In Contemporary Rhetoric(No. 3, 2022), Liu Yameng argues that the contemporary western world is experiencing an "emotional turn" in a double sense: in the public sphere, the advent of the "post-truth" era and social media's dominant role in communication practice make emotion become the prominent or main means to shape public opinions; in the academic field, with a continued surge in interest in the study of emotion, it has become a new trend sweeping through social sciences and humanities following the "linguistic turn" and "cultural turn".To propose a broader historical perspective on the origin of the "emotional turn", to use conceptual resources offered by the turn to examine and renew the emotion-related traditional discourse in rhetoric, and to make new and explanatory theoretical interpretations of the current popular modes of communication in public discourse -- these are the new research directions that scholars are currently trying to explore to make rhetoric conform to this new context.