8, September 2025

Affect and Politics: Exploring the Bidirectional Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Future Directions

VOLUME-11; ISSUE-9; SEPT-2025

Author(s): Meet D Shinde

Authors Affiliations:

Assistant Professor (Psychology),

SPNDWC affiliated to SNDTWU, Mumbai

DOIs:10.2015/IJIRMF/202509002     |     Paper ID: IJIRMF202509002


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This work examines the intricate relationship between affect and politics, highlighting how emotions are integral to political attitudes, behaviors, and institutional processes. It distinguishes between discrete emotions, moods, and generalized affective states, emphasizing their distinct roles in shaping political cognition and action. The analysis explores bidirectional models that conceptualize affect and political contexts as mutually constitutive through dynamic feedback loops operating across multiple temporal scales. The work identifies significant gaps in current research, including the need for finer differentiation among discrete emotions, longitudinal studies on affective climate formation, cross-cultural comparisons of emotional legitimacy norms, and the impact of digital media on affect transmission. It calls for multi-method approaches combining physiological, linguistic, and ethnographic data to capture the layered nature of political affect. Ethical considerations sur- rounding the modulation of public emotions are also addressed. Overall, this synthesis advances a comprehensive framework for analyzing how affect shapes and is shaped by political life across individual, collective, institutional, and cultural dimensions.

Keywords: Psychology, Affect, Politics, Affective Politics, Emotion

Meet D Shinde (2025); Affect and Politics: Exploring the Bidirectional Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Future Directions,International Journal for Innovative Research in Multidisciplinary Field, ISSN(O): 2455-0620, Vol-11, Issue-9, Pp.8-20.         Available on –   https://www.ijirmf.com/

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