Physiological Arousal and Political Beliefs
Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2014 papers
Abstract
It is by now well known that political attitudes can be affected by emotions. Most earlier studies have focused on emotions generated by some political event (e.g., terrorism or increased immigration). However, the methods used in previous efforts have made it difficult to untangle the various causal pathways that might link emotions to political beliefs. In contrast, we focus on emotions incidental (i.e., irrelevant) to the decision process, allowing us to cleanly trace and estimate the effect of experimentally induced anxiety on political beliefs. Further, we build upon innovative new work that links physiological reactivity ( H atemi, M c D ermott, E aves, K endler, & N eale, 2013; O xley et al., 2008a) to attitudes by using skin conductance reactivity as a measure of emotional arousal. We found that anxiety—generated by a video stimulus—significantly affected physiological arousal as measured by tonic skin‐conductance levels, and that higher physiological reactivity predicted more anti‐immigration attitudes. We show that physiological reactivity mediated the relationship between anxiety and political attitudes.
Related Papers
- → Intrusive versus deliberate rumination in posttraumatic growth across US and Japanese samples(2008)197 cited
- → Rumination activity of dairy cows in the 24 hours before and after calving(2014)78 cited
- Validation of rumination measurement equipment and the role of rumination in dairy cow time budgets(2009)
- Study Regarding Rumination Behavior in Cattle – Position Adopted by Cows During Rumination Process(2010)
- → Effects of ruminative response styles and cognitive control on depression in university students(2019)