Monday, November 10, 2025

Beauty and fear

The role of emotions in communicating natural disasters. New paper in JCOM

Sissa Medialab

Milford Sound (South Island/Te Waipounamu) — image:
Milford Sound (Māori: Piopiotahi) is a fiord in the south west of New Zealand's South Island, within Fiordland National Park, Piopiotahi (Milford Sound) Marine Reserve, and the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage site. It has been judged the world's top travel destination in an international survey (the 2008 Travelers' Choice Destinations Awards by TripAdvisor) and is acclaimed as New Zealand's most famous tourist destination. Rudyard Kipling had previously called it the eighth Wonder of the World. Milford Sound is incorrectly named, as a sound is in fact a large sea or ocean inlet larger than a bay, deeper than a bight, and wider than a fjord, while Milford Sound is formed by the actions of glaciers.
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Credit: Bernard Spragg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Wahipounamu#/media/File:Milford_Sound_NZ._(16944937040).jpg

New Zealand — particularly the South Island/Te Waipounamu — is one of the most seismically active regions in the world. For this reason, the country has acknowledged the importance of building awareness and preparedness.

In this kind of disaster communication, emotions — whether conscious or not — play a crucial role. Caroline Rowe, researcher at the Centre for Sustainability Research, University of Otago, New Zealand, explored this dimension, showing how risk communication can balance fear and anxiety with positive emotions such as fascination and confidence, using vivid imagery, storytelling, and certainty. The result is an in-depth exploration of how emotional aspects of risk communication operate in a real-world context, contributing to a deeper understanding of risk communication in real-world contexts. The study was published in the special issue on emotions and science communication in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM).

“In New Zealand there is a 75% chance of a magnitude 8 earthquake or greater happening on the Alpine Fault within the next 50 years,” explains Rowe. “So this got the interest of emergency managers who were saying, you know, we need to be better prepared for this.”

Launched in 2016 as a boundary organization, the Alpine Fault magnitude 8 - AF8 programme acts as an interface between seismic hazard science and emergency management practice, developing communication initiatives directed both at professionals and the wider public.

Rowe, who studies communication within the emergency management sector, recalls: “Through talking to emergency managers you could see that the programme had had this really strong kind of personal and organisational effect. I started to make the connection: there’s something going on here with emotion.”

Her research consisted of two main parts. The first was a document analysis of 14 AF8 communication materials. “Tone came through as being something I wasn’t really expecting to see,” she notes. Scientists, she found, conveyed risk with enthusiasm and positivity: “It is not really what you expect when you’re talking about a massive earthquake. But they were really excited about the science and really excited to share that science.”

Their enthusiasm also stemmed from the South Island’s remarkable geology. “It’s one of the few places in the world where you can observe a plate boundary up close, along a major fault line,” she adds. “The Alpine Fault is a world-class example of this transform plate boundary.”

AF8’s communication also highlighted not only the threat but also the beauty of the landscape shaped by the same geological forces.

“Yes, there is this risk, and it is something that can cause anxiety, but it’s also part of where we live and it’s brought us beauty. The fault line itself is responsible for the landscape of the South Island. It’s brought economic value as well through tourism.”

The second part of the study involved interviews with emergency management professionals — from civil defence officials and indigenous and community leaders to police, fire, and medical services. Their responses revealed that AF8’s emotional appeals were handled with careful balance: an engaged yet reassuring tone, the use of certainty framing (inevitably grounded in historical data), and efficacy messages (“we can act and prepare”). Tools such as animations, maps, and postcard-like imagery of the Southern Alps helped make the risk tangible without inducing paralysis.

What emerges is a nuanced picture in which emotions have genuine value, not as something to suppress, but to understand and use wisely. For risk communicators, emotions are not a side effect to be avoided: eliminating them is impossible. Recognising and channelling them allows the positive aspects — such as self-efficacy, confidence, and motivation to act — to surface, while preventing fear and anxiety from taking over.

“People are going to feel emotions regardless. Risk communicators need to accept that and work with it,” concludes Rowe. “The risk itself is inherently scary, but if it is framed with empowering messages of agency and efficacy, people are better able to deal with it.”

The paper “Walking the Faultline of Fear: How affect-inducing risk communication can help promote disaster preparedness” by Caroline Rowe, Caroline Orchiston and Fabien Medvecky is part of a JCOM special issue titled “Emotions and Science Communication”.

“This article shows how important it is to understand emotions in a context of risk and fear,” says Luisa Massarani, researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Public Communication of Science and Technology and one of the guest editors of the special issue on emotions and science communication.

"Despite their significant role, emotions are under-theorised and under-researched in science communication - although there is a growing interest among researchers and practitioners in understanding their role in science communication. This led us - Neta Shaby (UK), Daniel Silva Luna and myself - to propose this special issue, inviting researchers and practitioners around the globe to submit their manuscripts. We hope this special issue inspires other people to think further about the different facets of emotions and science communication , as well as to carry out more studies on the subject,” she says.

Journal

Journal of Science Communication

DOI

10.22323/148720250710190719

Method of Research

Observational study

Article Title

Walking the Faultline of Fear: How affect-inducing risk communication can help promote disaster preparedness

Between solstices and equinoxes

Reducing stigma around bipolar disorder on stage. New paper in JCOM

Sissa Medialab

Interview (stage photos - Oxímoro, entre Solstícios e Equinócios ) — image:
A moment fro the play Oxímoro, entre Solstícios e Equinócios
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Credit: The Marionet Theatre Company

“People tend to joke about mood swings, saying ‘my mood swings throughout the day, I’m already a bit bipolar,’ or joke with each other saying ‘everything is bipolar.’ And it’s not quite like that, as bipolar disorder has a biological component.”

This is one of the statements featured in a short trailer on YouTube about bipolar disorder. The video is connected to the play Oxímoro, entre Solstícios e Equinócios (Oxymoron, Between Solstices and Equinoxes) by Marionet, a Portuguese theatre company that brings scientific research topics to the stage.

The play was developed through an in-depth collaboration with doctors, researchers, and patients, with the goal of informing and raising public awareness about bipolar disorder, helping to reduce the stigma surrounding this and other mental health conditions.

The project also included an analysis of audience responses to the performance, with a specific focus on emotional engagement. The results of this experience are described in a practice insight published in the special issue of emotions and science communication in Journal of Science Communication (JCOM). According to the authors, the audience’s emotional response—empathy, emotional resonance, and personal identification—helped facilitate the assimilation of scientific information and contributed to reducing the stigma surrounding mental illness.

The Marionet theatre company has extensive experience staging works inspired by scientific research, explains Mário Montenegro (Marionet and Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Coimbra). “We have been working with science for 25 years,” he says. “But we only started to work on health subjects a few years ago.”

The company collaborates with scientific partners such as the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology at the Universidade de Coimbra, which also conducts research on mental health. For this play, Montenegro and his colleagues collaborated with a group from the center with a project focused specifically on bipolar disorder, as well as health practitioners from the Integrated Psychiatry Responsibility Center of the Coimbra Hospital and University Center.

The scientific component entered the project from the very beginning, during the writing phase, and was complemented by direct testimonies from patients. “We felt the need to change our creative process, because these were delicate subjects that touched people’s lives. We realized we needed to be even better informed,” explains Montenegro. “So we based our work on interviews with patients, doctors, nurses, and relatives—to hear, in their own words, their experiences with these conditions. From those interviews, we then began building our creative material.”

Based on these interviews, Montenegro and his colleagues wrote the script for the play, composed of several scenes featuring different characters and situations, rather than a single story with a defined set of protagonists. The play, performed by professional actors, ran for five days at the BlackBox of Convento São Francisco in Coimbra, Portugal, from March 20 to 24, 2024, with a total of six performances.

After each show, audience members were invited to complete a questionnaire about their experience. Of the approximately 300 attendees overall, 54 responded. “It was an emotionally very strong play,” says Montenegro. “And the emotional engagement from the audience was very strong as well.” According to the authors’ analysis of the questionnaires, emotions proved to be a key factor in helping audiences understand and remember information about bipolar disorder. Engagement, empathy, and personal identification helped assimilate scientific content and contributed to reducing stigma and stereotypes, humanizing the illness.

Emotion, therefore, does not interfere with message accuracy, Montenegro believes: when intentionally and thoughtfully guided through staging and language, it strengthens it, motivating audiences to learn more and leaving a deeper, longer-lasting impact than purely informational communication. As he puts it: “An important aspect of our play was not to offer the audience a pre-established interpretation of the illness or of the situations represented in each scene. We left the interpretation open so that spectators could form their own opinions. In this way, everyone could receive the content in their own way and react emotionally according to their own sensitivity—because we are all very different.”

The paper “Theatre and bipolar disorder: dealing with emotions” by Mário Montenegro, Silvia Carballo and Francisca Moreira is part of a JCOM special issue titled “Emotions and Science Communication”.

“Theather is indeed a very powerful way for engaging people in science and health issues; recently, very important initiatives have been developed worldwide, including this (very beautiful) one from Portugal”, says Luisa Massarani, researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Public Communication of Science and Technology and one of the guest editors of the special issue on emotions and science communication.

Bipolarism (stage photos - Oxímoro, entre Solstícios e Equinócios )

Caption
A moment from the play Oxímoro, entre Solstícios e Equinócios
Phone call (stage photos - Oxímoro, entre Solstícios e Equinócios )