Appeals to Ethos and Pathos in Post-Crisis Communication: A Case Study of Press Conferences Handling Tianjin Blasts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<p>This study focuses on the rhetorical appeals in post-crisis communication, and analyzes the influence of dynamically changing context on the speakers’ choice of rhetorical means. Aristotle’s three important rhetorical appeals-ethos, pathos and logos are investigated in the transcript of 14 press conferences handling Tianjin blasts. The changes in speakers’ rhetorical appeals are explored in relation to the changing context in the evolving crisis. In post-crisis press conferences, the speakers most frequently used appeals to ethos and pathos to persuade. Specifically, when appealing to ethos, the speakers usually manipulated discursive resources to construct their credibility, expertise, and similarity with the audience; when appealing to pathos, such emotions of the public as the feelings of depression, need for appreciation, and expectation for a thorough investigation of the blasts were addressed. In addition, as the crisis unfolded, the context for communication was dynamically changing. There was a tendency for speakers to adapt their rhetorical appeals to the dynamically changing context.</p>
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".