I hated my outpatient primary care clinic during residency. Every Wednesday at noon, I scrambled to finish my inpatient work in the hospital, to raggedly see my patients, to sign out my unfinished errands to the covering residents, and to leave the children’s hospital, heading north up the dilapidated thoroughfare to the federally qualified health center where my residency clinic was held. The noise of the street, the honking of the cars, the shouts of the pedestrians, the extremes of cold (...) and of heat: after hiding in the sanctity of the university, the five-minute march up to clinic immersed me in the battlefield of the South Side of Chicago. The march prepared me for the chaos that awaited me in the... (shrink)

This contribution provides a brief commentary to Bakker’s and Lelkes’s plea to emotion researchers to engage more thoroughly with research on affective polarisation. I begin by summarising some of the main arguments and suggestions developed by Bakker and Lelkes and then make a number of suggestions that focus on how accounting for discrete emotions can make a particularly valuable contribution to affective polarisation research. The first suggestion pertains to the intentionality of emotions, and specifically of political emotions in (...) intergroup contexts. The second suggestion emphasises that emotions convey meaning about social relations that is considerably richer than the information contained in affect alone. The third proposition highlights that relations characterised by discrete emotions also reveal information about the cultural value and appropriateness of these relations. Finally, I discuss how discrete emotions specifically contribute to processes of community building and social exclusion. (shrink)