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Many studies have examined characteristic verbal aspects of Donald J. Trump's political communication, from his authoritarian rhetoric to his preference for short words and simple sentences, as expressions of his populism. This article focuses on his use of non-verbal voice quality. In analyzing the "Trump rallies" and other materials from his successful campaigning before the 2016 United States presidential election, I argue that Trump's evocative and meaningful uses of pitch, amplitude, speech rate, rhythm, and other vocal measures combine to make his paralanguage exceptionally and counter-normatively informal, and that this informality amplifies his explicitly populist messaging. I conclude by suggesting that Trump's informal voice solves an important problem for him: It allows him to express his populism with a deeply personal undertone, and thereby potentially to make his claims to popular identification ring intuitively true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The humanities are centrally concerned with such human subjectivity—such thinking, feeling, and wondering—as goes into the appreciation of a painting or the absorbed and responsive reading of a novel. It is often argued that the intrinsic subjectivity of these experiences renders them inaccessible to objective science, which seeks to avoid subjectivity. However, this fallacious argument confuses an ontological and an epistemic sense of the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. The subjectivity of "thinking, feeling, and wondering" describes the mode of existence of these mental states, whereas the objectivity of science describes a mode of investigation, and it is in fact very possible to investigate human mental life by means of objective methods. This article expounds the fallacy and examines its appearances in recent scholarly writings against the use of objective methods in the humanities. The fallacy, as is argued, promotes a widespread misconception that the use of objective methods in the humanities would entail a discounting, or "reduction," of human subjectivity. By countering this misconception, this article aims to encourage humanists who are drawn to empirical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the evil voice in the horror film "The Exorcist" by William Friedkin. Topics include a description of the voice of the evil possessed adolescent girl in the film named Regan MacNeil, the experimental efforts of sound designer Ron Nagle and his team to find the right voice for possessed Regan, the application of the theory of conceptual metaphor to voices in popular fictions and the reason for the notoriety of the 1973 film adaptation of "The Exorcist."

The article discusses what is referred to as evil laughter within U.S. popular culture, including in the video game "Super Mario Bros." and the American film "Predator," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. An overview of the social aspects of laughter in popular culture, including the use of evil laughter to depict the antisociality of fictional villains, is provided.

• Many villainous fictional characters are popular among audiences. • We investigated whether personality contributes to villainous character preferences and affinities. • Immoral personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) robustly predicted villainous character preferences and affinities in a North American sample (N = 1805). Paradoxically, villainous characters in film, literature, and video games can be very popular. Previous research in the traditions of cognitive media theory and affective disposition theory has assumed that villainous characters can inspire positive engagement only when audiences discount the villains' immorality by focusing on positive traits or mitigating circumstances. Challenging this assumption, we argue that audiences with a conventionally immoral personality profile may come to engage positively with villainous characters because they share the villains' immoral outlook to some significant degree. We find robust support for this hypothesis in a North American sample (N = 1805) by comparing respondents' survey scores on the Dark Triad of personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) with their professed degrees of villain sympathy, identification, fascination, empathy, and enjoyment. We reject a competing hypothesis that such positive forms of engagement with villainous characters will be best predicted by respondents' agentic values, such as autonomy and competence. Our results support a need to consider personality as a basic determinant of character preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One explanation for why people engage in frightening fictional experiences is that these experiences can act as simulations of actual experiences from which individuals can gather information and model possible worlds. Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study (n = 310) tested whether past and current engagement with thematically relevant media fictions, including horror and pandemic films, was associated with greater preparedness for and psychological resilience toward the pandemic. Since morbid curiosity has previously been associated with horror media use during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also tested whether trait morbid curiosity was associated with pandemic preparedness and psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that fans of horror films exhibited greater resilience during the pandemic and that fans of "prepper" genres (alien-invasion, apocalyptic, and zombie films) exhibited both greater resilience and preparedness. We also found that trait morbid curiosity was associated with positive resilience and interest in pandemic films during the pandemic. Taken together, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that exposure to frightening fictions allow audiences to practice effective coping strategies that can be beneficial in real-world situations. • Fans of horror films exhibit less psychological distress during COVID-19. • Fans of "prepper" films reported being more prepared for the pandemic. • Morbidly curious people exhibit greater positive resilience during COVID-19. • Morbidly curious people are more interested in pandemic films during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]