Emotions In Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The role of emotions in politics is pervasive. In political psychology, a number of studies show that emotional reactions have an impact on the way citizens organize information, learn facts about politics, form impressions, and make political decisions. Parallel lines of work have developed in political sociology, examining macro-level emotions in social processes such as traumas, collective action, social movements, rituals, and institutions. Cognitive studies in psychology also make explicit the affective content of social information, concluding that cognition and affect are interdependent in such a way that virtually all things people think about have an affective reaction linked to them. Neuroscience provides similar evidence challenging the traditional dichotomy of feeling and thinking. Affective reactions are basic and inescapable, and there can be no decision making without emotions.

Definition Of Emotions

Research on emotions has not settled on a commonly accepted definition of the term that is used loosely and interchangeably with terms such as feelings, sentiments, affect, mood, and passions. The word emotion originates from the Latin emovere, which means “to excite, to move, to agitate,” and in common language we refer to emotions such as love, hate, anger, fear, hope, and pride. Feelings refers to experiences or sensory impressions such as warmth, cold, or pain or more general affective states such as desire, boredom, or depression. Because every person experiences and interprets the world differently, feelings are personal and biographical interpretations of sensations. Emotions are displays of feeling, and because they are expressions, they can be bound to social expectations and can be genuine or disingenuous. Emotions have intentionality; they are in other words about something, and they can be behaviorally disorganized at extreme states such as terror, panic, and rage. Emotions are also acute and momentary, and as such they are distinguished from sentiments, which indicate a complex disposition originating from feelings, involve an attitude or judgment, and imply action. Emotions result from appraisals and evaluations of the environment and are not habitual or cyclical. Therefore, they are differentiated from moods, which refers to pervasive and emotional states or states of mind. Affect is an abstract, nonconscious experience of stimulation comprising physiological responses aroused by the environment, which determines the intensity of feelings. Affect precedes consciousness and will, connects our bodies with the environment, and influences awareness. It is often regarded as one of the three areas of human mental functions, together with motivation and cognition. Passion is also often contrasted with reason and refers to the deeply stirring and intense feelings, convictions, affections, and desires that are often uncontrollable. The word originates from the Latin-pati, which means “to suffer,” but in political science it often refers to anger, love, or fear.

Differences Of Kind: The Flavors Of Emotionality

While positive emotions are experienced in a very similar fashion, negative emotions are differentiated into the dimensions of aversion and anxiety. Aversion signifies an internal negative reaction, a dislike for something, whereas anxiety refers to an unpleasant emotional state with qualities of uneasiness, apprehension, and distress, which often originates from indefinite sources. As Jennifer Ler ner and Dacher Keltner (2001) argue, individuals respond with aversion and anxiety under different conditions. Feelings of aversion and frustration are activated in familiar but punishing environments. The counterpoint to aversion is enthusiasm and satisfaction, generated by familiar but rewarding environments. Anxiety and unease are produced when something unexpected and unfamiliar takes place to which the individual cannot effectively respond. When the response is effective, it generates feelings of relaxation.

The Study Of Emotions In Politics

In political science, research on emotions has been gaining increasing attention. Robert Abelson and his colleagues (1982) provide survey evidence that positive and negative emotional responses to political leaders, such as hope, enthusiasm, anger, and fear, shape their electability, after controlling for candidate traits and party identification effects. Donald Kinder (1994) shows that these emotional reactions are prevalent not only among sophisticated voters but also among the inattentive public. Dennis G. Sullivan (1996) explores emotionality in different countries. Their experimental studies find that citizens distinguish happiness, anger, and fear when observing facial displays of political leaders in a very similar fashion. For example, citizens in the United States distinguished correctly the emotions expressed by image-only videos of former president Ronald Reagan, separating happiness from anger or fear. Gestures of happiness, anger, and fear were also identified correctly by French citizens when they evaluated facial displays of former French president Jacques Chirac.

Emotions also have significant effects on political judgments, starting from the style in which citizens process information all the way to how political decisions are made. George E. Marcus and his colleagues (2000) study affective intelligence, the dynamics between feeling and thinking, and their interaction to produce thoughtful and attentive citizens. While responses to familiar political objects such as candidates, parties, and issues are habitual, responses to novel stimuli are provoked on the basis of an unconscious learning system stimulated by anxiety. Their evidence shows that mild levels of political anxiety can inspire learning and information seeking and diminish reliance on prior opinions and stereotypes. Along the lines of this paradigm, Richard Lau and David P. Redlawsk (2006) use dynamic process tracing in political campaign environments to demonstrate how feelings of anxiety, anger, or enthusiasm toward preferred political candidates shape the processing of information and influence learning. As a side note, affective intelligence should not be confused with Daniel Goleman’s (1995) psychological theory of emotional intelligence, which studies the ability of individuals to perceive and express emotion accurately, to use emotion when thinking, and to manage it appropriately for their personal or professional growth.

Studies of motivated reasoning examine the role of affect in the elaboration and organization of political information. In a series of experiments, Milton Lodge and Charles Taber (2000) show that people receive emotional cues from social stimuli that they automatically process as subjective evaluations. Individuals react cognitively and affectively to cues such as a leader’s performance, political issues, natural disasters, or crisis events. These findings are in line with Robert Abelson’s (1963) “hot cognition” hypothesis. All social and political concepts are laden with affect as a positive or negative tag that is stored in memory independent of its cognitive content and comes to mind effortlessly and automatically. When citizens are asked to provide an evaluation, “how do I feel?” heuristics are activated, and their feelings toward the object come automatically to mind, influencing the judgment process.

Turning to the consequences of emotionality, Leonie Huddy and her colleagues (2002) study the role of anxiety and anger under the threat-generating context of a terrorist attack. They find that fear prevents cognitive processing of information because attention is focused on the threatening source instead of other aspects of the environment. In addition, threat shapes personal behaviors designed to minimize personal exposure to terrorism. Ted Brader (2006) studies political communication in the context of emotionality, focusing on the enthusiasm and fear stimulated by visual and audio cues of political advertising. His experimental and content analysis data demonstrate a significant impact of the affective content of political advertising on participation and electoral choice. Tereza Capelos and Joshua Smilovitz (2008) extend the study of emotions in the context of international mediation, showing that perceptions of negative emotionality among disputants influence the tactics that mediators use.

On The Measurement Of Emotions In Politics

The accurate measurement of emotional reactions to political stimuli is not an easy task. Political scientists often work with subjective reports of affective reactions where direct physiological measures are not possible. As W. Russell Neuman and his colleagues (2007) explain, early survey sampling studies adopted a discrete ter ms approach and asked open-ended questions about likes and dislikes to approximate emotionality. Affect checklists of the basic emotional reactions identified by Ira Roseman (1984) in his structural theory of emotion were also used to select the basic items of anger, fear, pride, and hope that have been present in the American National Election Studies since the 1980s. A second group of studies adopt valence models. They treat emotional reactions as a single valence system with a positive or negative evaluation on an approach-avoidance continuum and use feeling thermometer items to record overall evaluations. Circumplex models offer a third alternative by adding an arousal dimension to the bipolar positive-negative continuum. The three approaches are not mutually exclusive, but since they rely on self-reports they share a limitation: they can identify the evaluative content but not the physiological changes or unconscious emotional experience, which cannot be verbalized.

New studies combine the traditional measures with measures of reaction time and also psychophysiological measures such as galvanic skin response, measures of heart rate, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and facial electromyography. While these techniques do not provide information regarding the processes that are responsible for the emotion generation, they can provide a good indicator of emotional intensity. Traditional and new methodological perspectives add to the systematic study of this complex and challenging topic and provide opportunities for analysis and reflection of the neurological, personal, group, and societal levels of emotionality in politics.

Bibliography:

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Abelson, Robert P., Donald R. Kinder, Mark D. Peters, and Susan T. Fiske. “Affective and Semantic Components in Political Person Perception.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42, no. 4 (1982): 619–663.
Brader,Ted. Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Capelos,Tereza, and Joshua Smilovitz. “As a Matter of Feeling: Emotions and the Choice of Mediator Tactics in International Mediation.” Hague Journal of Diplomacy 3 (2008): 63–85.
Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam, 1995.
Huddy, Leonie, Stanley Feldman,Tereza Capelos, and Colin Provost. “The Consequences of Terrorism: Disentangling the Effects of Personal and National Threat.” Political Psychology 23, no. 3 (2002): 485–510.
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Marcus, George E.,W. Russell Neuman, and Michael B. McKuen. Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Neuman,W. Russell, George E. Marcus, Ann N. Crigler, and Michael B. MacKuen. The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
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Sullivan, Dennis G. “Emotional Responses to the Nonverbal Behavior of French and American Political Leaders.” Political Behavior 18 (1996): 311–325.