The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences

We report evidence that individual-level variation in people’s physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations. These findings are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions but are unique in incorporating findings on variation in directed attention that make it possible to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political

The Political Left Rolls with the Good; The Political Right Confronts the Bad: Physiology and Cognition in Politics

We report evidence that individual-level variation in people\u27s physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations. These findings are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions but are unique in incorporating findings on variation in directed attention that make it possible to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political

The Physiology of Political Participation

Political involvement varies markedly across people. Traditional explanations for this variation tend to rely on demographic variables and self-reported, overtly political concepts. In this article, we expand the range of possible explanatory variables by hypothesizing that a correlation exists between political involvement and physiological predispositions. We measure physiology by computing the degree to which electrodermal activity changes on average when a participant sequentially views a full range of differentially valenced stimuli. Our findings indicate that individuals with higher electrodermal responsiveness are also more likely to participate actively in politics. This relationship holds even after the effects of traditional demographic variables are taken into account, suggesting that physiological responsiveness independently contributes to a fuller understanding of the underlying sources of variation in political involvement

The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences

We report evidence that individual-level variation in people’s physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations. These findings are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions but are unique in incorporating findings on variation in directed attention that make it possible to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political

Emotion and Public Attention to Political Issues

Which mechanisms underlie the orientation of public attention to political issues? Though research on media agenda-setting has been one of the most successful enterprises in political communication and behavior, little is known of the actual processes that drive this phenomenon. I hypothesize that inherent in all environmental stimuli is emotional information, and that it is this information that drives the linkages between media and public agendas. Using a combination of large-scale automated content analyses of several political issues in the New York Times and public search attention data, I demonstrate that negatively-valenced and arousing coverage work concurrently with the volume of news reports to drive public attention to issues. Moreover, for issues that typically receive lower levels of media coverage, the emotionality of media reports plays an especially important role in predicting the extent to which the public orients attention to those issues. By unpacking the black box of public attention, this research provides a fuller picture of how and why the media are able to set the agenda, and demonstrates how even in the absence of extensive media coverage, the public can and will pay attention to policy issues on the basis of the emotional content of issue-relevant media messages. Adviser: John R. Hibbin

REFFECT: Stata module to compute Pearson's r Effect Size Computation for Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)

Pearson's r effect size computations for main effects and interactions after running anova.Pearson's r, effect size, interactions, ANOVA