Taken at face value: Emotion expression and protest dynamics
2025-09-12
Understanding the role of emotions in protest is a growing field of research, but existing research does not address the role of emotions once protests start. By applying computer vision models to the expressed emotions of 37,558 faces in 7,824 geolocated protest images across twelve protest waves in ten countries, this article contributes to the study of emotions and protest. Most importantly, it measures emotions within protest waves, not before them. It also investigates emotions’ temporal effects, measures multiple emotions simultaneously, connects emotions directly to actual protests, and analyzes data across multiple countries. The results suggest that anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise occur simultaneously throughout a protest, though happiness peaks on the first day. Emotions sometimes correlate with protest size in unexpected directions, and the coefficient signs differ by country. The most consistent finding is that models without lagged terms outperform those with lags, suggesting emotions and protests covary more than the former causes changes in the latter.