Police’s discursive strategies of regulating citizens’ emotions in the Chinese interactional context

The study uses a discourse-analytic approach to explore Chinese police’s discursive strategies of regulating citizens’ negative emotions during police-citizen interactions. Through analyzing natural-occurring conversations from two famous Chinese police documentaries, we find that the police’s extrinsic emotion regulation targets at six types of negative emotions, which can be realized through four explicit discursive strategies, including comforting, distracting, negotiating, and showing empathy, as well as six implicit strategies, namely delegitimating, hope-building, evoking the influence of family bonds, displaying good intent, pinpointing misunderstanding, and affirming. Given the persuasive and educational orientation of Chinese policing, these strategies closely align with appeals to pathos, logos, and ethos. This study offers insight into the growing literature on extrinsic emotion regulation in the context of police-citizen interactions.