Here we introduce the nine research articles assembled in this special issue. Together they explore the implications for foreign policy and international security of the forced deprivation of individuals’ freedom by state or non-state actors for political advantage – what we and our authors call ‘politicised captivity’. Despite its ubiquity, politicised captivity has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention. Although some research explores cases of kidnappings by terrorists, the use of human shields, and hostage diplomacy, there are few studies that engage the political implications of captivity in their full complexity. This is particularly odd given the recent increase in scholarly interest in the role of emotions in international politics. After all, popular emotions permeate captivity, and what we call ‘captivity passions’ have at times influenced national security policies. This volume therefore aims to redress the lack of sustained theoretical and empirical attention to how captivity triggers national emotions and affects international security.

The present three-wave longitudinal study tested two transdiagnostic mediators – anger and racism-related vigilance – of the link between racism and internalizing and externalizing problems. At Wave 1, the sample included 344 Mexican-origin adolescents (Mage = 13.5 years; 51.7% male, 45.9% female; 2.3% non-binary) residing in the Midwestern United States. Data across the three waves were collected from April 2021 through October 2024. The study examined how both direct and vicarious racism were related to internalizing and externalizing problems over time. Results from latent growth curve mediation analyses indicated that outward anger expression was a significant mediator; both direct and vicarious racism at Wave 1 were significantly associated with higher levels of anger at Wave 2, which in turn, were associated with higher levels of internalizing and externalizing problems at Wave 3. Racism-related vigilance was a significant mediator of the association between vicarious racism and internalizing problems only, according to results from post hoc sensitivity analyses. Implications for future theory, research, and clinical practice are discussed to help mitigate the effects of racism in new migration contexts for this vulnerable population.

This article addresses the psychological dynamics between internal political efficacy, emotions and support for populism. Contrary to the extended idea that populism is associated with low levels of political competence, it is argued that individuals’ self‐competence beliefs enhance populist attitudes. Individuals who conceive themselves as able to understand and participate effectively in politics are more critical towards politicians and more prone to consider that citizens could do a better job. The article also hypothesises that internal efficacy enhances the likelihood of experiencing anger, which in turn promotes populist attitudes. Experimental and comparative observational evidence shows robust direct effects of internal efficacy over populism, as well as a smaller indirect impact via feelings of anger. These findings raise important questions regarding the nature of populism and how to fight it in our emancipated and information‐intensive democratic systems.

No existing model of political rhetoric fully captures the complex interplay between the mainstream-populism divide and appealing to emotions like fear and anger. We present a new conceptualization and procedure that defines populism in relation to governmentalism, operationalizes both through communication frames, and allows for the analysis of emotions. We separate governmentalist-populist contestation from contestation between government and opposition, solving a longstanding theoretical and empirical problem. Analyzing one million tweets by politicians and their audiences, we fine-tune and employ supervised machine learning (transformer models) to classify populist and governmentalist communication. We find that populist tweets appeal more to anger and more to fear than governmentalist tweets. While we deploy our approach for tweets about Coronavirus in the UK, the procedure is transferable to other contexts and communication platforms.

After a defense of the reading that Jesus was “angry” in Mark 1:41, this investigation explores the nature of anger in light of ancient and contemporary conceptions of emotion, what causes Jesus’s anger in the context, and what results from Jesus’s anger in the story. Jesus’s anger is aroused because the (“leprous”) man’s public request for an amazing act of cleansing comes right on the heels of Jesus’s attempt to avoid notoriety about his deeds of power and preach the kingdom more broadly (1:38). Jesus mercifully cleanses the man but then cleverly issues a strict command that the man leave the region, go to Jerusalem, and spend several days there (1:43–44). However, the man and Jesus do not share enough context for him to grasp Jesus’s anger, and so he goes out and proclaims the deed, resulting in what initially troubled Jesus—he can now no longer enter towns to preach (1:45).

Amia Srinivasan is interviewed about her classic paper ‘The Aptness of Anger’, which challenges a common response to those who express anger at injustice: that their anger is counterproductive.

In two field experiments conducted in Mississippi and Florida, we present novel evidence about how emotions can be harnessed to increase voter turnout. When we inform respondents that a partisan villain would be happy if they did not vote (for example, a Gloating Villain treatment), we find that anger is activated in comparison to other emotions and turnout increases by 1.7 percentage points. In a subsequent field experiment, we benchmark this treatment to a standard GOTV message, the social pressure treatment. Using survey experiments that replicate our field experimental treatments, we show that our treatment links the act of voting to anticipated anger. In doing so, we contribute the first in-the-field evidence of how we can induce emotions, which are commonly understood to be fleeting states, to shape temporally distant political behaviours such as voting.

Inequality is a critical global issue, particularly in the United States, where economic disparities are among the most pronounced. Social justice research traditionally studies attitudes towards inequality—perceptions, beliefs, and judgments—using latent variable approaches. Recent scholarship adopts a network perspective, showing that these attitudes are interconnected within inequality belief systems. However, scholars often compare belief systems using split-sample approaches without examining how emotions, such as anger, shape these systems. Moreover, they rarely investigate Converse’s seminal idea that changes in central attitudes can lead to broader shifts in belief systems. Addressing these gaps, we applied a tripartite analytical strategy using U.S. data from the 2019 ISSP Social Inequality module. First, we used a mixed graphical model to demonstrate that inequality belief systems form cohesive small-world networks, with perception of large income inequality and belief in public redistribution as central nodes. Second, a moderated network model revealed that anger towards inequality moderates nearly one-third of network edges, consolidating the belief system by polarizing associations. Third, Ising model simulations showed that changes to central attitudes produce broader shifts across the belief system. This study advances belief system research by introducing innovative methods for comparing structures and testing dynamics of attitude change. It also contributes to social justice research by integrating emotional dynamics and highlighting anger’s role in structuring inequality belief systems.

While the majority of 2021 Capitol insurrection participants were white men, the media prominently highlighted the involvement of male conservative activists of color. However, we still know little about the perspectives of men in the general public regarding this event in our nation’s history, particularly across racial/ethnic and other identity groups. This project examines the influence of racialized anger and racial efficacy on self-identified male views toward the 2021 Capitol insurrection across racial/ethnic groups. We utilize the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), which was the only national, post-election dataset to yield responses on the Capitol insurrection across a large number of identity groups like men of color. Using the CMPS, we hypothesize that the level of racialized anger and racial efficacy will impact attitudes toward the 2021 Capitol insurrection for men across racial groups comparing men of color and their white male counterparts. We find racial anger has a negative effect on political attitudes about the 2021 Capitol insurrection across all groups of men, while racial efficacy has varied effects on certain men of color groups in comparison to white men. This paper underscores the importance of intersectionality in the study of public opinion formation and the effect of political attitudes like racial efficacy and racialized anger on non-traditional political engagement.

Response-dependence about moral responsibility argues that someone is morally responsible if and only if, and because, they're an appropriate target of reactive attitudes. But if we can be partially morally responsible, and if reactive attitudes are too coarse-grained to register small differences in normatively significant features of agents, then response-dependence is false. Shawn Wang dubs this the “Granularity Challenge.” This article rejects the second premise of the Granularity Challenge. Human emotions are fine-grained enough to register small differences in normatively significant features of agents. One illustrative example of this, I argue, is how children gradually emerge as partially responsible agents.