The Politics of Emotional Appraisal

• In Event: The Interplay between Emotions and Politics

Abstract

Since the publication of the landmark book "Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment" by George Marcus, W. Russell Newman, and Michael McKuen (2000), there has been an explosion of research on emotions in politics. We now know substantially more about the political causes and consequences of anxiety (Albertson and Gadarian 2015), resentment (Cramer 2016), fear (Pearlman 2016), disgust (Petersen et al. 2020), anger (Webster 2020), hope (Just et al. 2007), envy (McClendon 2018), and many more emotions. Underpinning this research are psychological theories of emotional appraisal, which argue that how we feel about a situation depends on how we think about it. For instance, anxiety and fear are activated when we perceive that we are under threat, while shame is activated when we perceive that we have broken a social norm.

Typically, the appraisal “structure” of an emotion is viewed by political scientists as a jumping off point rather than an assumption to be tested. However, the collective and moralistic nature of politics offer reasons to think politics could transform the connections between appraisals and emotions. To what extent does the appraisal “structure” of emotions, as theorized by psychologists, apply in political situations? Put another way, how does politics change the appraisal structure of emotions? A direct and comprehensive test of whether psychological theories of emotional appraisal obtain in politics is a necessary first step on the path to answering these questions.

In this paper, we undertake such a test using two novel vignette experiments with factorial designs. The vignettes, which are based on the appraisal theory of psychologist Ira Roseman, focus on political scenarios and vary five appraisal dimensions: motivational state, situational state, agency, power, and certainty. In his prior work, Roseman used vignettes of non-political scenarios to show that these five dimensions were predictive of sixteen discrete emotions (1991). By replicating his work with political scenarios, we will offer an initial assessment of the extent to which politics transforms how emotional appraisal happens.

Authors

• Christopher Ojeda, University of California, Merced

• Elaine K. Denny, University of California, Merced

• April Westmark