as important contribution to prevention of extremist action tendencies and radicalized behaviors in afflicted societies. EBSC policy can be also viewed as a large-scale strategy of emotion regulation that might decrease destructive power of extreme political behavior and terrorism.

extreme political attitudes, radicalized behaviors, terrorism, dominant emotional maps, strategic communications, associative and reinforcement learning, amygdala, prefrontal cortex

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