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Roundtable: The Study of Emotion in Political Communication
In his opening commentary to this issue's roundtable, George Marcus notes that the key divide between early and contemporary research on the role of emotion in politics was forged by neuroscience. Where once researchers imagined the difference between reason and emotion spatially (the former lodged in the head, the latter in the gut), new research by neuroscientists suggested that the difference was primarily temporal: humans apparently process information first through largely preconscious emotional systems and only then through conscience systems.
This insight changed the key question entirely, from either emotion or reason to the interaction between the two in time. With his colleagues Russell Neuman and Michael MacKuen, Marcus produced some of the first studies on political decision-making to borrow from this new insight. Perhaps their most famous finding--certainly the one that has stuck in my mind--is that anxiety appears to provoke deliberative reflection. In other words, people apparently engage in intentional reflection when they are emotionally uncomfortable-.
Contributors to our roundtable take the story from there. They describe a field of study that has mushroomed in the past decade, moving more deeply into considerations of voter behavior (a longstanding question in this research) to a broader consideration of emotion in a variety of political situations.
Ted Brader reports that research subsequent to Marcus et. al.'s study largely confirms their "Affective Intelligence Theory" (AIT): emotions do tend to anticipate political decisions, and negative emotions seem to prompt intentional reflection. Brader notes that some research has contradicted parts of AIT, and a key motivation of recent research has been to iron out these differences.
David Redlawsk's work on voter decision-making is a case in point. Redlawsk combines AIT with Milton Lodge's motivated reasoning theory to sketch a theory of voting behavior that stresses the elements of time and context. He and his co-authors argue that motivated reasoning may initially inhibit voters from considering new information, but that if more negative information prompting negative emotions accumulates, voters may reach an "affective tipping point" beyond which they reflect more on incoming information.
Brader points to a second, growing body of research that moves beyond considerations of voter behavior into previously unexplored territory.
Rose McDermott and Jack Glaser's work are examples of this kind of research.
McDermott discusses a body of work on the influence of emotion on leaders (rather than voters), particularly in the context of international relations. She notes that this research challenges the assumption that emotion inevitably leads leaders astray in their decision-making. Her own research, as well as that of others, indicates that emotion can have salutary influences on leader decision-making. If this influence is not automatic, it nonetheless indicates that the role of emotions in decision-making is more complicated and variable than previously appreciated.
Glaser introduces an entirely new issue: the emotionality of candidates. Though little research has been done on this question, Glaser notes several intriguing anecdotes: Edward Muskie's sobbing during the 1972 campaign, Michael Dukakis' inability to emote during the 1988 campaign, and Ronald Reagan's ability to project just the right emotional tone in political situations. Such anecdotes, Glaser argues, ndicate that this an area ripe for further inquiry. He concludes that one fruitful path may lie in the investigation of emotional "display rules" operative in a given situation.
Though he is a trained social psychologist, Glaser's notion of "display rules" points toward the potential for a sociology of emotions.
Mabel Berezin, a political sociologist at Cornell University, makes this subject more explicit. I stumbled onto Berezin's work when I discovered a large and vibrant literature on the role of emotions in social movements. Berezin observes that "the central problem for [sociologists of emotion] is the identification of the social mechanisms that transpose a feeling state into an emotional action." In other words, how are emotional states transformed into social objects--rituals, practices, symbols, events, and the like?
Such questions move the study of emotion and politics outward from individual cognition--where it has resided in the field of political communication--into tantalizing new areas of thinking and research.
I hope you enjoy these essays as much as I have, and let me once again thank the contributors for their generosity and hard work.
ROUNDTABLE CONTRIBUTIONS
Ted Brader, "Affective Intelligence and Beyond"
David Redlawsk, "Emotions and the Processes of Voter Decision Making"
Rose McDermott, "Emotion in Elite Decision Making"
Jack Glaser, "Candidate Emotionality"
Mabel Berezin, "Acts of Translation"
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