The most common approach to measuring emotional response has been to
simply ask people what they are feeling. Analysts of mass behaviors have long
made use of questionnaires and surveys in which individuals are asked to self report
their feelings towards some political stimulus or other. We have also long had more scientific ways of measuring emotional response, such as examining
a subject's heart rate and perspiration levels using the same technology as
lie detectors (though these techniques are far less widely used in political
psychology). There are some problems with both of these techniques, of
course; people may not be willing or able to describe their emotions with
precision, and the use of older technologies to tap emotional responses
involves ethical as well as financial issues, as well as being rather imprecise and
unsuitable for some purposes. As we shall see in the next chapter, developments
in neuroscience-most notably in brain imaging techniques such as MRI
and fMRI-have made it easier than before to measure directly the emotions
that individuals are experiencing, however. Moreover, political psychologists
have begun to work with neuroscientists at an interdisciplinary level to utilize
such techniques in their work. While this work is very new indeed and the
results of the few studies done so far are extremely preliminary, in the next
chapter we will examine and assess some of the latest research that has been
done in this area.