Unpacking the Emotional Reactions to Racial Campaign Rhetoric

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Psychology: Applications in Political Psychology

Abstract

Research in the 2000s demonstrated that politicians had to prime race implicitly during campaigns to activate racial attitudes and that explicit racial appeals would backfire. However, the experience of recent US campaigns, coupled with growing evidence contradicting the implicit-explicit model of campaign appeals, suggests that people no longer reject overtly hostile racial rhetoric. One conjectured reason for the diminishing distinction between implicit and explicit appeals and the rising acceptability of explicit racial rhetoric is the belief that respondents are no longer angered by such explicit appeals.

Extant research has not directly tested the link between emotional reactions to campaign appeals and the effectiveness of racial primes. In part this stems from social desirability concerns as well as the problem of accurately measuring respondents’ emotional reactions using self-reports. This paper overcomes these concerns and directly tests this conjecture by examining respondents’ emotional reactions to racial campaign rhetoric using Emotient FACET facial recognition software that tracks respondents’ facial expressions. In one study (n=165) respondents’ emotional reactions were measured, first, as they read fictitious news reports containing either implicit or explicit racial campaign appeals. Second, their reactions were also measured as they watched campaign ads from actual campaigns that vary in the explicitness of the racial rhetoric. The emotion data, when paired with respondents’ cognitive evaluations of the stimuli, highlight the difference in respondents’ automatic and deliberate processing of racial appeals, thereby providing important insight into the question of why the once prominent distinction in reactions to implicit and explicit racial appeals no longer seems to hold.

Author

• Fabian Guy Neuner, Arizona State University