Putting the affect into affective polarisation.

While many believe that affective polarisation poses a significant threat to democratic stability, the definition and operationalisation of the concept varies greatly. This leads to conceptual slippage as well as imprecise tests of the causes and consequences of affective polarisation. In order to clearly identify and target its micro-foundations, we must understand the degree to which political divides are, in fact, affective. In this paper, we do so. We begin by delineating affective polarisation, a social divide that is purportedly distinct from policy-based disagreements. Subsequently, we explore the influence of emotions in politics, including how affect is conceptualised within the framework of polarisation. Where possible, our literature review is supplemented with analyses of existing datasets to support our points. The paper concludes by proposing a series of questions emotion researchers could address in the study of polarisation.

Tone in politics is not systematically related to macro trends, ideology, or experience.

What explains the variation in tone in politics? Different literatures argue that changes in the tone of politicians reflect changes in the economy, general language, well-being, or ideology. So far, these claims have been empirically tested only in isolation, in single country studies, or with a small subset of indicators. We offer an overarching view by modelling the use of tone in European national parliaments in 7 countries across 30 years. Using a semi-supervised sentiment-topic model to measure polarity and arousal in legislative debates, we show in a preregistered multiverse analysis that the tone in legislative debates is not systematically related to previously claimed factors. We also replicate the absence of such systematic relationships using national leader speeches and parties' election manifestos. There is also no universal trend towards more negativity or emotionality in political language. Overall, our results highlight the importance of multi-lingual and cross-country multiverse analyses for generalizing findings on emotions in politics.

Inconsistent and very weak evidence for a direct association between childhood personality and adult ideology.

OBJECTIVE: We add depth and breadth to the study of the childhood personality-adult ideology link with additional data, measures, and measurement approaches. BACKGROUND: Past research in (political) psychology has put forward that individual differences in psychological needs shape ideology. Most evidence supporting this claim is cross-sectional. Two previous longitudinal studies showed preliminary evidence that childhood personality traits linked to negativity bias correlate with political ideology in adulthood, yet these studies have limitations. METHODS: We report the results from two longitudinal studies (combined N = 13,822) conducted in the United Kingdom that measure childhood personality (5-11 years old) and political ideology from puberty (age 16) to early (age 26) and middle adulthood (age 42). RESULTS: We find very weak and inconsistent evidence that childhood personality traits related to negativity bias are directly associated with general conservatism, social conservatism, or economic conservatism across different stages of adulthood. Across the board, Bayes Factors most often indicate strong evidence for the null hypothesis. CONCLUSION: We offer evidence that the results of previous research are not as robust or as consistent as scholars in the extant literature presume. Our findings call for more, not less, research on the link between childhood personality and political ideology.

Facing emotional politicians: Do emotional displays of politicians evoke mimicry and emotional contagion?

Emotional displays of politicians can be persuasive. According to prominent psychological theories, we can easily "catch" the emotional displays of others through mimicry and emotional contagion. Do these processes work for politicians too, or is it conditional on what voters think of the politician making the display? In a preregistered within-subjects laboratory experiment, participants observed images of neutral and manipulated emotional displays of politicians. We measured emotional mimicry (facial electromyography) and emotional contagion (self-reports). We do not find evidence for the matched motor hypothesis. Our findings are in line with the emotional mimicry in social context model. Namely, we find that the happy displays of in-party politicians elicit congruent facial activity (a positive facial index). Furthermore, the displays of the out-party politicians do not elicit mimicry, but instead our findings suggest a reactive response: Participants smiled in response to angry out-party politicians. The self-reported emotions indicated a small effect of emotional contagion. Taken together, our study provides insights in how voters are emotionally affected by politicians' emotional displays and highlights that our polarized prior beliefs color our emotional responses to politics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The complicated but solvable threat-politics relationship.

Popular models on the threat-politics association suggest that threats cause right-wing political preferences. Failed replications, crossnational variation, and examples of threats causing left-wing preferences suggest this relationship is more complicated. We introduce a model of the reciprocal threat-politics relationship that reconciles prior conflicting findings and raises new questions.

Yikes! Are we disgusted by politicians?

In the political domain, disgust is primarily portrayed as an emotion that explains individual differences in pathogen avoidance. We hypothesized that political rhetoric accusing opponents of moral transgressions also elicits disgust responses. In this registered report, we present the results from a laboratory experiment. We find that participants self-report higher disgust and have stronger physiological (Levator labii) responses to pictures of out-party leaders compared with in-party leaders. Participants also report higher disgust in response to moral violations of in-party leaders. There is more suggestive evidence that in-party leaders evoke more labii activity when they commit moral violations than when out-party leaders do. The impact of individual differences in moral disgust and partisanship strength is very limited to absent. Intriguingly, on average, the physiological and self-reported disgust responses to the treatment are similar, but individuals differ in whether their response is physiological or cognitive. This motivates further theorizing regarding the concordance of emotional responses.

Conservatives and liberals have similar physiological responses to threats.

About a decade ago, a study documented that conservatives have stronger physiological responses to threatening stimuli than liberals. This work launched an approach aimed at uncovering the biological roots of ideology. Despite wide-ranging scientific and popular impact, independent laboratories have not replicated the study. We conducted a pre-registered direct replication (n = 202) and conceptual replications in the United States (n = 352) and the Netherlands (n = 81). Our analyses do not support the conclusions of the original study, nor do we find evidence for broader claims regarding the effect of disgust and the existence of a physiological trait. Rather than studying unconscious responses as the real predispositions, alignment between conscious and unconscious responses promises deeper insights into the emotional roots of ideology.

Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches.

There is some evidence that liberal politicians use more complex language than conservative politicians. This evidence, however, is based on a specific set of speeches of US members of Congress and UK members of Parliament. This raises the question whether the relationship between ideology and linguistic complexity is a more general phenomenon or specific to this small group of politicians. To address this question, this paper analyzes 381,609 speeches given by politicians from five parliaments, by twelve European prime ministers, as well as speeches from party congresses over time and across countries. Our results replicate and generalize earlier findings: speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties. Economic left-right differences, on the other hand, are not systematically linked to linguistic complexity.