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African-Americans Emotional Responses to Trump, the Confederate Flag, and Police

Thu, August 30, 10:00 to 11:30am, Marriott, Suffolk

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing development in the area of biopolitics. One area of focus has been the use of psychophysiology to examine political behavior. Such new approaches are well worth investigating given the often-poor performance of models used to examine individual level data. One of the shortcomings of this research, however, is that it has relied almost exclusively on white subjects and has failed to examine the unique political attitudes and behavior of African Americans. This paper seeks to fill this gap by examining African Americans’ psychological and physiological responses to Racially Traumatic Stressful Stimuli. Anecdotal information suggest that African Americans possess angry emotions when they are exposed to certain stimuli. Here, we test whether Confederate symbols, images of Donald Trump and images of Police lead to negative psychological and physiological responses. The physiological responses are measured using skin conductance levels (SCL) derived from electrodermal activity (EDA) analyses to examine whether exposure to Confederate images increase the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, commonly known as flight or fight activity. To be sure, EDA analyses do not detect valences. As a result, an Implicit Association Test (IAT) is employed to assess individuals’ subconscious attitudes toward the Confederate flag, Donald Trump and police.

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