Emotional states elicited by wolf videos are diverse and explain general attitudes towards wolves

Abstract

Emotions are short, intuitive mental processes that are important components of people's cognitions. They can influence attitudes (i.e. positive or negative evaluations of objects), and they are involved in decision‐making processes. In the context of human‐wildlife coexistence, mostly emotional dispositions have been studied (i.e. people's decontextualized, stable tendencies to react in a certain way towards wildlife), in contrast to emotional states (i.e. quick reactions elicited in specific contexts), which have been overlooked. This limits our understanding of emotional states and the role of emotional diversity in shaping attitudes towards wildlife species. Here, we quantified emotional states elicited by context‐specific wolf encounters featured in a set of YouTube videos. We conducted a social survey in rural populations of 24 randomly selected cities in France (n = 795) to (i) quantify emotional diversity and (ii) test the relationship between emotional states and attitudes towards wolves, accounting for individual and regional factors. We found that emotional states that were most expressed across the six contexts of encounter were surprise, interest and fear, in this order. Emotional diversity was highly context‐specific, with significantly different emotional identity, dispersion and extremization across the six contexts of encounters. Most variance in attitudes was explained by emotional factors alone (28%) and the best model including all three groups of predictors (emotional, individual and regional factors) explained 57% of the variance. The strongest effects of emotional states on attitudes were those of anger and joy. Fear had only half the effect of joy on attitudes. Synthesis and applications: Our results highlight the importance and context‐specificity of emotional diversity for human‐carnivore coexistence. Complementary to previous studies focusing on single emotions and on decontextualized emotional dispositions, quantifying diverse, context‐dependent emotional states can be helpful to improve decision‐making in three different ways: (i) address relevant contexts triggering anger, which is a feeling rooted in perceived injustice, (ii) reduce emotional biases involving fear of carnivores given the extremely low probability of risks to human life and (iii) promote positive emotions like joy to better reflect costs and benefits of sharing landscapes with large carnivores. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.