It is clear that no account of the psychology of politics would be remotely complete without an account of the role that emotion-or "affect" as it is sometimes called-plays within it. Many phenomena in politics involve emotion and feelings rather than just the "cold" kind of information-processing we examined in the previous chapter; virtually all political concepts are charged with emotion, either positive or negative, something that many psychologists refer to as "hot cognitions". Political stimuli often provoke strong emotions, feelings such as liking, dislike, happiness, sadness, anger, guilt, gratitude, disgust, revenge, joy, insecurity, fear, anxiety, and so on. We do not look at politics neutrally, as some kind of super-advanced, artificially intelligent computer might. Very few people can look at a photograph of George W Bush or Hillary Clinton, for instance, or a picture of an airplane slamming into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2002, without feeling something. Few Americans can look at a picture of Osama Bin Laden and not feel anger, contempt, or some other negative emotion, just as many radical Islamists in the Middle East look at the same picture and feel pride, admiration, and other positive responses. And this phenomenon is not confined to politics, of course. As the psychologist Robert Zajonc notes, one cannot be introduced to a person without experiencing some immediate feeling of attraction or repulsion and without gauging such feelings on the part of the other. We evaluate each other constantly, we evaluate each other's behavior, and we evaluate the motives and consequences of their behavior.
Setting aside social situations, moreover, "there are probably very few perceptions and cognitions in everyday life that do not have a significant affective component, that aren't hot, or in the very least tepid."
Advocates of most cognitive perspectives tend to treat people as pure processors of information. This is not true of the cognitive consistency approach of Leon Festinger, in which the emotion of psychological discomfort (dissonance) motivates people to adapt their beliefs, but it is true of most applications of schema theory, for instance. As Khong notes, "the informationprocessing theories of the 1970s and 1980s-including schema theoryconsciously shied away from 'hot' cognitions, in part because cognitive psychology's model of the mind was informed by the computer analogy. " For some years after cognitive concepts like schemas became popular, it was true to say that the topic of emotion in politics was somewhat neglected. As David Redlawsk has pointed out, rational choice theorists-supporters of the Homo economicus approach-have always given emotion short shrift, but advocates of the cognitive theories examined in Chapter 9 have traditionally downplayed this potent force as well : Perhaps because accurately measuring emotional response to political stimuli is very difficult, even political psychologists not necessarily working in the rational choice tradition turned first to the tools of cognitive psychology to understand how people process political information.
The cognitive revolution of the past decades led to a great deal of focus (much quite successful) on the cognitive underpinnings of political behavior.
Yet a long line of psychological research posits that cognition is not unbiased ; that people have various cognitive and emotional motivations to see the world in particularistic ways. Yet somehow this recognition that emotions matter a lot did not find its way very far into political psychology.
Instead a distinctly cognitive information processing approach developed that talked of "schemas" and "heuristics" and "rational" decision-making. But it did not talk much about
motivation and emotion.
While this was certainly true until fairly recently, it is fortunately no longer the case, especially in the field of mass political behavior. A flood of books about emotion and voting behavior has come onto the market in recent years, for instance, and the work of George Marcus and his colleagues has been especially important in this regard.
Politics is as much about "feeling" as it is about "thinking." In order to understand political emotions better, though, it helps to categorize the different kinds of political feelings possible, and what we colloquially term "emotion" should really be distinguished in various ways. For one thing, feelings that are object-speciflc (in other words, that derive from a reaction to a specific thing or person) differ from those that are diffuse (that is, they are not associated with a specific person or thing). We can label this kind of emotional feeling "mood."
Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, for instance, suffered from depression for most of his life, a condition he often referred to as his "black dog." One of the distinguishing features of such moods is that the sufferer is often unable to attribute the dark feelings that come with them to any specific object or cause.8 Alternatively, we have all had the experience of waking up in a "sunny" mood, and this too is non-specific in nature.
"Emotional responses," on the other hand, may be as transitory and fleeting as this kind of good mood, but they are reactions provoked by a particular person or event, and we can thus attribute some sort of" cause" to them.
Ronald Reagan once made a rather inappropriate joke-at a time when the Cold War was still going on-about bombing the Soviet Union, for instance. Some reacted to this with anger, others with annoyance, and still others with laughter.
Some emotions differ from both moods and emotional responses in the sense that they are much more long-lasting than either of these. "Evaluations" refer to longer-term attitudes towards (for instance) a particular politician or party, attitudes which rarely change overnight. Both George W Bush and Hillary Clinton inspire particularly strong affective evaluations among American voters, just as John Howard and Tony Blair did in Australia and Great Britain respectively. It is possible, of course, that we evaluate political leaders using solely "cold" cognitive processes such as schemas or the degree to which the values of a politician fit our own, but this is unlikely because all politicians appear to evoke emotional reactions in people (strong "like" or "dislike," or merely indifference).