Speakers conference Moral Emotions
Ross Buck
Ross Buck is Professor of Communication Sciences and Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs. His research is on the experience, expression, and communication of motivation and emotion. He is the author of Human Motivation and Emotion; The Communication of Emotion; and 100+ publications. His research has been funded by grants from NIMH, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the EJLB Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is co-organizer and Charter Chair of the Nonverbal Communication Division, National Communication Association. Research on emotional expression has been featured on ABC News 20-20 and FUJI-TV, Japan. Present empirical work: brain mechanisms of emotional communication including fMRI studies of empathy; emotional experience, expression, and communication in human cooperation and competition, trustworthiness, and altruism; emotion in persuasion including safe-sex communication; cross-cultural studies of social/moral emotion; emotional communication in clinical samples (schizophrenia, Huntington’s disease, cancer); emotional factors in maintaining drug regimen. Theoretical work: Developmental-Interactionist theory, incorporating a typology of biological emotions based in neurochemical systems; and higher-level social, cognitive, and moral emotions as aspects of self-organizing dynamical systems emerging effortlessly from experience in social interaction.
Marketing risk: The mindless acceptance of risk is promoted by emotional appeals
Abstract: A central question considered by the conference Moral Emotions about Risky Technologies is the role that emotions should play in judging what is a morally acceptable technological risk. An important consideration in addressing this question is that emotions are in fact exploited in the marketing of risk, with emotional appeals used in advertising and propaganda supporting the mindless acceptance of risk, including technological risk. As a consequence, emotion is arguably a necessary factor in the design of effective messages warning of risk. To be effective, a warning must command attention, galvanize memory, evoke emotion, contain an explicit instruction, and show consequences. As it is, effective warnings are resisted because they undermine sales. For example, risky behaviors such as using alcohol and tobacco are supported by highly effective emotional advertisements, and the so-called “warning labels” in the United States on alcohol and tobacco products are pallid and cold: offering mere advice, not effective warning. Similarly, the marketing of GM-foods and nuclear energy has been supported by soothing emotional messages that do not deny, but rather ignore, risk. It is argued that it is not only morally acceptable but morally imperative to design messages that use emotion effectively to communicate genuine risks, and thereby to facilitate rational decisions as to the moral acceptability of risks.
