{"id":17769,"date":"2025-05-26T11:36:03","date_gmt":"2025-05-26T10:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=17769"},"modified":"2025-05-26T11:36:03","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T10:36:03","slug":"emotional-regimes-of-the-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2025\/05\/26\/emotional-regimes-of-the-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Emotional Regimes of the Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Mortal Coil<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The Covid pandemic brought a public health emergency, political and legal challenges, intense media coverage, social divisions, and intense debates among scientists. Yet, in public commentaries, attention fell almost exclusively on a single cause of suffering: the virus itself.<\/p>\n

This framing of the crisis contributed to an atmosphere of extreme danger, a sense that disease and death lurked around every street corner. Public messaging, media reports and daily statistics reinforced the idea of omnipresent risk. News cycles focused relentlessly on case numbers, hospitalizations and fatalities, making the threat feel immediate and inescapable.<\/p>\n

Five years on, we can collate how the pandemic sparked a surge of research across many fields: medicine, public health, economics, education, and sociology all responded. This burst of academic activity was not, however, spread evenly. Bibliometric studies show that, at first, research focused mainly on clinical medicine, immunology, biology, genetics, and pharmacology; the social sciences, psychiatry, and economics received less attention (Funada et al., 2023). Within the social sciences, early research looked at wellbeing, the plight of healthcare workers, vaccines, and inequalities. Emotions were also studied, but far less often, ranking only as the twenty-fourth most common keyword in published papers (Hamdan & Alsuqaih, 2024).<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, a closer look at emotion-related research reveals a problematic focus. Most of these studies examine mental health issues and depression, fatigue, sleep, fear, anxiety, coping strategies, resilience, and attitudes toward vaccines. They treat emotions as individual reactions to a threatening situation, mainly, the risk of illness or death. From this almost exclusive perspective, emotions are considered as disruptions to psychological balance, responses to a biological danger separate from society or culture. They are private experiences, signs of mental strain when facing mortality. Fear, grief, and anxiety are viewed as symptoms of danger and of risk, highlighting the personal impact of living through a threatening time.<\/p>\n

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Image: Daniele Idini<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Moving Beyond Reaction: Constructing the Emotional Field<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This framing of emotions overlooks a crucial point: emotions are not simply automatic, hard-wired biological responses to external situations or threats. Rather, they are often actively produced and shaped within particular moral, cultural, and political frameworks. How people come to fear, endure, or worry is continually influenced by the signals and expectations set by public discourse, media narratives, institutional practices and prevailing social norms.<\/p>\n

The news media do obviously more than report mere facts; they select, emphasize, and dramatize certain aspects of events, contributing and even constructing the emotional climate of crisis according to preconceived judgments. Hence, the emotional atmosphere of the pandemic, marked by vigilance, anxiety, and collective tension, was not just a consequence of the virus, but the result of ongoing processes that shaped how people understood and responded to the unfolding situation.<\/p>\n

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Image: Daniele Idini<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

‘Be a hero, wear a mask’<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n

Several notable examples illustrate how governments and media employed rhetorical and psychological techniques to shape public emotions.<\/p>\n

In the UK, the slogan \u201cStay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives\u201d became one of the most widely disseminated and emotionally charged messages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Designed to evoke both communal duty and existential fear, it mobilised public sentiment around the act of staying at home, not simply as a health measure, but as a moral obligation to shield others, particularly frontline healthcare workers. Ubiquitous across television, newspapers, and social media, the slogan fostered an emotional climate of collective responsibility and latent anxiety about overwhelming the national health system.<\/p>\n

Rhetorically, the slogan is striking: its simplicity, repetition, and rhythmic cadence render it both memorable and persuasive. It appeals simultaneously to national solidarity, civic duty, and the highest ethical imperative, saving lives, thus activating a complex affective mix of fear, guilt, and altruism.<\/p>\n

This emotional construct was neither accidental nor incidental. A report by the UK\u2019s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, dated 22 March 2020 and titled \u201cOptions for Increasing Adherence to Social Distancing Measures\u201d (SPI-B, 2020), explicitly recommended the use of emotionally charged messaging. It advised that \u201cthe perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging,\u201d and further emphasized the need to frame compliance as a duty to protect others. Public messaging was a deliberate instrument of affective governance.<\/p>\n

In France, the famous \u201cNous sommes en guerre<\/em>\u201d, \u201cwe are at war\u201d slogan, pronounced by French President Emmanuel Macron recruited the French citizens for \u201cgeneral mobilisation\u201d against an \u201cenemy […] invisible and elusive\u201d. This phrase, repeated six times during a single televised address, anchored the pandemic within a wartime imaginary, framing the virus as an invisible enemy and the French population as combatants in a national struggle (Lemari\u00e9, A., & Pietralunga, C. 2020).<\/p>\n

The affective environment in France was thus shaped around sacrifice and mobilisation. Staying at home became not merely a health directive, but an act of national resistance, evoking allusive memories of the World War II. This rhetorical strategy, deeply embedded in French republican traditions of unity and state authority, reactivated symbolic repertoires associated with past national emergencies.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most disquieting illustration of planned disciplinary and emotional control during the Covid-19 crisis in Europe was to be found in a leaked strategy document from Germany\u2019s Federal Ministry of the Interior. Widely referred to (ironically yet revealingly) as the \u201cpanic paper\u201d, this internal memorandum, drafted in March 2020, exposes the deliberate mobilisation of fear and terror as legitimate political tools. The paper explicitly recommends heightening the population\u2019s sense of threat to ensure compliance with lockdown measures, even proposing emotionally manipulative narratives targeted at children.<\/p>\n

The document\u2019s authors do not hesitate to make emotionally manipulative claims, unanchored to any scientific or empirical evidence. One of the more disturbing passages reads: \u201cChildren will easily become infected, even with restrictions on leaving the house […] If they then infect their parents, and one of them dies in agony at home, they will feel guilty because, for example, they forgot to wash their hands after playing. It is the most terrible thing a child can ever experience.\u201d (Bundespapier<\/em>, 2020)<\/p>\n

Under the guise of public health strategy, the experts thus suggest that the state should conjure worst-case scenarios to shock citizens into obedience. This weaponisation of fear, particularly the psychological targeting of children, marks a disconcerting threshold where public communication slips into psychological coercion. It represents a calculated use of terror to engineer behaviour.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly enough, this narrative was not limited to governments or the media. Even prominent intellectuals such as J\u00fcrgen Habermas<\/a><\/span>, one of the leading voices in the theory of deliberative democracy, perceived democracy as having ground to a halt. Under the threat to \u201cthe life and health of members of the species Homo sapiens<\/em> across the globe,\u201d Habermas declared in 2021, in strikingly dramatic terms, that humanity found itself in a truly existing Hobbesian state of nature, engaged in a metaphysical and biological war for the survival of the species. In such a situation, Habermas thought, the \u201clegally mandated acts of solidarity\u201d required by the authority of the state must override individual rights and liberties without exception (Habermas, 2021). In other words, the recourse to a temporary dictatorship is defended as a legitimate means of safeguarding democracy itself.<\/p>\n

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Image: Daniele Idini<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Reframing the emotional pandemic<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n

Such tactics reflect a biopolitical logic in which emotions are instrumentalised, manipulated, and weaponised in the name of security. As the American historian William Reddy\u2019s notion of \u2018emotional regimes\u2019 reminds us, the state not only regulates action but prescribes feeling. What the \u201cpanic paper\u201d reveals is an attempt to institutionalise anxiety and guilt as tools of governance, undermining democratic trust and ethical responsibility in the process.<\/p>\n

Insights from the history and anthropology of emotions, particularly the work of Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy, invite us to rethink this framing of emotions. Rosenwein\u2019s concept of \u2018emotional communities\u2019 (2006) highlights how emotions are shaped, valued, and regulated within particular social groups, each with their own norms and expressive codes. From this standpoint, emotions during the pandemic cannot be reduced to individual reactions but must be understood as patterned and normative, reflecting the affective economies of distinct communities: communities of fear, of denial, of moral indignation, or of solidarity.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Reddy\u2019s theory of \u2018emotives\u2019 (2001) emphasises the performative and world-shaping nature of emotional expression. Emotions are not merely responses to a given reality; they participate in shaping that reality by enacting or challenging dominant scripts.<\/p>\n

Shaping the emotional landscape of the pandemic through these theoretical lenses allows us to move beyond the medical paradigm and to interrogate the normative, political, and cultural scripts that governed which emotions were considered legitimate, intelligible, or deviant. It also opens the way to analyse how emotions were mobilised to sustain or contest public policies, shape collective identities, and articulate forms of belonging or exclusion.<\/p>\n

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Image: Daniele Idini<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How to do emotions with words<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n

Although traditional theories of public relations and propaganda from Bernays and Adorno to Ellul have long emphasized the central role of emotions in shaping public opinion, the American historian William Reddy offers a strikingly original lens through which to examine how speech, when instrumentalised, not only conveys but actively produces emotional states. The framework he developed in his book The Navigation of Feeling<\/em> (2001) allows us to reconsider emotional expression not as a by-product of persuasion, but as a form of action in its own right.<\/p>\n

The expressions and formulae he calls \u201cemotives\u201d work at the same time as expressions and speech-acts that do not merely reflect a feeling but also act upon the feelings expressed.<\/p>\n

Let us consider one of the slogans widely used in the UK during Covid: \u201cCan you look them in the eyes and tell them you\u2019re helping by staying at home?\u201d The formula obviously expresses sentiments of moral urgency, it purveys a sense of guilt, and it evokes a feeling of shared suffering. By mobilising emotional responses in its audience, the message not only seeks compliance but also helps produce an imagined community of responsibility, what Benedict Anderson might describe as a politically constructed sense of belonging forged through shared affect and narrative. \u201cNot staying at home\u201d not only becomes a morally shameful act, but it also transforms those who do not abide by the rules into antisocial or even dangerous outsiders.<\/p>\n

As such, the formula is not simply descriptive (\u201cyou are harming people\u201d), nor purely persuasive (\u201cplease help us\u201d), but it performs a moral-emotional judgment that invites internalisation: \u201cYou are failing us, your community, unless you feel what we want you to feel.\u201d In this sense, that emotives express and reshape emotional experience by realigning the narrative sense of oneself and the expected moral position of the community.<\/p>\n

The same analysis applies to Macrons \u201cwar\u201d. The expression declares a collective crisis state, it evokes gravity, calls out a clear and present danger and warns about an existential threat. Thus, it installs an emotional climate of wartime unity, emergency discipline, and patriotic mobilisation. Unlike the English moral community, French citizens are summoned in the guise of soldiers and patriots, enlisted in the defence of the state.<\/p>\n

The German example seems politically the most unsettling. The consultants emphasise horrific imagery (death by suffocation) in order to induce \u201cprimal fears\u201d and uncontrollable panic. They instrumentalise guilt in children to heighten family responsibility by evoking a nightmarish parricide that results from disobeying.<\/p>\n

-Germany\u2019s response corresponds in function (if not in scale) to Jacobin emotional regimes analysed by Reddy in the period of French Terror (September 1793\u2013July 1794). Emotional authenticity is measured by conformity to the collective fear. In the context of post-Revolutionary France, not fearing enough becomes a sign of counter-revolutionary disloyalty. Similarly, in 2020 Germany, not appearing afraid (or questioning the panic narrative) could make one suspected of being reckless, not acting in solidarity, or worse, of being a right-wing-extremist-enemy of the state.<\/p>\n

To push things even further, Germany\u2019s federal domestic intelligence service \u2013 the\u00a0Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution \u2013 <\/strong>established, in 2021, a new \u2018phenomenon area\u2019 for verbal \u201cdelegitimisation of the state\u201d as part of a broader affective disciplining. \u00a0Much like the East German state\u2019s attention to emotional attitudes and moral tone (Brauer, 2011), pandemic-era Germany began to police not only what people did or said, but how they felt, or more precisely, which emotions they were publicly permitted to express. The result, in Reddy\u2019s terms, was the emergence of a strict emotional regime, wherein fear, trust, and compliance became not just encouraged but expected, while scepticism, defiance, and even calm detachment were marked as dangerous deviations from normative feeling.<\/p>\n

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Image: Daniele Idini<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Touched and the Untouchable<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n

As Reddy shows, emotives do not exist in isolation but operate within broader\u00a0emotional styles that can transform into hegemonic \u201cemotional regimes\u201d. These regimes then constitute the\u00a0officially sanctioned or dominant norms governing which emotions are deemed appropriate or required. An emotional regime may be conceptualised as the\u00a0emotional dimension of a culture’s ideological structure.<\/p>\n

This perspective helps explain how distinct emotional regimes were deliberately constructed\u00a0within varying national and cultural settings. The aim was to cultivate specific emotional landscapes which, according to political figures, scientific experts and media outlets were perceived as the most effective means to\u00a0encourage, persuade, or even compel populations towards the desired attitudes and behaviours. This was to be achieved, in large part, by aligning public sentiment with state goals and framing non-compliance as morally reprehensible.<\/p>\n

By dictating appropriate feelings such as patriotism, calm obedience, compliance, solidarity, anxiety or even panic, while discouraging dissent, critique, lack of fear or apathy, the Covid responses installed what Reddy calls a \u201cstrict\u201d emotional regime. In strict regimes \u2013 as was the case in most Western democracies \u2013 authorities heavily dictate emotional responses (e.g. demanding constant displays of patriotic fear or fervour), whereas a \u201clooser\u201d regimes (like Sweden) allowed more individual emotional freedom.<\/p>\n

The construction of a strict emotional regime evidently leaves little room for individual \u201cemotional navigation\u201d. Emotional navigation, in Reddy’s theory, is the process through which individuals explore and reorient their feelings, often by attempting to name or express them using available emotional descriptions. Hence, within strict regimes, the mandated emotions and suppression of others are always at risk of creating a conflict with individuals’ authentic feelings. Pressure to conform reduces our autonomy to explore and articulate genuine emotional experiences.<\/p>\n

Reddy’s work suggests that strict regimes inevitably inflict \u201cpsychological pains\u201d. This psychological pain arises from the discrepancy between one’s internal emotional state and the external expectation of how one should feel or express emotions. The deliberate heightening of threat and weaponisation of fear, as seen in the aforementioned pandemic policies, lead to significant emotional suffering.<\/p>\n

This approach mirrors what the German memo proposed (making individuals, even children, feel accountable for tragic outcomes) and what SPI-B had called \u201cshame\u201d by conflating compliance with virtue and non-compliance with deviance (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022).<\/p>\n

Indeed, psychologists reported a rise in what they dubbed \u201cCOVID-19 Anxiety Syndrome,\u201d where individuals became obsessively fearful (avoiding public spaces, constant symptom-checking, etc.), effectively locked into a state of chronic anxiety (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022). Professor of psychology Marcantonio Spada, who studied this phenomenon, warned that by \u201cdeliberately inflat[ing] the threat and perceived fear of Covid-19 (in combination with lockdowns)\u201d, the government made it likely \u201cthat a significant proportion of the population would develop psychopathological responses and end up locked into their fear or develop related forms of anxiety such as health anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behaviours\u201d (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022).<\/p>\n

As a consequence, when people find an emotional regime oppressive or alienating, they seek \u201cemotional refuges\u201d, that is, social spaces or subcultures that permit the free expression of forbidden feelings. These refuges (such as the historic salons, Masonic lodges, caf\u00e9s in Reddy\u2019s research) let individuals \u201cbreathe\u201d emotionally and share sentiments that the dominant discourse suppresses.<\/p>\n

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, social media platforms played a crucial role as digital emotional refuges, allowing individuals to articulate forms of scepticism, frustration, irony, or grief that were often unwelcome or delegitimised in mainstream public discourse. Whether through Telegram groups, Facebook forums, YouTube comments, or encrypted chat channels, these online spaces became vital arenas not only for a delegitimized critique, but also for affective expression, especially for those who rejected the emotional scripts of fear, compliance, or trust in government authority.<\/p>\n

Here, alternative emotional narratives could circulate: defiance against confinement, sarcasm toward official slogans, or empathy with marginalised voices such as vaccine sceptics, small business owners, or distressed adolescents. It was these spaces that functioned as emotional counter-publics: informal communities where dissonant emotions could be shared, validated, and amplified outside the normative emotional regime that attempted to monopolise the emotional field.<\/p>\n

Yet even these emotional counter-publics did not remain untouched. As expressions of dissent or ambivalence became increasingly vilified and pathologised, many of these refuges were themselves subjected to forms of surveillance, content moderation, public denunciation and censorship. Social media platforms intensified their control of discourse through algorithmic filtering and deplatforming, while governments and media denounced certain emotional expressions, especially those critical of official policy, as irrational, dangerous, or politically subversive. In this way, the emotional regime extended its reach, constraining the very spaces where alternative affective orientations could emerge, intensifying emotional suffering and narrowing the horizon of legitimate emotional life.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n