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"Confronting Many Roles of Emotion in Political Communication"
by George Marcus
Introducing a forum on the role of emotion in political communications affords me the opportunity to remark on the accelerating trajectory of research on emotion in politics. Though I will begin with a brief overview of the earlier stages of that trajectory, my primary focus will be to outline some of the daunting challenges as political science attempts to catch up with the explosion of work in social neuroscience (Cacioppo et al. 1996; Cacioppo et al. 2002) , in general, and in neuroscience on emotion in particular (LeDoux 2000; Damasio 1994; Cacioppo and Gardner 1999; Armony and LeDoux 1997) .
I will not here review the long tradition of treating feeling and thinking as separate and antagonistic that incorporated a clear though not uncontested presumption as to which was the normatively preferred (for those interested, see Marcus, 2002). In this long tradition, even among the variants therein, what was uncontested was the underlying spatial metaphor used to define the critical differences between affect and cognition. Freud's hierarchy is spatial (the sub conscious resides under consciousness) and more generally literature abounds with spatial location metaphors (most commonly, the heart and gut for emotion and the "mind", where else, for reason). It has been common then to see research on affect and cognition focused on what feelings people report about (a candidate, issue, or group) to generate emotion variables that could where then add to ordinary least squares equations adding new variables to the pre-existent beliefs and perceptions as an improvement over models that ignore emotion (Theiss-Morse et al. 1993; Ragsdale 1991; Kuklinski et al. 1991).
With the advent of neuroscience's exploration of emotion, the most radical insight is the replacement of spatial description (even though neuroscience is energetically mapping where in the brain specific functions are located) with temporal dimension taking precedence in importance as distinguishing the relationships between affect and cognition. Figure 1 shows the important (highly simplified) shift:
Figure 1: Time, Affective and Cognitive Processes
Affective appraisals arise far earlier than consciousness but additionally generate appraisals that in addition to generating affective states (e.g., feelings), also shape behavior and control many aspects of consciousness (e.g., attention and modes of decision-making). But, there are two major points to make about the adequacies of this depiction. First, once conscious awareness arises humans can introspect and our ability to name, differentiate, and offer a narrative account of our "feelings" enables an additional impact, how these late (i.e., post 500 millisecond) semantic understandings additionally modify our thoughts, feelings and actions. Second, as depicted in figure 1, affective processes arise very early (and also cycles far more rapidly and frequently than consciousness can manage) but more importantly there are multiple systems active in this pre-conscious swath of the time course--hence making the challenge of modeling multiple, highly inter-connected and dynamic systems each of which has an array of "down stream" (and upstream) impacts on cognition, but even more so on various forms of action, and systems of memory, makes a fuller understanding a yet to be reached state of understanding. So, yes, affect impacts on cognition by shaping consciousness, by modifying when we rely on "automatic" systems to govern our behavior (Bargh and Chartrand 1999) , and when expressed conscious decisions dominate. But further, it is also the case that there are important differences in these multiple systems of perception, appraisal, and control --both conscious and preconscious. The preconscious systems integrate across sensory modalities (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) as does consciousness, but the former has some important differences from consciousness. These are:
1. Preconscious systems are not primarily devoted to providing a comprehensive representational view of the world, while consciousness offer what seems to provide a comprehensive and complete and timely representation.
2. Preconscious systems are expressly normative (hence their dynamic and tight integration with action systems) while consciousness is largely an error correcting system that, as errors are infrequent, offers a representation view of the world less tied to normative expectations and commitments (Gray 2004) .
Hence, mapping affect and cognition (or emotion and reason) means mapping the still as yet undetermined number of preconscious systems, and their multiple converging and diverging responsibilities, their impact on cognition (how, when, and in what manner thinking and introspection matter), and as well the likely but still undetermined impact of our own sense of our feelings then also may impact on what and when we act and how we explain ourselves to ourselves and others. To that we can add still yet another challenge. These systems do not act in isolation, one from another. Depending on the circumstances, and the immediate and interim appraisals, these systems can generate cascades, wherein the upstream appraisals also lead to recruiting multiple other systems (e.g., as when targeted anger at a familiar foe may, depending on the actions of said foe, engage preconscious affective appraisal systems to manage uncertainty, leading to multiple and in this instance contrary impulses). [An aside: Ambivalence is likely to become a far more complicated area of study as the full implications of this point becomes more widely grasped. Ambivalence - that is to say multiple competing systems may generate more than just "positive" versus "negative" approach versus avoidance conflicts, but also, additionally, certainty versus uncertainty conflicts (and no doubt others as well].
So, a forum with talented and diverse set of scholars comes at an opportune time this reflects a growing expansion of the reach of affect beyond its initial exploration of the role of affect in voting and candidate and issue assessment (review of this literature in Marcus, 2000) for evidence of that expansion see also (Redlawsk, 2006) and (Neuman et al., forthcoming) .
George Marcus is Professor of Political Science at Williams College.
REFERENCES
Armony, Jorge L. , and Joseph E. LeDoux. 1997. "How the Brain Processes Emotional Information." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 821:259-70.
Bargh, John A., and Tanya L. Chartrand. 1999. "The Unbearable Automaticity of Being." American Psychologist 54 (7):462-79.
Cacioppo, John T., Gary G. Berntson, Ralph Adolphs, Susan C. Carter, Richard J. Davidson, Martha K. McClintock, Bruce S. McEwen, Michael J. Meaney, Daniel L. Schacter, Esther M. Sternberg, Steve S. Suomi, and Shelley E. Taylor, eds. 2002. Foundations in social neuroscience . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Cacioppo, John T., Gary G. Berntson, and Stephen L. Crites, Jr. 1996. "Social Neuroscience: Principles of Psychophysiological Arousal and Response." In Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles , ed. T. E. Higgins and A. W. Kruglanski. New York: Guildford Press.
Cacioppo, John T., and Wendi L. Gardner. 1999. "Emotion." Annual Review of Psychology 50:191-214.
Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain . New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Gray, Jeffrey Alan. 2004. Consciousness : creeping up on the hard problem . Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Kuklinski, James H., Ellen Riggle, Victor C. Ottati, Norbert Schwarz, and Robert S. Wyer, Jr. 1991. "The Cognitive and Affective Bases of Political Tolerance Judgments." American Journal of Political Science 35 (1):1-27.
LeDoux, Joseph E. 2000. "Emotion Circuits in the Brain." In Annual Reviews Neuroscience . Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews.
Marcus, George E. 2002. The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics . University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Neuman, W. Russell, George E. Marcus, Ann Crigler, and Michael B. MacKuen, eds. forthcoming. The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Thinking and Behavior . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ragsdale, Lyn. 1991. "Strong Feelings: Emotional Responses to Presidents." Political Behavior 13 (1):33-65.
Redlawsk, David P. 2006. Feeling politics : emotion in political information processing . New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth, George E. Marcus, and John L. Sullivan. 1993. "Passion and Reason in Political Life." In Reconsidering the Democratic Public , ed. G. E. Marcus and R. Hanson. University Park, PA: Penn State Press.
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