About This Project

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Political scientists have long focused on reason as the primary factor when explaining why individuals hold liberal or conservative positions. Recent studies, however, indicate that other factors —personality, morals, and emotions— influence people’s political ideologies as well. Contemporary work that focuses on the influence of emotion on ideology is breaking new ground by empirically measuring emotional response as revealed through autonomic nervous system activity (e.g., sweat gland activity). This work suggests that an individual’s response to frightening or disgusting stimuli is related to his or her ideology, suggesting that reason alone does not tell the whole story. People’s emotions seem to play an important role too, but this relationship is not yet well understood.

What is the significance of this project?

Liberals and conservatives are more polarized now than they have been at any point in the last several decades. Why is this polarization so severe? Why do liberals and conservatives have such a hard time talking to each other? Emotion may be part of the problem. We know, for example, that heightened emotional states affect political attitudes. But we don’t know the extent to which politics influences people’s emotions. To explore the emotional impact of politics, we measure the extent to which people experience emotion when simply confronted with ideological terms. If we find that people have strong emotional reactions to such an everyday occurrence, it may be the case that emotion plays a larger role in ideological preferences – and political polarization – than once thought.

What are the goals of the project?

Our primary goal in the proposed study is to examine individuals’ emotional responses to ideological terms. We plan to recruit a community sample of 150 adult participants. Each participant will complete an experiment in which they will be asked to write about what the word conservative or liberal means to them. During the experiment, we will measure second by second changes in heart rate and skin conductance level – measures of autonomic nervous system activity that have been commonly used as indicators of negative emotion. This methodology will allow us to examine whether the presentation of a simple ideological term leads to significant increases in negative emotion. We will also be able to conduct analyses examining which types of individuals respond with the strongest emotions.