Expressing Emotions in Times of COVID-19: A Melodramatic Approach to the Deterioration of Social Relations based on Visual Motifs in the News Programs on the Spanish national broadcaster (RTVE)

Abstract

Based on the premise that the restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a contraction in the range of emotions that could be expressed in social settings, this article examines the relationship between this reduction and the decline in culturally coded ways of communicating emotions in the public sphere. The analysis focuses on images accompanying news reports broadcast on the evening news on RTVE’s La 1 channel in 2020 and 2021, taking an iconographic and iconological approach aimed at identifying the formal mutations of the most significant visual motifs (Balló, 2000) in affective terms that are used most often in coverage of the pandemic. The study also analyses iconographic variants found in images associated with other news stories whenever these can be understood as consequences of the pandemic’s impact on other events in the news during this period. Identifying signs of a possible epistemic crisis evident in the manifest absence of the representation of certain emotions, this analysis interprets the affective implications of this absence through a comparison with examples from cinematic melodrama, a genre grounded in emotional interaction.