Political emotion splits into anxiety and enthusiasm systems that adapt to campaign pressure

Evidence

The empirical work in both mood psychology and neurophysiology indicates that we should expect two types of emotional response, which we call “anxiety” and “enthusiasm.” Our first empirical steps show that political candidates elicit these two sorts of responses in the mass public. Here we extend work already done (Abelson et al., 1982; Marcus, 1988b) by adding two new twists. First, we observe that the “dual-system” view of emotional response stands up under different measurement techniques. In so doing, we eliminate the alternative “valence” hypothesis about the structure of emotional response. Second, we observe that this dual system is not stable but instead reacts to the psychic pressure of the campaign. Thus we support an understanding that emotional responses are functionally focused, with one system alert to intrusive signals of novelty and threat and the other system monitoring the success of current behavior. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1671

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the two-system (anxiety/enthusiasm) model of political emotion and its empirically demonstrated variability, rejecting the simpler valence dimension.
• XREF: 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; Threshold events can propagate collective political emotions — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1955