The emotion isn’t the manipulation. Being carried by it before you notice, is.
Persuasion research studies emotion as something done to an audience. Emotional control is the other half of that transaction, the target’s own capacity to catch a triggered response before it does the deciding for them.
Psychologist James Gross’s process model maps five points in an emotion’s timeline where regulation can happen, from choosing or shaping the situation itself through to modulating the response after it has already appeared. His research found a consistent pattern: strategies that intervene early, reframing a trigger before the emotion fully forms, reduce the actual experience of the emotion, while strategies that intervene late, suppressing an emotion already underway, only mask its expression and carry a physiological cost. Catching it early beats gritting your teeth after the fact.
Misinformation research gives this a sharper, more applied edge. A 2022 study by Roozenbeek, Traberg, and van der Linden names “emotional language use” as one of six recurring manipulation techniques found in misinformation, content deliberately worded to trigger outrage or fear ahead of scrutiny. Their inoculation studies expose people to weakened versions of the tactic in advance, on the logic borrowed from vaccination, so the real thing gets recognised and discounted rather than felt and obeyed. That is the more literal sense of practising the skill: not suppressing emotion generally, but learning to spot the moment a message was built to produce one.
Source: Gross, J.J. (1998), Review of General Psychology; Roozenbeek, Traberg & van der Linden (2022), Royal Society Open Science.