Crises and disasters are emotional events. The combination of intense media coverage and worried citizens, create a system stress that decision makers must handle. This paper builds on a doctoral dissertation analyzing how different types of focusing events affect three societal arenas. The aim of this paper is to summarize the results from three studies on emotional and cognitive reactions following four crises and disasters. Citizens’ reactions were studied in a laboratory experiment (N = 30), the media arena was studied through a quantitative content analysis of news texts and pictures during the first two weeks following the events (N = 498), and the Parliamentary debates (N = 132) during nine months were analyzed. The results contribute to the discussion on how our emotions and cognition work together in crisis situations. In the light of the three studies, the results highlight how emotional reactions decrease on the formal political arena. Even though citizens and the media react strongly to focusing events, emotional reactions in the Parliamentary arena were rather mild with no particular blame gaming.
