Affect and Emotion in Political Communication

There is growing body of work in political communication that emphasizes importance of affect, emotion, and personality in politics. Sensitivity to threat or disgust; reactions of fear, anger, or happiness; tendency to focus more on negative than on positive information—each of these can impact feelings about candidates, and positions on wide range of domestic and foreign issues. Many of these feelings are in reaction to mass-mediated information; and changing media technologies likely increases volume of affective or emotional content reaching public. Review of recent work on these themes, drawn from both media psychology and political communication.

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