Emotional Judgments Research Articles

Vigilance or avoidance: How do autistic traits and social anxiety modulate attention to the eyes?

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are highly overlapping in symptoms and have a high rate of comorbidity, posing challenges in diagnosis and intervention for both disorders. Both disorders are linked to abnormal attention to the eyes, yet how they interactively modulate the attentional process to the eyes remains unclear. In this study, we explored how autistic traits and social anxiety in college students separately and together affected different temporal stages of attention to the eyes. Participants were instructed to view virtual faces for 10 s and make an emotional judgment, while their eye movements were recorded. We found that social anxiety and autistic traits affected different temporal stages of eye-looking. Social anxiety only affected the first fixation duration on the eyes, while autistic traits were associated with eye avoidance at several time points in the later stage. More importantly, we found an interactive effect of autistic traits and social anxiety on the initial attention to the eyes: Among people scoring high on autistic traits, social anxiety was related to an early avoidance of the eyes as well as attention maintenance once fixated on the eyes. Our study suggests the separate and interactive roles of social anxiety and autistic traits in attention to the eyes. It contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of social attention in both SAD and ASD and highlights the application of psychiatric diagnoses using eye-tracking techniques.

Temporal Cues in the Judgment of Music Emotion for Normal and Cochlear Implant Listeners.

Several studies have established that Cochlear implant (CI) listeners rely on the tempo of music to judge the emotional content of music. However, a re-analysis of a study in which CI listeners judged the emotion conveyed by piano pieces on a scale from happy to sad revealed a weak correlation between tempo and emotion. The present study explored which temporal cues in music influence emotion judgments among normal hearing (NH) listeners, which might provide insights into the cues utilized by CI listeners. Experiment 1 was a replication of the Vannson et al. study with NH listeners using rhythmic patterns of piano created with congas. The temporal cues were preserved while the tonal ones were removed. The results showed (i) tempo was weakly correlated with emotion judgments, (ii) NH listeners' judgments for congas were similar to CI listeners' judgments for piano. In Experiment 2, two tasks were administered with congas played at three different tempi: emotion judgment and a tapping task to record listeners' perceived tempo. Perceived tempo was a better predictor than the tempo, but its physical correlate, mean onset-to-onset difference (MOOD), a measure of the average time between notes, yielded higher correlations with NH listeners' emotion judgments. This result suggests that instead of the tempo, listeners rely on the average time between consecutive notes to judge the emotional content of music. CI listeners could utilize this cue to judge the emotional content of music.

Autonomous Weapons and Just War Theory

As wars today involve the use of sophisticated weapons such as autonomous ones, this paper aims to address the moral permissibility of using autonomous weapons systems (AWS) in wars. In the debate on autonomous weapons, advocates argue based on AWS’s precision of targets (Arkin 2018) and it not being clouded by emotional judgments (Marchant, et.al 2011) and prohibitors who comment on the ethical and legal implications of autonomous weapons (A. Sharkey 2019; Blanchard 2022). However, there has been relatively little development of compliance of the autonomous weapons with all the principles of jus in bello, amongst the scholarship as well as its engagement with the just war framework broadly. To assess the moral compliance of AWS, the paper focuses on just conduct or the jus in bello principles. It closely examines all the three principles of necessity, discrimination, and proportionality that makeup just conduct as well as the legal body of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Through a close analysis of all the principles of jus in bello against the use of autonomous weapons, this paper will result in the incompatibility of such weapons with the ethical framework of just war theory that gives out the norms for just and fair conduct during wars. It will thereby lead to a further reflection on the compliance of autonomous weapons as per jus in bello and the IHL to have greater restrain and ethical conduct during wars.

Trauma Therapy: Literary Concept of Overcoming Collective Pain (considering the works of modern Ukrainian prose)

The article studies the literary concept of tragedy in contemporary Ukrainian prose about Soviet past. The problem is relevant, because the trauma is important in the consolidation of Ukrainian society, affected by new trials. The subject of literary analysis is the comprehension of the Kurenivka man-made disaster of 1961, the history of which was declassified only in the era of independence. The novels “Life in Pink” by Halyna Horytska and “The Thaw Book. 1954–1964” by Tymur and Olena Lytovchenko. The author of the studio is guided by the theories of “collective trauma”, “culture of wound”, “trauma therapy”, “place of memory”. Accordingly, the literary model of collective tragedy is analysed. It is determined that the depiction of trauma in the context of memory of the Soviet past in both novels has many common features, namely: showing a characteristic of victims and perpetrators (a specific perpetrator — a representative of the authorities; a generalised perpetrator — the Soviet system; a perpetrator — relative); giving the places of remembrance the signs of grief by tracing the immediate destruction of objects in space; describing the death as understanding the transition of the soul to the afterlife; demonstrating memory erasure (forced silence of trauma, deliberate refusal of memory); identifying categories of remorse and punishment (suicide).The similarity of the author’s means of artistic speech is revealed: the combination of fiction and nonfiction, the introduction of journalistic comments and emotional judgment, giving semantic weight to details-symbols. The novelty of the study is the expansion of theoretical views on the problem of trauma in literary work, modeling the image of tragedy in the context of memory of the Soviet past. Further study of the problem is promising in the analysis of the aesthetic concept of the traumatic past, which is comprehended in modern prose.

Why the Embodied Emotion Theory Is Better than the Evaluative

Supporters of the Evaluative Judgment Theories of Emotion mainly explore emotions from the perspective of cognitive evaluation and advocate that emotions are evaluative judgments. The Perceptual Theories of Emotion have made some modifications to the evaluative judgment of emotions, attempting to propose better theories. The Perceptual Theories of Emotion advocate verifying the similarities between emotions and perceptions through analogical reasoning. However, the Perceptual Theories of Emotion also have their problems. Compared to the Evaluative Judgment Theories of Emotion and the Perceptual Theories of Emotion, the Embodied Emotion Theory has significant advantages, mainly reflected in avoiding the drawbacks of over-intellectualize emotions by evaluative judgments; infants and animals can also understand emotions through non-conceptualized ways of self-awareness and understanding of social rules and norms; the core relational property of emotions revealed in the embodied emotion theory demonstrates the action orientation of emotions, connects the organism’s body and external environment, and integrates both biological and social aspects, further clarifying the complexity and diversity of emotions.

Image or Information? Examining the Nature and Impact of Visualization Perceptual Classification.

How do people internalize visualizations: as images or information? In this study, we investigate the nature of internalization for visualizations (i.e., how the mind encodes visualizations in memory) and how memory encoding affects its retrieval. This exploratory work examines the influence of various design elements on a user's perception of a chart. Specifically, which design elements lead to perceptions of visualization as an image (aims to provide visual references, evoke emotions, express creativity, and inspire philosophic thought) or as information (aims to present complex data, information, or ideas concisely and promote analytical thinking)? Understanding how design elements contribute to viewers perceiving a visualization more as an image or information will help designers decide which elements to include to achieve their communication goals. For this study, we annotated 500 visualizations and analyzed the responses of 250 online participants, who rated the visualizations on a bilinear scale as 'image' or 'information.' We then conducted an in-person study ( n = 101) using a free recall task to examine how the image/information ratings and design elements impacted memory. The results revealed several interesting findings: Image-rated visualizations were perceived as more aesthetically 'appealing,' 'enjoyable,' and 'pleasing.' Information-rated visualizations were perceived as less 'difficult to understand' and more aesthetically 'likable' and 'nice,' though participants expressed higher 'positive' sentiment when viewing image-rated visualizations and felt less 'guided to a conclusion.' The presence of axes and text annotations heavily influenced the likelihood of participants rating the visualization as 'information.' We also found different patterns among participants that were older. Importantly, we show that visualizations internalized as 'images' are less effective in conveying trends and messages, though they elicit a more positive emotional judgment, while 'informative' visualizations exhibit annotation focused recall and elicit a more positive design judgment. We discuss the implications of this dissociation between aesthetic pleasure and perceived ease of use in visualization design.

EEG Emotion Recognition Applied to the Effect Analysis of Music on Emotion Changes in Psychological Healthcare.

Music therapy is increasingly being used to promote physical health. Emotion semantic recognition is more objective and provides direct awareness of the real emotional state based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Therefore, we proposed a music therapy method to carry out emotion semantic matching between the EEG signal and music audio signal, which can improve the reliability of emotional judgments, and, furthermore, deeply mine the potential influence correlations between music and emotions. Our proposed EER model (EEG-based Emotion Recognition Model) could identify 20 types of emotions based on 32 EEG channels, and the average recognition accuracy was above 90% and 80%, respectively. Our proposed music-based emotion classification model (MEC model) could classify eight typical emotion types of music based on nine music feature combinations, and the average classification accuracy was above 90%. In addition, the semantic mapping was analyzed according to the influence of different music types on emotional changes from different perspectives based on the two models, and the results showed that the joy type of music video could improve fear, disgust, mania, and trust emotions into surprise or intimacy emotions, while the sad type of music video could reduce intimacy to the fear emotion.

Genetic and environmental influence on resting state networks in young male and female adults: a cartographer mapping study.

We propose a unique, minimal assumption, approach based on variance analyses (compared with standard approaches) to investigate genetic influence on individual differences on the functional connectivity of the brain using 65 monozygotic and 65 dizygotic healthy young adult twin pairs' low-frequency oscillation resting state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data from the Human Connectome Project. Overall, we found high number of genetically-influenced functional (GIF) connections involving posterior to posterior brain regions (occipital/temporal/parietal) implicated in low-level processes such as vision, perception, motion, categorization, dorsal/ventral stream visuospatial, and long-term memory processes, as well as high number across midline brain regions (cingulate) implicated in attentional processes, and emotional responses to pain. We found low number of GIF connections involving anterior to anterior/posterior brain regions (frontofrontal > frontoparietal, frontotemporal, frontooccipital) implicated in high-level processes such as working memory, reasoning, emotional judgment, language, and action planning. We found very low number of GIF connections involving subcortical/noncortical networks such as basal ganglia, thalamus, brainstem, and cerebellum. In terms of sex-specific individual differences, individual differences in males were more genetically influenced while individual differences in females were more environmentally influenced in terms of the interplay of interactions of Task positive networks (brain regions involved in various task-oriented processes and attending to and interacting with environment), extended Default Mode Network (a central brain hub for various processes such as internal monitoring, rumination, and evaluation of self and others), primary sensorimotor systems (vision, audition, somatosensory, and motor systems), and subcortical/noncortical networks. There were >8.5-19.1 times more GIF connections in males than females. These preliminary (young adult cohort-specific) findings suggest that individual differences in the resting state brain may be more genetically influenced in males and more environmentally influenced in females; furthermore, standard approaches may suggest that it is more substantially nonadditive genetics, rather than additive genetics, which contribute to the differences in sex-specific individual differences based on this young adult (male and female) specific cohort. Finally, considering the preliminary cohort-specific results, based on standard approaches, environmental influences on individual differences may be substantially greater than that of genetics, for either sex, frontally and brain-wide. [Correction added on 10 May 2023, after first online publication: added: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Added: individual differences in, twice. Added statement between furthermore … based on standard approaches.].

Is the gated community really safe? An empirical analysis based on communities with varying degrees of closure

ABSTRACT Gated communities are considered a way of living that provides privacy and security. Existing research has mostly focused on subjective emotional judgments such as fear of crime, while it is unclear whether communities with different degrees of closure have avoided insecure incidents. Taking six communities and 649 questionnaires in Changsha, China as study cases, we analyze the relationship between community closure and community security. The results show that not gated communities but open communities are the safest, while semi-gated communities are the least safe. It is confirmed that community security is regardless of being gated. One possible explanation for this is the joint effect of ‘dual security scenarios’. This means that the living communities’ security is not only rooted in the construction of a safe physical space, but also depended on a humanistic atmosphere with informal relations and residents’ safety awareness, providing natural surveillance possibilities.

Judging the emotional states of customer service staff in the workplace: A multimodal dataset analysis.

Emotions play a decisive and central role in the workplace, especially in the service-oriented enterprises. Due to the highly participatory and interactive nature of the service process, employees' emotions are usually highly volatile during the service delivery process, which can have a negative impact on business performance. Therefore, it is important to effectively judge the emotional states of customer service staff. We collected data on real-life work situations of call center employees in a large company. Three consecutive studies were conducted: first, the emotional states of 29 customer service staff were videotaped by wide-angle cameras. In Study 1, we constructed scoring criteria and auxiliary tools of picture-type scales through a free association test. In Study 2, two groups of experts were invited to evaluate the emotional states of customer service staff. In Study 3, based on the results in Study 2 and a multimodal emotional recognition method, a multimodal dataset was constructed to explore how each modality conveys the emotions of customer service staff in workplace. Through the scoring by 2 groups of experts and 1 group of volunteers, we first developed a set of scoring criteria and picture-type scales with the combination of SAM scale for judging the emotional state of customer service staff. Then we constructed 99 (out of 297) sets of stable multimodal emotion datasets. Based on the comparison among the datasets, we found that voice conveys emotional valence in the workplace more significantly, and that facial expressions have more prominant connection with emotional arousal. Theoretically, this study enriches the way in which emotion data is collected and can provide a basis for the subsequent development of multimodal emotional datasets. Practically, it can provide guidance for the effective judgment of employee emotions in the workplace.

The effect of dichotic music presentation on ratings of emotional facial expressions

Music has a cross-modal influence on the emotional appraisal of pictures, probably due to a misattribution of emotion from music to the visually perceived images. Moreover, dichotic listening studies have demonstrated a left-ear (right-hemisphere) advantage for processing emotional and/or musical stimuli. The present study investigated the role of laterality in cross-modal affect misattribution: that is, whether visual judgments of emotion would be affected differently depending on which ear was presented with music via the dichotic listening task. Participants rated the emotionality of happy, sad, and neutral faces while listening to happy or sad music in one ear and white noise in the other. Baseline ratings without music were used as a comparison to see whether and how emotionality judgments shifted in the music conditions. As predicted, the results showed that happy music played to the left ear had a stronger cross-modal influence on ratings of sad faces than the same music played to the right ear. Furthermore, sad music affected the ratings of all faces regardless of whether it was played to the left or right ear. These results do not fully align with any given lateralized model of emotion processing, suggesting that other factors such as negativity bias may play a role.

The assessment method of foreign language communication ability of intelligent emotional network based on artificial emotion.

The traditional evaluation methods of foreign language communication skills cannot deal with emotional information in the process of communication. Psychologists believe that a real personalized evaluation system should be smart. Based on the emotion network technology of artificial emotion intelligence, aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional evaluation system, this paper puts forward a new language ability evaluation system with certain emotion judgment function. The system can easily obtain and identify emotions in foreign communication, and can also carry out individual learning at the cognitive and emotional levels on the basis of comprehensive analysis of emotions and communication effects.

Emotional Expression and Analysis in Music Performance Based on Edge Computing

The expression of emotion in music performance is the soul of music, and the emotion revealed by the performer during the performance can bring emotional resonance to the audience. The emotions expressed by music such as joy, anger, and sadness are the meaning of music’s existence. Music without emotion will be dead. However, the music itself has no emotion at all; it is just a regular sound, so the emotional reading of music performance is very important. Music performance is an interpretation of music, and it is the most important emotional information and communication medium for human beings. Through the appreciation of the works to express the author’s emotions, the different performance forms of musical instruments, dance, and singing bring emotional resonance to the audience. Edge computing is the core technology and edge node of the Internet of everything in the new era, and it is constantly innovating with the rapid development of computers and the great changes brought about by them. Nowadays, people’s demand for emotional information processing of music performances has also increased. The research attention to music performance and the attention to its application technology have also received unprecedented development, so the requirements for the ability of human and machine interaction are getting higher and higher. With the increasing maturity of multimedia and communication technologies, there is an increasing expectation of using computers to express human thoughts and emotions. By combining the two, Dongfeng’s expression and analysis of music emotions through edge computing have also ushered in new developments. For example, people upload or share music and dance videos to their friends through WeChat, QQ, Douyin, etc., which greatly enriches people’s emotional world. The analysis and judgment of music emotion are the main subject of the joint development of both musicology and psychological research. With the help of computer science technology and artificial intelligence and other tools, the purpose of music emotional research can also be achieved. Particularly with the advancement of science and technology and the vigorous development of computer application technology, people’s needs for emotional expression and analysis of music can now be carried out with the help of computers. However, the amount of data generated is extremely large, and using edge servers for data processing can improve the efficiency of analysis and processing to meet people’s needs.

The Confluence of Rhetoric and Emotion: How the History of Rhetoric Illuminates the Theoretical Importance of Emotion

This essay argues that the history of rhetoric is a crucial resource for illuminating the theoretical importance of emotion in, for instance, reasoning, reading, knowing, acting, and judging. Taking its cue from two recent histories of rhetoric – Rita Copeland’s Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (2021), and Benedict Robinson’s Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson (2021), which together trace thirteen centuries of the history of rhetoric, this essay reads these histories with one eye on their theoretical significance. It does so by extracting five theoretical vignettes concerning the role and value of emotion based on Copeland’s and Robinson’s histories of rhetoric: (1) emotional invention; (2) emotional style; (3) emotional knowledge; (4) emotional action; and (5) emotional judgement. In reading history in this way, i.e. for its theoretical significance, the essay seeks to carve out a middle space between theory and history, and thus offer a way of doing theoretically-minded history or historically-responsive theory.

Animal eMotion, or the emotional evaluation of moving animals

ABSTRACT Responding adequately to the behaviour of human and non-human animals in our environment has been crucial for our survival. This is also reflected in our exceptional capacity to detect and interpret biological motion signals. However, even though our emotions have specifically emerged as automatic adaptive responses to such vital stimuli, few studies investigated the influence of biological motion on emotional evaluations. Here, we test how the motion of animals affects emotional judgements by contrasting static animal images and videos. We investigated this question (1) in non-fearful observers across many different animals, and (2) in observers afraid of particular animals across four types of animals, including the feared ones. In line with previous studies, we find an idiosyncratic pattern of evoked emotions across different types of animals. These emotions can be explained to different extents by regression models based on relevant predictor variables (e.g. familiarity, dangerousness). Additionally, our findings show a boosting effect of motion on emotional evaluations across all animals, with an additional increase in (negative) emotions for moving feared animals (except snakes). We discuss implications of our results for experimental and clinical research and applications, highlighting the importance of experiments with dynamic and ecologically valid stimuli.

Political identity biases Americans' judgments of outgroup emotion

Social group identity plays a central role in political polarization and inter-party conflict. Here, we use ambiguously valenced faces to measure bias in the processing of political ingroup and outgroup faces, while also accounting for inter-party differences in judgments of emotion at baseline. Participants identifying as Democrats and Republicans judged happy, angry, and surprised faces as positive or negative. Whereas happy and angry faces convey positive and negative valence respectively, surprised faces are ambiguous in that they readily convey positive and negative valence. Thus, surprise is a useful tool for characterizing valence bias (i.e., the tendency to judge ambiguous stimuli as negative). Face stimuli were assigned to the participants' political ingroup or outgroup, or a third group with an unspecified affiliation (baseline). We found a significant interaction of facial expression and group membership, such that outgroup faces were judged more negatively than ingroup and baseline, but only for surprise. There was also an interaction of facial expression and political affiliation, with Republicans judging surprise more negatively than Democrats across all group conditions. However, we did not find evidence for party differences in outgroup negativity. Our findings demonstrate the utility of judgments of surprised faces as a measure of intergroup bias, and reinforce the importance of outgroup negativity (relative to ingroup positivity) for explaining inter-party biases.

Racially invariant stimuli may bias outcomes in assessment of emotion processing.

Difficulties identifying emotional facial expressions are commonly observed in alcohol use disorder (AUD). Critically, this work utilizes single-race stimulus sets, although study samples are not similarly constrained. This is particularly concerning given evidence among community samples showing the impact of racial incongruity, giving rise to interpretative caveats. Community controls (n = 55, 12 Black) and individuals with AUD (n = 46, 9 Black) completed a two-choice emotion judgment task. A similar nonaffective sex judgment task was employed as a covariate. Repeated measures mixed-model analyses were conducted with race, AUD status (AUD vs. control), and their interaction as fixed effects. Accuracy and reaction time (RT) were primary dependent measures. A post hoc analysis was conducted on efficiency (accuracy/RT). In addition to lower accuracy by individuals with AUD (p = .02), Black participants were less accurate than White participants (p = .0001) overall. Significant interactions between race and AUD were also detected for accuracy (p = .002), RT (p = .05), and efficiency (p = .01), wherein Black participants with AUD identified emotional expressions most poorly. This latter finding suggests that AUD-associated differences may be biased under racial incongruity. Taken together, these preliminary findings do not reflect a deficit among Black respondents. Instead, our results reflect the need for greater attention to stimulus diversity and sensitivity to respondent demographics in emotion-processing examinations. Given the purported role of emotion processing in alcohol-related problems and the increase in racial minority representation in the U.S., elucidating these differences remains critical. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Surgical face masks do not impair the decoding of facial expressions of negative affect more severely in older than in younger adults

Surgical face masks reduce the spread of airborne pathogens but also disturb the flow of information between individuals. The risk of getting seriously ill after infection with SARS-COV-2 during the present COVID-19 pandemic amplifies with age, suggesting that face masks should be worn especially during face-to-face contact with and between older people. However, the ability to accurately perceive and understand communication signals decreases with age, and it is currently unknown whether face masks impair facial communication more severely in older people. We compared the impact of surgical face masks on dynamic facial emotion recognition in younger (18–30 years) and older (65–85 years) adults (N = 96) in an online study. Participants watched short video clips of young women who facially expressed anger, fear, contempt or sadness. Faces of half of the women were covered by a digitally added surgical face mask. As expected, emotion recognition accuracy declined with age, and face masks reduced emotion recognition accuracy in both younger and older participants. Unexpectedly, the effect of face masks did not differ between age groups. Further analyses showed that masks also reduced the participants’ overall confidence in their emotion judgements, but not their performance awareness (the difference between their confidence ratings for correct and incorrect responses). Again, there were no mask-by-age interactions. Finally, data obtained with a newly developed questionnaire (attitudes towards face masks, atom) suggest that younger and older people do not differ in how much they feel impaired in their understanding of other people’s emotions by face masks or how useful they find face masks in confining the COVID-19 pandemic. In sum, these findings do not provide evidence that the impact of face masks on the decoding of facial signals is disproportionally larger in older people.

Do Surrounding People's Emotions Affect Judgment of the Central Person's Emotion? Comparing Within Cultural Variation in Holistic Patterns of Emotion Perception in the Multicultural Canadian Society.

Previous studies in cultural psychology have suggested that when assessing a target person's emotion, East Asians are more likely to incorporate the background figure's emotion into the judgment of the target's emotion compared to North Americans. The objective of this study was to further examine cultural variation in emotion perception within a culturally diverse population that is representative of Canada's multicultural society. We aimed to see whether East-Asian Canadians tended to keep holistic tendencies of their heritage culture regarding emotion perception. Participants were presented with 60 cartoon images consisting of a central figure and four surrounding figures and were then asked to rate the central figure's emotion; out of the four cartoon figures, two were female and two were male. Each character was prepared with 5 different emotional settings with corresponding facial expressions including: extremely sad, moderately sad, neutral, moderately happy, and extremely happy. Each central figure was surrounded by a group of 4 background figures. As a group, the background figures either displayed a sad, happy, or neutral expression. The participant's task was to judge the intensity of the central figures' happiness or sadness on a 10-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 9 (extremely). For analysis, we divided the participants into three groups: European Canadians (N = 105), East Asian Canadians' (N = 104) and Non-East Asian/Non-European Canadians (N = 161). The breakdown for the Non-East Asian/Non-European Canadian group is as follows: 94 South Asian Canadians, 25 Middle Eastern Canadians, 23 African Canadians, 9 Indigenous Canadians, and 10 Latin/Central/South American Canadians. Results comparing European Canadians and East Asian Canadians demonstrated cultural variation in emotion judgment, indicating that East Asian Canadians were in general more likely than their European Canadian counterparts to be affected by the background figures' emotion. The study highlights important cultural variations in holistic and analytic patterns of emotional attention in the ethnically diverse Canadian society. We discussed future studies which broaden the scope of research to incorporate a variety of diverse cultural backgrounds outside of the Western educational context to fully comprehend cultural variations in context related attentional patterns.

Frozen by threat or motivated to move? Emotionally charged horizons of opportunities in development work of universities

How do emotions function in the development work and change attempts of universities? This article investigates the emotional dimensions of development of higher education and how emotions relate to the conditions of academic work, and the university as a forum for those initiatives. Building theories from affective cultural studies, the article drafts and explores the concept of ‘emotionally charged horizon of opportunity’. This concept defines emotions as relational, culturally situated social forces connected with relationships, collective mentalities and belief systems, which the article explores by example of two cases: a national attempt to renew a degree structure on a disciplinary level, and a departmental initiative of development of the academic unit. Taking a discourse analytic approach with the focus on emotions, the analysis comprises two major findings. First, affectivity was present in the practices of development work, in the hierarchies of power, group relations and identities of the academic culture. Second, the actors’ expectations about the future, the emotional judgments attached to these expectations, and the position of the actors were crucial for the development process.