Righteous Anger Research Articles

Investigating the Moderators in the Relationship Between Righteous Anger and Support for Lynching

Investigating the Moderators in the Relationship Between Righteous Anger and Support for Lynching

Stoicism 'à la mode': Senecan Ethics in Roger Bacon’s 'Moralis philosophia'

While recent scholarship accents early Franciscans’ use of Greek and Greco-Arabic sources in their ethics, Roger Bacon’s appeal to Stoic ethics via Seneca in his Moralis philosophia, the last book of his Opus maius, has not been given its due. Bacon’s citation of Seneca’s dialogues privileges De ira and works he associates with it. Placing Bacon’s ethics in the context of classical and Christian traditions on anger, this paper argues that Bacon uses Seneca to undermine the arguments for righteous anger in both these traditions, specifically those validated by his Franciscan contemporary John of La Rochelle. Bacon’s alternative addresses ethical and political concerns he shares with his dedicatee, Pope Clement IV, and with Franciscan confrères committed to popular preaching and the apostolate to non-Christians. As such, Bacon’s Stoic ethics à la mode needs clearer recognition in the ongoing reinterpretation of thirteenth-century Franciscan thought.

Theorising resistance in times of fossil fuels: Ecological grief, righteous anger and interaction rituals in Sweden's energy regime shift

The emerging shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy engages a broad spectrum of society. Through protests, social media campaigns and civil unrest, different groups seek to impact the speed, direction and distributional effects of this transformation. In this paper, we develop a conceptualisation of how such resistance is socially mobilised. We ask how people come to resort to open resistance in the context of energy regime dynamics. The growing literature on the topic highlights that declining material and social capital are not enough to understand resistance in times of fossil fuels. We suggest in this study that attention to a wider spectrum of emotions is crucial for understanding the political and ethical contestations through which changes in energy provision materialize. We draw upon sociological theory, in particular the notion of interaction rituals, to understand the social and affective process of resistance. The concept of interaction rituals captures the movement from feeling aggrieved to mobilisation of resistance through attention to the sharing and transformation of emotions. We apply our theorisation in two Swedish examples of contemporary resistance – the Forest Rebellion and the Petrol Protest – to illustrate the grievances that underpin these movements, and how interaction rituals mobilise and justify resistance. We end the paper with a discussion and comparison of the two examples, and the implications of our findings for (academic) knowledge about the role of resistance in relation to energy regimes.

From distress to anger to shame: Gender violence, empowerment, and emotional states in Ecuador

AbstractChanging discourses and laws related to women's rights and intimate partner violence (IPV) in rural Ecuador have profoundly reshaped how local women experience and respond to violence. Women once understood violence as one strand of social suffering embedded in everyday rural life, and they resisted and managed this violence through various collective idioms of distress. Over the last two decades, however, state and non‐governmental organization (NGO) campaigns have isolated gender violence as a discrete phenomenon, emphasizing the “wrongness” of IPV, the validity of righteous anger, and the importance of a legal response to secure the separation of “liberated” women. In this article, I draw on 20 years of fieldwork to discuss how emotional responses to gender violence have shifted in tandem with changing state and transnational discourses and policies in the coastal region of Las Colinas. A deep disjuncture between neoliberal discourses of feminist empowerment and the material reality of rural women's life options leaves many women experiencing new forms of shame when they are unable to turn anger into liberation and escape gender violence in their families and communities. Focusing on the emotional states that states create reveals how political‐economic and discursive shifts are mediated through emotions and collective idioms.

Exploring the Impact of Attachment to School Counselors on Moral Emotion Development in Slow Learners: A Case Study in Central Java Inclusive Schools

Emotion becomes an integral part that derives children's moral behavior. Moral emotion controls moral transgression by making children aware of the consequences of their actions. However, not all children can control their emotions, e.g., slow learners. The slow learners in this study are students in inclusive schools in Central Java. Their status as inclusive students resulted in feelings of alienation, even bullying. One factor affecting moral emotions is children's attachment to attachment figures, including school counselors. This study aims to determine the attachment pattern between slow learners and school counselors in developing moral emotions. This research used a qualitative method with a case study approach. Data was collected by interviews, direct observations, focused group discussions (FGD), and documentation. The results showed that the level of slow learners‘ attachment security was affected by school counselors‘ affection, responsiveness, sensitivity, and availability, both physically and emotionally. Higher security slow learners demonstrated higher trust and disclosure, and are emotionally attached to school counselors compared to those with lower security. On the other hand, attachment is associated with moral emotions of shame, guilt, and righteous anger but is not significantly associated with empathy. The findings are expected to increase awareness of school counselors in showing support and affection toward slow learners in inclusive schools, especially while providing services to fulfill guidance and counseling functions of understanding, development, and prevention.

Mathematical Education, School, and Righteous Anger: Problematizing Entanglements

Resumo Este artigo visa articular algumas das incursões teóricas do grupo História da Educação Matemática em Pesquisa (HEMEP) na direção de produzir interferências em discursos naturalizados socialmente e que constroem uma escola, uma matemática e um professor (homem-branco-hétero-cis). A partir de narrativas produzidas por meio da metodologia da história oral, nos colocamos a exercitar um movimento difrativo lendo textos, slogans e narrativas através uns dos outros. Este texto afirma a potência da produção e mobilização de narrativas de estudantes e professores de Matemática na denúncia de modelos escolares excludentes e na busca pela organização coletiva em torno da escola como espaço de luta.

Hands at Our Throats, Nails in Their Heads: The Holy Vengeance of Women in Hawthorne and Gentileschi

ABSTRACT Deeply informed by the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, Hawthorne wrestles with narratives of female vengeance found in canonical and deuterocanonical sources as he moves from his earlier romances to his final published oeuvre, The Marble Faun. His allusions to biblical women seeking retribution in The Blithedale Romance are magnified when he moves from transcendental New England to Catholic Italy. In the Book of Judith and the Book of Judges, female figures of holy vengeance wield weapons of righteous anger to redress the repeated violations they are forced to endure. When Hawthorne encounters these figures painted on canvas in the Uffizi, he reconsiders the art of recrimination for women who have been wronged by men who have political, religious, or artistic power. The aesthetic restraint of Gentileschi inspires an even more audacious approach from Hawthorne in The Marble Faun. Where Artemisia works to contain her retaliation within the canvas, the figure of Miriam rejects such boundaries, insisting instead on holy vengeance outside the studio. Painted treatments of revenge spill into real-life acts of bloody retribution. Hawthorne then insists on one more radical shift, from parricide to piety, taking the hands of death in Judith, Jael, and the works of Gentileschi and transforming them into the hands of life. In the figure of Miriam, Hawthorne converts the fatal vengeance of violated women into the wellspring of their spiritual possibility.

Lucamante, Stefania, Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2020, 333 pp.

Lucamante, Stefania, Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2020, 333 pp.

Righteous Anger: Celebrating the Anti-racist Activism of Sir Michael and Ann Dummett, written by New College Library and Archives

Righteous Anger: Celebrating the Anti-racist Activism of Sir Michael and Ann Dummett, written by New College Library and Archives

The politics of health promotion: channelling our anger and our hope for the wellbeing of people, place and planet

ABSTRACT With the Institute of Health Promotion and Education turning 60, it is timely to reflect on health promotion’s journey. While health promotion can celebrate many advances, much remains to be done. This paper considers the enormous challenges we face and how we might move forward by working not only within, but beyond, the five action areas of the Ottawa Charter: engaging creatively with the opportunities offered by the changing contexts in which we operate, for example in relation to integrated care systems and place-based partnerships; learning from our experience of COVID-19 to ensure joined-up whole system responses that nurture the transformative change necessary to ‘build back better’ for a sustainable and healthy future; and advocating a new economic vision and model that rejects economic growth as an end in itself and refutes the assumption that such growth will automatically result in improved population and planetary health. Health promotion is inherently political. Reflecting on the UK’s current situation – with spiralling child, food and fuel poverty, flatlined/reduced life expectancy, increased inequalities, and the ongoing failure of government to take on powerful vested interests through legislative, regulatory and fiscal measures – we face a crisis. However, a crisis represents not only danger, but also a potential turning point. This should motivate the health promotion workforce to harness and channel its righteous anger; and give space for active hope that we – as citizens, professionals and members of families and communities – can envision, advocate and fight to secure the wellbeing of people, places and the planet.

Rage of righteousness: Anger's role in promoting debunking effects during the COVID-19 pandemic

The concerning proliferation of misinformation and its adverse consequences have spurred considerable effort among scholars and practitioners to debunk misinformation. Nevertheless, few studies have investigated how emotions influence the effectiveness of debunking. In our study, following the cognitive functional model, we analyzed 441 short videos on Douyin and their 8315 comments to examine how videos that debunk misinformation with punishment-focused frames improve the effectiveness of debunking. Our results demonstrate that the audience's anger, which we characterize as righteous anger, can be induced by video content that primes a preference for the punishment of creators and spreaders of misinformation. Moreover, when anger facilitates the audience's trust in debunking, message involvement and argument quality can intensify their anger.

Contempt and Righteous Anger: A Gendered Perspective From a Classical Indian Epic

Reading a passage in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata—the attempted disrobing of Princess Draupadī after her senior husband has gambled her away (after losing all his wealth, his brothers and himself)—I suggest that we see in her attitude and angry words an expression of contempt. I explore how contempt is a concept that is not thematized within Sanskrit aesthetics of emotions, but nonetheless is clearly articulated in the literature. Focusing on the significance of her gendered expression of anger and contempt, and the positive acceptance of it in the text, I suggest that contempt can be understood as a transformative attitude in a woman (even a high-born one) towards iniquities in a patriarchal culture.

Revelation through violence? Jesus in the Temple in John 2:13–22

John’s version of Jesus’s temple entrance is remarkable for its depiction of Jesus wielding a whip and driving out animals and people from the precincts. Focusing on the violence of Jesus’s “righteous anger,” some interpreters have used John 2:13–22 to justify violence in God’s name throughout history. Others push back against such readings by mitigating or ignoring the violence of Jesus’s actions. This article seeks to find a middle ground by focusing on ancient understandings of what happens when holiness is profaned. Using 2 Maccabees as a comparison, I argue John 2:13–22 presents Jesus’s arrival in the temple as a clash caused by holiness breaking out. This presentation emphasizes Jesus’s identity as God’s glory made flesh and plays into ancient audience expectations in 2:13–17. In 2:18–22, however, Jesus undercuts these assumptions by predicting his own death and resurrection. Rather than endorsing violence, then, John 2:13–22 is better understood as a type of bait and switch, in which the narrative emphasizes Jesus’s identity, the problem he faces in the world, and the surprising way God responds. Instead of spreading violence, Jesus receives it upon his own body, thus revealing God’s inviolability that results in life for those who will receive it.

Preference for partner or servant brand roles depends on consumers’ power distance belief

Anthropomorphism nests in both, persuasion, and marketing communications. This research examines anthropomorphized digital advertising brand message frames as either a servant or a partner. Across five studies, we demonstrate that the relationship between anthropomorphized digital advertising and willingness to pay/purchase intention depends on individual power distance belief. Low power distance belief consumers respond to brand-as-a-partner advertising more favorably while high power distance belief consumers are indifferent across both frames (Studies 1a–c). This conditional positive effect of partner message frame for low power distance belief consumers is mediated by consumers’ righteous anger induced by the message frame (Study 2 & 3). We conclude with contributions to theory, implications for practice, and directions for future inquiries.

Righteous Anger

Righteous Anger Sarah Jones (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 20] When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, my body responded with anger. I say body because the anger felt entirely physical. Animalistic in its intensity, it was like the cry of a trapped creature. Outsiders had placed a limit on me and on millions of others who shared with me the capacity to become pregnant. To the justices, who rule not as judges or as scholars but as clerics, our promise is contained in the womb. Whatever we are outside that organ means nothing in comparison to the people we could bear. So my anger was an assertion of myself: only a person could feel this way. No one could deny my humanity now. My response to Dobbs felt visceral and personal, but it could have been different. Anti-abortion women reacted to the decision with elation. I am a child of the American right, and anger is my first political memory. Everyone around me was so angry all the time, and not just at the "abortion mills." The world was changing around us and might leave us behind, which was an intolerable prospect. Progress threatened our churches, we thought, but more than that it threatened the country. A nation without the church in power—our church—was a nation in ruins. Anger is not always righteous, and it does not always look like a pro-choice rally. Sometimes it is a picket outside a clinic. The anger I felt as a child was an anger that adults transmitted to me. With it, they hoped to mold me into a foot soldier. But my anger shifted targets when I discovered that our side in the culture war had only two roles for a girl. The first was reproduction, and the second was to keep all the other girls in line. Much like a military, the Christian right runs on conformity. There was no uniform, but strict dress codes protected our modesty. As women in waiting, girls were thought of mostly as future wives and mothers. And any political inclinations had to follow an established trajectory. The right needs its Kellyanne Conways and its Amy Coney Barretts to soften the face it presents to the world, so women could enter right-wing politics without sustaining much reputational damage. Yet as I got older, I noticed that there seemed to be no room for the anger I was beginning to feel—anger at the men in authority over me, anger at the women who obeyed them. [End Page 21] The dress codes exhausted me. I could map out my future with paces around my mother's kitchen. Even in church, the center of my life, I could not expect to have authority. Any role I could have would be handed to me by a man with real power. I would only ever be a reflection of him. I knew vaguely of feminism, knew it to be the enemy, but in secret I began to suspect those feminists might have a point. I could not deny what I saw to myself. Women in my world occupied a second and subordinate tier to men, and I would never be an independent person. My worth depended entirely on my sexuality: on my purity and my capacity to bear children. My mind never entered into anything at all. Midway through college I knew the right was no longer my home. So I went in search of a new one. I eyed the pro-choice movement and lurked in the comments of popular feminist blogs. This was the Obama era, and liberalism was ascendant. I defended Obama passionately on my college campus. But I knew I wanted more than a polite rally or a quiet moment at the ballot box. The entire structure of the world needed to change, I thought. The exploitation of the poor had radicalized me, as had the violent foreign policy of the United States, the vulnerability of the right to an abortion, and the moral imperative of rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Obama was not Bush, but he was no savior...

The triangulation of ethical leader signals using qualitative, experimental, and data science methods

To advance ethical leadership using signaling theory, the current work presents a mixture of inductive and deductive studies. Using a constant comparative analysis method, Study 1 involved coding CEO letters to shareholders (n = 10,919 sentences). Eight verbal ethical leader signals (ELSs) emerged and were associated with emotions (e.g., righteous anger, pride). In a set of preregistered experiments, ELSs were found to lead to evaluations of ethical leadership (Study 2: n = 264; Cohen’s d = 0.26). Study 3 illustrated that ELSs led to a reduction in financial theft (n = 434; Cohen’s d = 0.20). Study 4 showed that ELSs led to an improvement in performance (n = 434; Cohen’s d = 0.18) but had little effect on extra role behavior (Cohen’s d = 0.06). Finally, in Study 5 a machine learning algorithm, DeepEthics, was created to automatically score text (ROC =. 84; r = 0.85 between human and algorithm scores), such as emails and meeting transcripts, for ELSs in future research. Recommendations for theory and practice are discussed.

Nativist Nation

Nativist Nation Lucy E. Salyer (bio) Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2019. 432 pp. Images, Notes, and index. $32.00. Amanda Frost, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021. 248 pp. Images, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95. Julia Rose Kraut, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. 352 pp. Notes and index. $37.00. The 2016 presidential election brought Donald Trump and his shrill, anti-immigrant rhetoric to the White House, providing a bully pulpit and a megaphone for nativist forces that had been clamoring for more draconian policies. Trump unleashed vitriolic attacks on immigrants and foreign-born Americans of all statuses and nationalities but reserved special antipathy for Black and Brown immigrants. Trump promised to “take the shackles off” immigration agents and to “build the wall”—both physical and legal barriers—to stem what he called an “invasion” by “bad” people. Deeds followed words. Moving remarkably swiftly, Trump issued the controversial travel ban (a.k.a. “Muslim Ban”) within a week of his inauguration and adopted an aggressive deportation campaign to expel undocumented immigrants. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy led to record-high detention rates and the separation of migrant children from their parents, some of whom have still not been reunited. By the time Trump left the White House in 2021, his administration had enacted an astounding 472 administrative changes “that dismantled and reconstructed many elements of the U.S. immigration system.”1 The 2016 election sparked diverse reactions: many onlookers were startled and appalled by the nastiness and the outright racism of Trump’s attacks while his supporters thronged to his message, as he dared say boldly and loudly what many conservatives felt. Erika Lee, in her new book America for Americans, expresses her own “constant astonishment and dark humor” as well as her “righteous anger and helplessness” in response to Trump’s campaign (p. 5). [End Page 368] Many critics believed that Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiment broke with the United States’ cherished image as a “nation of immigrants,” reviving outdated and disreputable views that had fallen out of favor decades ago. But as these three books—Lee’s America for Americans, Amanda Frost’s You Are Not American, and Julia Rose Kraut’s Threat of Dissent—reveal, Trump’s “Make America Safe Again” and “America First” slogans echoed a long line of cries throughout the nation’s history, demanding “America for Americans.”2 In sum, we’ve been here before. Lee, Frost, and Kraut all construct their studies around the same fundamental paradox: Is the United States a “nation of immigrants” or a nation against immigrants? On the one hand, Lee notes that the U.S. has received more than 80 million immigrants over the past 200 years and “historically led the world in resettling refugees.” It remains the “world’s largest immigrant-receiving country in the world.” Lawful permanent residents, observes Frost, benefit from liberal naturalization laws allowing them to become citizens 5 years after their arrival. Frost also remarks that the Constitution raises a broad umbrella over a diverse society, the First Amendment “protecting the rights of ethnic, religious, ideological, and racial minorities to live as they prefer.”3 On the other hand, the United States has continually defined itself in opposition to “foreigners,” employing a variety of methods to cull and separate those deemed a threat to “real Americans.” In one of the great opening lines of a book, Aristide Zollberg, in A Nation by Design (2006), observed that the United States has been “a nation of immigrants, to be sure, but not just any immigrants.”4 That observation, in itself, is not new. There is a rich literature on the history of anti-immigrant movements, with John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (1988) providing the classic account. Higham and other scholars tended to view nativist movements as episodic, arising in times of national crisis. Writing a new epilogue for the 2002 edition of his classic work, Higham conceded that...

Stefania Lucamante. Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives

Stefania Lucamante. <i>Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives</i>

Why Do Trees Need Herding? J. R. R. Tolkien’s Mastery of Trees in The Lord of the Rings

Why Do Trees Need Herding? J. R. R. Tolkien’s Mastery of Trees in The Lord of the Rings Mary-Anne Potter (bio) and Deirdre C. Byrne (bio) Introduction J. R. R. Tolkien is known to have loved trees and advocated for them against the forces of industrialization. He wrote to The Daily Telegraph in 1972: “In all of my works, I take the part of trees as against all their enemies” (419).1 The “enemies” of trees include industry and machines; the entire modern era of manufacture and sale of commodities; the densification of housing; and the demand for more edible crops to support livestock for meat. The Ents represent Tolkien’s righteous anger against those who would turn the trees into material for imperialist ends. Saruman needs timber for his war effort on behalf of Sauron, but the Ents do not take this kindly, and Saruman receives the punishment he deserves for mistreating the trees. The march of the Ents and Huorns to Isengard, which they destroy, inspired by the Birnam Wood march to Dunsinane to defeat a tyrant in Macbeth, is emblematic of Tolkien’s “tak[ing] the part of trees” in The Lord of the Rings (LotR).2 This article explores Tolkien’s advocacy of trees, particularly focusing on contrapuntal voices in his depiction of trees in LotR. Tolkien’s hierarchy of values is shown in that all his forests are cared for by human, or humanoid, stewards.3 Environmental critic John Elder defines stewardship in LotR as “faithful and discerning action on behalf of a beloved landscape and community . . . the knowledgeable and practical service of living communities” (Dickerson and Evans xi). This sounds very loving, but implies superior human knowledge and insight. The trees do not act or speak on their own and are not represented from their own perspective; they are always seen, [End Page 277] and spoken for, by their stewards. We trace Tolkien’s propensity to speak for trees to his Catholic humanism, which leads him to adopt a position of control and mastery4 over his fictive creations. The question of “who speaks?” reminds us of postcolonial theorizing about subaltern voice and agency,5 and raises concern about who has the right to speak and act. We begin with an exploration of Tolkien’s, specifically LotR’s, Catholic humanism. We then discuss non-humanist paradigms that we find useful in thinking about the portrayal of trees in LotR. Finally, we read the relationships between forests and their eco-stewards in LotR (Lothlórien, the Old Forest and Fangorn) diffractively through nonhumanist paradigms. For Barad, diffractive reading “place[s] the understandings that are generated from different (inter) disciplinary approaches in conversation with each other” (92–93) to “produce a new way of thinking about the nature of difference” (73). Our diffractive reading of LotR concludes that, while the novel constitutes a paean to trees, it also keeps its author’s humanism intact. A Liberal Humanist Love of Trees Tolkien’s love of trees permeated his capacity to make sense of his context and life events, as well as his self-expression in language. Further, Tolkien’s Catholic humanism directs his response to trees. First, he often used arboreal images in his personal writings. Following the death of fellow Inkling and close friend, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien wrote: “So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age—like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots” (“Letters” 258). He also refers to LotR as “my own internal tree” (“Letters” 341), implying that the story takes root and grows from within his psyche. The story appears to have been Tolkien’s inner Yggdrasil: a World Tree and the central axis of his inner world. Frodo’s journey to Mordor serves as the trunk, from which numerous branches grow: Aragorn’s ascension to the throne of Gondor; the war with Sauron and Saruman; Gandalf’s ascension to White Wizard; the Elves’ departure; the hobbits’ growth to warriors and their liberation of the Shire, and so on. Patrick Curry reinforces the arboreal emphasis when he describes Tolkien’s...

AI Service and Emotion

AI in service can be for routine mechanical tasks, analytical thinking tasks, or empathetic feeling tasks. We provide a conceptual framework for the customer, firm, and interactional use of AI for empathetic tasks at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Emotions resulting from AI service interactions can include basic emotions (e.g., joy, sadness, and fear), self-conscious emotions (e.g., pride, guilt, embarrassment), and moral emotions (e.g., contempt, righteous anger, social disgust). These emotions are mostly likely to occur during frontline interactions in which both firms and customers use AI, a phenomenon called “AI as customer.” The analysis level of AI service and emotion can be at the macro-level in which AI is transforming the service economy into a feeling economy, at the meso-level in which firms can use “thoughtful AI” to make the employees’ and customers’ lives a little bit better by brightening their days, and at the micro-level in which customers can experience basic, self-conscious, and moral emotions from interactions with service AI.