Abstract:
The war photo coverage often contains violence, destruction, pain and even death, which
can affect the public’s attitude towards the news events by arousing emotions, and thus
play a focusing and guiding role in public opinion. This makes emotional construction an
essential part of war photo coverage. This paper, from the perspective of emotional cognition theory, uses visual grammar and visual framing as analytical tools to conduct a
content analysis of the Syrian Civil War photo coverage by “United Nations News”, and
explores how emotions are constructed in war images and the emotional strategies of
Peace Journalism reporting frames. The study finds that the premise of emotional
construction in war images involves invoking interactive resources of visual grammar to
establish the imagined social relations between the represented participants and the
viewers. When the image stimulus matches the emotional schema, emotions are directly
transmitted through emotional empathy; otherwise, they are indirectly transmitted through
the categorization function of emotional schemas and the evaluation function of emotional
attribution. The study also finds that the reporting frame of Peace Journalism is good at
mobilizing interactive resources that favor positive emotional expression, emphasizing
positive emotional empathy and adopting emotional schemas with happiness and trust
orientations, highlighting achievement attribution. This exploration has a constructive
significance for a deeper understanding of the war reporting strategies of Peace
Journalism, revealing the “emotion-cognition” mechanism in the image’s application in
emotional construction.
