Emotions have an "automatic" quality to them, and may sometimes reflect unconscious processes. As George Marcus puts it, "the idea that emotional processes occur outside of conscious awareness, which was initially treated with skepticism, is no longer much disputed."23 More work needs to be done on the ways that specific cognitive processes in politics interact with emotion, Analogies At War, he notes that analogical reasoning has an affective content as we as a pure y cogmtlve one: Thus, when [Secretary of State] Dean Rusk decided that the danger in Vietnam was analogous to that in Korea, the analogy might not only conjure up images of Chinese troops crossing the Yalu River, but also evoke negative feelings about inscrutable Chinese hordes. He also felt "remorse about his failure to anticipate China's intervention in the Korean War," Khong points out. 25 We do not simply "match" the characteristics of a situation with a previous one in a detached way; frequently, we pick an analogy that has some strong emotional significance to us, as Korea did for both President Johnson and his secretary of state. Cognitive availability may thus be a function of hot processes as well as cold ones, but this has so far been a neglected area in political psychology. Moreover, it is clear that emotions-especially fear-played a strong role in Johnson's Vietnam decision-making. One well known fear that he mentioned often to his subordinates was the prospect that he might inadvertently set off World War III by bringing China into the war. "In the dark at night, I would lay awake picturing my boys flying around North Vietnam, asking myself an endless series of questions," Johnson told Doris Kearns Goodwin. "What if one of those targets you picked today triggers off Russia or China? What happens then?" It is clear that this was based in part on the Korean analogy, but the comparison set off strong emotions in Johnson that inevitably affected policymaking. Blema Steinberg's analysis of U.S. decision-making on Vietnam also suggests that the emotions of shame and humiliation were very much behind the reasoning of both LBJ and his successor Nixon: Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were two highly narcissistic individuals who suffered from painful feelings of shame and humiliation. It was these feelings, in the overall context of their narcissistic character structures, that played an important role in shaping their presidential decisions V. on Ietnam. While not everyone would agree with her psychoanalytic characterization of the two men, it seems beyond doubt that these emotions (and others) had an impact. Another of Johnson's well documented fears was being "the first American president to lose a war."
One useful way of linking work on emotion with "cold" approaches such as schema theory may be to regard emotion as a kind of "cognitive short cut," as Fiske and Pavelchak suggest. They argue that when someone appears to be a typical member of some category~for instance, a "typical Democrat" or a "typical Republican"~we react affectively not to that person's characteristics, but use our emotional reactions to the group category instead. Unless the person seems to be atypical in some noticeable way, we simply assign that person to the general category and ignore his or her particular characteristics. Cognitively this makes some sense, since as with other short cuts it puts less strain on our limited information-processing capabilities. Specific kinds of affect (happiness, sadness, anger, and so on) may also trigger particular information-processing styles. This approach would seem to assume that affect is secondary, rather than primary, and this kind of approach has dominated the study of elite decisionmaking (including foreign policy decision-making). There is no reason, though, why the models developed by both the Marcus camp and the Lodge-Taber camp cannot be applied to international relations, just as they have become influential in approaching mass behavior. As Redlawsk notes:
Where "political behavior" is usually focused on the mass behavior of citizens~often in terms of voting~the political psychology of emotion is often developed at a more individual level of analysis and therefore is broadly applicable to situations in which individuals must process information about political conditions, whether we talk about citizens evaluating candidates, or elites addressing beliefs about war and peace.