Chapter 7 Exercises: Emotional Appeals — Fear, Pride, and Moral Outrage

Exercise 7.1 — Applying the Emotional Proportionality Test

Individual | 45 minutes

Select a political advertisement currently airing in your media environment — from television, YouTube, or social media. Locate the full ad (not a clip) and watch it twice: once as a normal viewer, once with a notepad in hand.

Apply the Six-Step Emotional Proportionality Test from the chapter's Action Checklist to this advertisement. Write a structured response addressing each of the six steps with specific reference to elements of the ad.

After completing the test, write a two-paragraph evaluation:

• Paragraph 1: What emotional response was the ad designed to produce, and through what specific technical means?
• Paragraph 2: Was the emotional intensity proportionate to the factual claims, honestly presented? Use specific evidence from the ad and from any fact-checking you conducted.

Submission note: Attach or link to the advertisement you analyzed. Your response should be approximately 600 words.

Exercise 7.2 — EPPM Analysis: Fear + Efficacy

Individual or Pair | 30 minutes

Kim Witte's Extended Parallel Process Model predicts that the outcome of a fear appeal depends on the interaction between perceived threat and perceived efficacy. For this exercise, locate three fear-based communications from different domains (one political advertisement, one public health message, one commercial advertisement).

For each, complete the following table:

After completing the table, write a paragraph comparing your three examples: What patterns do you notice across domains? Does the commercial advertisement use EPPM dynamics differently than the political one?

Exercise 7.3 — Moral-Emotional Language Audit

Individual | 30 minutes

Open your personal social media feed (Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or another platform) and select 10 posts that appeared in a single twenty-minute scrolling session. For each post, record:

1. The content (summarize in 1–2 sentences)
2. Any moral-emotional language present (language that carries both moral valence and emotional charge)
3. Your engagement response (did you feel pulled to share, react, or comment?)
4. Whether the emotional intensity seemed proportionate to the factual content

After completing the audit, calculate: What percentage of the 10 posts contained moral-emotional language? Did posts with moral-emotional language produce stronger engagement responses for you personally?

Write a short reflection (200 words): What does this exercise reveal about the Brady et al. finding in your own media consumption?

Exercise 7.4 — Pride Dissection: An Olympic Advertisement

Individual or Small Group | 40 minutes

Locate a national broadcast advertisement that aired during Olympic Games coverage in any country. (The chapter's Case Study 2 provides context for U.S., Chinese, and Brazilian examples.) Watch the advertisement at least three times.

Write an analysis (400 words) addressing:

a) What claims about national identity are implicit in this advertisement? b) What techniques does the advertisement use to activate national pride? (Music, imagery, athlete selection, narrative arc, use of flag, use of historical reference?) c) Is this pride activation a form of propaganda, a form of legitimate national celebration, or something on the spectrum between? Apply the proportionality standard from the chapter. d) Does the advertisement tip from pride into the "contrast with out-group" structure that begins the progression toward chauvinism? If so, how?

Exercise 7.5 — The Outrage Machine: Tracking a Social Media Cascade

Pair or Small Group | 45 minutes (plus optional 24-hour observation period)

Identify a recent social media controversy — a public figure, institution, or event that generated a significant outrage cascade on a platform of your choice.

Investigate the cascade's structure:

1. Origin: Where did the initial outrage appear to originate? Who posted first, and what did they post?
2. Amplification: Through what accounts and communities did the outrage spread? Can you identify any signs of coordinated amplification (multiple accounts posting identical or near-identical language; accounts with suspiciously low follower counts or high post rates)?
3. Proportionality: Was the expressed outrage proportionate to the documented harm? What evidence of harm was available at the time the cascade began, as opposed to evidence that emerged later?
4. Outcome: Did the cascade produce any change in the external situation it was directed at? Or did the energy of the outrage remain within the social media environment?

Discuss with your partner or group: Based on what you found, does this cascade appear to be organic outrage, partially manufactured outrage, or fully manufactured outrage? What evidence supports your assessment?

Exercise 7.6 — Dehumanizing Language Tracker

Individual | 20 minutes — Sensitive Content Warning

This exercise requires searching for examples of dehumanizing language in current public discourse. You will not be asked to reproduce dehumanizing language in detail; you will be asked to analyze its structural characteristics.

Search news coverage from the past six months for any instance in which a public figure, media outlet, or social media post described a human group using language drawn from the biological contamination domain (language describing people as insects, rodents, parasites, vermin, infestations, swarms, floods, plagues, or similar).

For each instance you find (you should find at least two or three):

1. Who is the source of the language?
2. What group is the language applied to?
3. What is the context and the apparent political purpose?
4. Based on the chapter's discussion of Haidt's research and the historical cases (Nazi Germany, Rwanda), what is the documented relationship between this type of language and subsequent group-based harm?

Write a paragraph (200 words) responding to the following: Is calling attention to dehumanizing language, and connecting it to historical cases, itself a form of emotional appeal? If so, is it a proportionate one?

Exercise 7.7 — Primary Source Close Reading: Design Your Own Ad

Individual or Pair | 50 minutes

This exercise asks you to apply your understanding of emotional engineering by working through the design choices of a hypothetical advertisement — not to create manipulative content, but to understand the decisions that make emotional engineering possible.

Scenario: You are a political communication consultant. A client asks you to create a one-minute television advertisement for a ballot initiative to fund local school music programs. The factual situation: funding was cut three years ago, academic research supports the value of music education, and similar programs in neighboring cities have been restored with public support.

For this scenario, answer the following design questions:

1. What emotional register would you target (hope? pride? mild fear of what's being lost? outrage at a documented injustice)?
2. What visual elements would you use to trigger that emotional register?
3. What statistics or evidence would you include, and how would you present them?
4. What efficacy path would you provide?
5. Is your emotional appeal proportionate to the factual situation? Apply the proportionality test to your own design.

After completing the design exercise, write a reflection (200 words): What did the exercise reveal about the relationship between communication effectiveness and proportionality? Is it possible to create emotionally effective communication that is also fully proportionate?

Exercise 7.8 — Inoculation Campaign Matrix: Row 1 (Emotional Appeals)

Individual | Ongoing project component

Complete Row 1 of the Technique Identification Matrix for the community you are profiling in your Inoculation Campaign project. Using the template from the chapter's Inoculation Campaign section:

1. Identify at least two specific communications targeting your community that use emotional appeals.
2. Complete the full matrix row for each.
3. Write a brief summary paragraph (150 words) characterizing the dominant emotional appeal type(s) in communications targeting your community and what vulnerabilities (from your Chapter 4 vulnerability audit) these appeals appear to be exploiting.

This entry becomes part of your accumulating Inoculation Campaign portfolio. Retain it for integration in Chapter 12 (Symbols and Images, Row 6) and subsequent chapters.

Discussion Questions for Seminar

The following questions are suitable for structured class discussion after completing the chapter's reading and exercises.

1. Sophia Marin could not take notes during the political advertisement she watched in Prof. Webb's media lab. Is this evidence of a weakness in her analytical training, or evidence of how the human mind is built? What are the implications for how we think about media literacy education?

2. Witte's EPPM identifies high-threat / low-efficacy as producing defensive reactions rather than behavior change. Can you identify any contemporary political communication strategies that appear to be deliberately exploiting the high-threat / low-efficacy condition to produce demobilization rather than mobilization?

3. Brady et al. found that moral-emotional language increases retweet rate by ~20% per word, independently of the content's accuracy. What structural changes to social media platforms — if any — would address this finding? What trade-offs would those changes involve?

4. The chapter distinguishes between legitimate national pride (proportionate to real achievements) and pride weaponized for exclusionary ends. Where, specifically, is that line? Can you give an example of a pride appeal that you believe is clearly on the legitimate side, one that is clearly on the propaganda side, and one that you find genuinely difficult to classify?

5. The "moral licensing" research suggests that expressing outrage on social media may reduce the probability of subsequent civic action. If you accept this finding, what are its implications for how advocates and organizers should think about their social media strategy?