Enthusiasm drives political involvement while anxiety drives attention

Evidence

However, there is some work on the role of emotions in candidate perception and voting (e.g., Abelson, Kinder, Peters, & Fiske, 1982; Glaser & Salovey, 1998). Marcus and MacKuen (Reading 9) intriguingly find that anxiety stimulates attention and learning during a political election and that enthusiasm influences campaign involvement and candidate selection. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 121

First, we demonstrate that fear (anxiety) and enthusiasm are distinctive emotional responses to political candidates and thereby eliminate a simple “valence” view of emotions. Second, we observe that people’s anxiety and enthusiasm varies with political events and is not a permanent feature of individual personalities. Third, we consider evidence that anxiety and enthusiasm play distinctive parts in the voting decision. Fourth, we show explicitly that anxiety, rather than enthusiasm, moves people to learn policy-related information about candidates. More generally, we argue that anxiety works cooperatively with learning to shift attention to political matters and to diminish reliance on habit in voting decisions. Finally, in a parallel analysis, we show that enthusiasm, rather than anxiety, has a distinct effect on political involvement. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1661

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to affective intelligence theory in political science and the emotion-and-attentioning literature from the Deep Listening reading. — connects to: Positive campaigns suppress deliberation while anxiety-inducing ones promote it. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 1747; Anxiety drives careful attention while enthusiasm drives emotional involvement. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 1741
• DEFINE: Sets up the dual-emotion framework that distinguishes anxiety’s learning function from enthusiasm’s mobilization function.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 121; John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1661