Emotional Appeals in Argumentation

This book offers an investigation of emotional appeals (pathos) in natural language argumentation. Building on rhetorical theory, psychology, and computational linguistics, it introduces an interactional model of pathos to explain how emotions are elicited and expressed in persuasive discourse. The book traces emotional appeals from classical rhetoric to modern AI-driven methods, showing how emotional language influences perceived argument strength in political, educational, and online contexts. It combines theoretical foundations with empirical studies, including psychological experiments, corpus-based analyses, and large-scale computational modeling using emotion lexicons and large language models (LLMs). By incorporating philosophy, psycholinguistics, and NLP, the book aims to present pathos as a legitimate and measurable element of real-world argumentation.

Author Biography

Dr. Barbara Konat is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She earned her PhD in Philosophy with a specialization in social communication from the same institution. Her research spans argumentation theory, psycholinguistics, and computational rhetoric, with a particular focus on emotional appeals in natural language argumentation, a central theme of her current book project. Dr. Konat was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Argument Technology, University of Dundee, where she deepened her expertise in computational argumentation. As Principal Investigator of the R&D project Sentimenti, she led a team of psychologists and computational scientists in analyzing emotions in language. She also led the Computational Pathos project in the cognitive sciences, of which the book “Emotional Appeals in Argumentation” is the main outcome. Currently, she heads the Laboratory of Everyday Argumentation and Persuasion (LEAP), where she directs the project PersOn: A Pragmatic Model of Persuasion in Online Communities. Her publications appear in journals such as Argumentation, Philosophy & Technology, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, and Metaphor and the Social World. She is active in the argumentation community through participation in and organization of conferences and scholarly events.