Emotional Strategies of War Images: Analysis Based on News Photography of the Syrian Civil War

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.