Emotion Regulation as the Foundation of Political Attitudes: Does Reappraisal Decrease Support for Conservative Policies?

Cognitive scientists, behavior geneticists, and political scientists have identified several ways in which emotions influence political attitudes, and psychologists have shown that emotion regulation can have an important causal effect on physiology, cognition, and subjective experience. However, no work to date explores the possibility that emotion regulation may shape political ideology and attitudes toward policies. Here, we conduct four studies that investigate the role of a particular emotion regulation strategy – reappraisal in particular. Two observational studies show that individual differences in emotion regulation styles predict variation in political orientations and support for conservative policies. In the third study, we experimentally induce disgust as the target emotion to be regulated and show that use of reappraisal reduces the experience of disgust, thereby decreasing moral concerns associated with conservatism. In the final experimental study, we show that use of reappraisal successfully attenuates the relationship between trait-level disgust sensitivity and support for conservative policies. Our findings provide the first evidence of a critical link between emotion regulation and political attitudes

Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks

Happiness and other emotions spread between people in direct contact, but it is unclear whether massive online social networks also contribute to this spread. Here, we elaborate a novel method for measuring the contagion of emotional expression. With data from millions of Facebook users, we show that rainfall directly influences the emotional content of their status messages, and it also affects the status messages of friends in other cities who are not experiencing rainfall. For every one person affected directly, rainfall alters the emotional expression of about one to two other people, suggesting that online social networks may magnify the intensity of global emotional synchrony.Sociolog

Topological Cluster Analysis Reveals the Systemic Organization of the Caenorhabditis elegans Connectome

The modular organization of networks of individual neurons interwoven through synapses has not been fully explored due to the incredible complexity of the connectivity architecture. Here we use the modularity-based community detection method for directed, weighted networks to examine hierarchically organized modules in the complete wiring diagram (connectome) of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) and to investigate their topological properties. Incorporating bilateral symmetry of the network as an important cue for proper cluster assignment, we identified anatomical clusters in the C. elegans connectome, including a body-spanning cluster, which correspond to experimentally identified functional circuits. Moreover, the hierarchical organization of the five clusters explains the systemic cooperation (e.g., mechanosensation, chemosensation, and navigation) that occurs among the structurally segregated biological circuits to produce higher-order complex behaviors

Measuring Ideology, Dimensionality and Polarization in Politics

This dissertation introduces a set of new statistical methods for measuring foundational constructs in political science: ideology, dimensionality and polarization. Using the proposed methods, I offer novel findings on multidimensional ideological characteristics of American Congress. The final chapter provides the first complete description of ideological coalitions in Korean National Assembly from its birth to the present by introducing a new structural model of ideal point estimation for non-voting datasets

Power of Earned Advertising on Social Network Services: A Case Study of Friend Tagging on Facebook

Social network services (SNSs) are now the primary advertisingmedium in terms of both reach and engagement.For both businesses and the SNS providers, it iscrucial to find advertising methods that users perceiveto be valuable. In this paper, we provide an empiricalevidence for the role of different advertising methodson SNSs (i.e. earned vs. paid) on the subjective evaluationof the relative worth of advertising. In particular,we concentrate on the act of ‘friend tagging’ – the conventionof tagging friends in a thread to a brand post –where users inadvertently engage in targeted and personalizedbrand advertising. Through survey analysis,we validate that users find earned advertising less irritatingand more informative, entertaining, and crediblethan paid advertising. We further ask if brands canstrategically craft their content to boost up friend tagging.Using the data collected from Facebook, we analyzewhat drives users to engage in friend tagging andfind that content characteristics such as media attachmentsand posting times affect friend tagging frequency.We conclude that friend tagging is a powerful userinitiatedsolution for matching products with potentialtarget audience

Emotion regulation as the foundation of political attitudes: does reappraisal decrease support for conservative policies?

Cognitive scientists, behavior geneticists, and political scientists have identified several ways in which emotions influence political attitudes, and psychologists have shown that emotion regulation can have an important causal effect on physiology, cognition, and subjective experience. However, no work to date explores the possibility that emotion regulation may shape political ideology and attitudes toward policies. Here, we conduct four studies that investigate the role of a particular emotion regulation strategy--reappraisal in particular. Two observational studies show that individual differences in emotion regulation styles predict variation in political orientations and support for conservative policies. In the third study, we experimentally induce disgust as the target emotion to be regulated and show that use of reappraisal reduces the experience of disgust, thereby decreasing moral concerns associated with conservatism. In the final experimental study, we show that use of reappraisal successfully attenuates the relationship between trait-level disgust sensitivity and support for conservative policies. Our findings provide the first evidence of a critical link between emotion regulation and political attitudes

A model of moderated mediation shows that reappraisal attenuates the otherwise robust relationship between disgust sensitivity and purity concerns, thus leading to less support for conservative policies, Experiment 4.

<p>All values are regression coefficients. Purity variable consists of the items that suggest purity as a moral concern. Solid lines indicate significant paths and dashed lines indicate non-significant paths. *<i>p</i><0.05, **<i>p</i><0.01, ***<i>p</i><0.001. c indicates the conditional indirect effect of disgust sensitivity on support for conservative policies, whereas c′ indicates direct effect. (R) and (NR) denote reappraisal and non-reappraisal conditions respectively. Binary indicator variable for suppression was entered as a covariate. All beta coefficients (a through e) are unstandardized. Standard errors, p-values, and 95% confidence intervals for the corresponding coefficient estimates are as follows. a = 0.75, <i>SE</i> = 0.64, <i>p</i><0.001. b = 0.72, <i>SE</i> = 0.10, <i>p</i><0.001. c = −0.23 (R), <i>SE</i> = 0.21, <i>p</i> = 0.29, (−0.65, 0.29). c = 0.55 (NR), <i>SE</i> = 0.17, p = 0.002, (0.25, 0.91). c′ = 0.01, <i>SE</i> = 0.14, <i>p</i> = 0.97, (−0.29, 0.28). d = −1.07, <i>SE</i> = 0.37, <i>p</i> = 0.005. e = −0.01, <i>SE</i> = 0.19, <i>p</i> = 0.96.</p