Negativity is common in political rhetoric and advertising, but its effects are variable. One important moderator may be the specific emotions communicated by the messages and potentially in recipients. Contempt may be the emotion often conveyed by uncivil ads, which have attracted considerable interest, particularly in light of increased partisan polarization. Using data from web-based surveys in New Jersey and Iowa, we examine the role contempt played in two U.S. Senate races in 2014. We find respondents perceived contempt—more than anxiety or anger—in four televised negative campaign ads and in candidates’ statements about opponents. Moreover, respondents’ feelings of contempt toward candidates, though less intense than feelings of anger, were of equal or greater significance than anger or anxiety in predicting voting intentions regarding three of the four Senate candidates across the two elections.
AbelsonR. P.KinderD. R.PetersM. D.FiskeS. T. (1982). Affective and semantic components in political person perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 619-630.
2.
American Heritage dictionary of the English language (5th ed.). (2014). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
3.
American National Election Studies. (2014). Users guide and codebook for the ANES 2012 time series study. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
4.
AverillJ. (1982). Anger and aggression. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.
5.
BanduraA. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 193-209.
6.
BanksA. J. (2014). The public’s anger: White racial attitudes and opinions toward health care reform. Political Behavior, 36, 493-514.
7.
BarrettL. F. (2006). Are emotions natural kinds?Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 28-58.
8.
BraderT. (2006). Campaigning for hearts and minds: How emotional appeals in political ads work. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
9.
BraderT.MarcusG. E. (2013). Emotion and political psychology. In HuddyL.SearsD. O.LevyJ. S. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of political psychology (pp. 165-204). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
10.
BraderT.ValentinoN. A.SuhayE. (2008). What triggers public opposition to immigration? Anxiety, group cues, and immigration threat. American Journal of Political Science, 52, 959-978.
11.
CarverC. S.Harmon-JonesE. (2009). Anger is an approach-related affect: Evidence and implications. Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 183-204.
12.
CoanJ. A.GottmanJ. M. (2007). The specific affect coding system (SPAFF). In CoanJ. A.AllenJ. (Eds.), Handbook of emotion elicitation and assessment (pp. 267-285). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
13.
CuddyA. J.FiskeS. T.GlickP. (2007). The BIAS map: Behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 631-648.
14.
EkmanP.CordaroD. (2011). What is meant by calling emotions basic?Emotion Review, 3, 364-370.
15.
EkmanP.FriesenW. V. (1975). Unmasking the face. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
16.
EkmanP.HeiderK. G. (1988). The universality of a contempt expression: A replication. Motivation and Emotion, 12, 303-308.
17.
FinnC.GlaserJ. (2010). Voter affect and the 2008 U.S. presidential election: Hope and race mattered. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 10, 262-275.
18.
FischerA. H. (2011). Contempt: A hot feeling hidden under a cold jacket. In TrnkaR.BalcarK.KuškaM. (Eds.), Re-constructing emotional spaces (pp. 77-87). Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert.
19.
FischerA. H.RosemanI. J. (2007). Beat them or ban them: The characteristics and social functions of anger and contempt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 103-115.
20.
FiskeS. T.CuddyA. J.GlickP.XuJ. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878-902.
21.
FowlerE. F.RidoutT. N. (2013). Negative, angry, and ubiquitous: Political advertising in 2012. The Forum, 10(4), 51-61.
22.
FridkinK. L.KenneyP. J. (2011). Variability in citizens’ reactions to different types of negative campaigns. American Journal of Political Science, 55, 307-325.
23.
FrijdaN. H. (1986). The emotions. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
24.
FrimerJ. A.SkitkaL. J. (2018). The Montagu Principle: Incivility decreases politicians’ public approval, even with their political base. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115, 845-866.
25.
GottmanJ. M.LevensonR. W. (1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: Behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 221-233.
26.
GrimmerJ.KingG. (2011). General purpose computer-assisted clustering and conceptualization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 2643-2650.
27.
HaidtJ. (2003). The moral emotions. In DavidsonR. J.SchererK. R.GoldsmithH. H. (Eds.), Handbook of affective sciences (pp. 852-870). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
28.
HalperinE.CanettiD.KimhiS. (2012). In love with hatred: Rethinking the role hatred plays in shaping political behavior. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42, 2231-2256.
29.
HawkS. T.van KleefG. A.FischerA. H.van der SchalkJ. (2009). “Worth a thousand words”: Absolute and relative decoding of nonlinguistic affect vocalizations. Emotion, 9, 293-305.
30.
HuddyL.MasonL.AarøeL. (2015). Expressive partisanship: Campaign involvement, political emotion, and partisan identity. American Political Science Review, 109, 1-17.
31.
HutchersonC. A.GrossJ. J. (2011). The moral emotions: A social–functionalist account of anger, disgust, and contempt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 719-737.
32.
InbarY.PizarroD. A.BloomP. (2009). Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals. Cognition and Emotion, 23, 714-725.
33.
IyengarS. (2011). Media politics: A citizen’s guide (2nd ed.). New York: Norton.
34.
IyengarS.WestwoodS. J. (2015). Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group polarization. American Journal of Political Science, 59, 690-707.
35.
IzardC. E. (1991). The psychology of emotions. New York, NY: Plenum Press.
36.
IzardC. E. (2007). Basic emotions, natural kinds, emotion schemas, and a new paradigm. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2, 260-280.
37.
IzardC. E.HaynesO. M. (1988). On the form and universality of the contempt expression: A challenge to Ekman and Friesen’s claim of discovery. Motivation and Emotion, 12, 1-16.
38.
JohnstonG.RosemanI.KatzS. (2014, March). Discrete emotions mediate perceptions of presidential candidates: A study using a nationally representative sample. Poster presented at the 26th Annual Convention, Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, MA.
39.
KinderD. R.PetersM. D.AbelsonR. P.FiskeS. T. (1980). Presidential prototypes. Political Behavior, 2, 315-337.
40.
KunnemanF.LiebrechtC.Van MulkenM.Van den BoschA. (2015). Signaling sarcasm: From hyperbole to hashtag. Information Processing & Management, 51, 500-509.
41.
KuppensP.Van MechelenI.SmitsD. J.De BoeckP. (2003). The appraisal basis of anger: Specificity, necessity and sufficiency of components. Emotion, 3, 254-269.
42.
LauR. R.SigelmanL.RovnerI. B. (2007). The effects of negative political campaigns: A meta-analytic reassessment. Journal of Politics, 69, 1176-1209.
43.
LernerJ. S.KeltnerD. (2000). Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. Cognition & Emotion, 14(4), 473-493.
44.
LodgeM.TaberC. S. (2013). The rationalizing voter. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
MannT. E.OrnsteinN. J. (2016). It’s even worse than it looks: How the American constitutional system collided with the new politics of extremism. New York, NY: Basic Books.
47.
MarcusG. E.MacKuenM.WolakJ.KeeleL. (2006). The measure and mismeasure of emotion. In RedlawskD. P. (Ed.), Feeling politics: Emotion in political information processing (pp. 31-45). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
48.
MarcusG. E.NeumanW. R.MacKuenM. B. (2000). Affective intelligence and political judgment. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
49.
MarcusG. E.NeumanW. R.MacKuenM. B. (2017). Measuring emotional response: Comparing alternative approaches to measurement. Political Science Research and Methods, 5, 733-754.
50.
MatsumotoD.EkmanP. (2004). The relationship among expressions, labels, and descriptions of contempt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 529-540.
51.
MattesK.RedlawskD. P. (2014). The positive case for negative campaigning. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
52.
MattesK.RosemanI. J.RedlawskD. P.KatzS. (2018). Contempt and anger in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. In LucasJ. C.GaldieriC. J.SiscoT. S. (Eds.), Conventional wisdom, parties, and broken barriers in the 2016 election (pp. 101-113). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
53.
MiceliM.CastelfranchiC. (2018). Contempt and disgust: The emotions of disrespect. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 48, 1-25.
54.
MillerP. R. (2011). The emotional citizen: Emotion as a function of political sophistication. Political Psychology, 32, 575-600.
55.
MillerS. (1985). The shame experience. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
56.
MillerW. I. (1997). The anatomy of disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
57.
MottaM. P.FowlerE. F. (2016). The content and effect of political advertising in U.S. campaigns. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.217
58.
OatleyK.Johnson-LairdP. N. (1996). The communicative theory of emotions: Empirical tests, mental models, and implications for social interaction. In MartinL. L.TesserA. (Eds.), Striving and Feeling: Interactions Among Goals, Affect, and Self-Regulation (pp. 363-393). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
59.
PotegalM.QiuP. (2010). Anger in children’s tantrums: A new, quantitative, behaviorally based model. In PotegalM.StemmlerG.SpielbergerC. (Eds.), International handbook of anger (pp.193-217). New York: Springer.
60.
PlutchikR. (2003). Emotions and life: Perspectives from psychology, biology, and evolution. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
61.
RedlawskD. P.PierceD. R. (2017). Emotions and voting. In ArzheimerK.EvansJ.Lewis-BeckM. S. (Eds.), SAGE handbook of voting behaviour (pp. 406-432). London, England: SAGE.
62.
RedlawskD. P.RosemanI. J.MattesK.KatzS. (2018). Donald Trump, contempt, and the 2016 GOP Iowa caucuses. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 28, 173-189.
63.
ReicherS.HaslamS. A. (2017). The politics of hope: Donald Trump as an entrepreneur of identity. In FitzduffM. (Ed.), Why irrational politics appeals: Understanding the allure of Trump (pp. 25-40). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
64.
RidoutT. N.FranzM. M. (2011). The persuasive power of campaign advertising. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
65.
RomaniS.GrappiS.BagozziR. P. (2013). My anger is your gain, my contempt your loss: Explaining consumer responses to corporate wrongdoing. Psychology & Marketing, 30, 1029-1042.
66.
RosemanI. J. (2013). Appraisal in the emotion system: Coherence in strategies for coping. Emotion Review, 5, 141-149.
67.
RosemanI. J. (2018). Rejecting the unworthy: The causes, components, and consequences of contempt. In MasonM. (Ed.), The moral psychology of contempt (pp. 107-130). London, England: Rowman & Littlefield.
68.
RosemanI. J.AbelsonR. P.EwingM. F. (1986). Emotion and political cognition: Emotional appeals in political communication. In LauR. R.SearsD. O. (Eds.), Political cognition (pp. 279-294). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
69.
RosemanI. J.WiestC.SwartzT. S. (1994). Phenomenology, behaviors, and goals differentiate discrete emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 206-221.
70.
RozinP.HaidtJ.McCauleyC. R. (2016). Disgust. In BarrettL. F.LewisM.Haviland-JonesJ. M. (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (4th ed., pp. 815-834). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
71.
RozinP.LoweryL.ImadaS.HaidtJ. (1999). The CAD triad hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 574-586.
72.
RussellJ. A. (2003). Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion. Psychological Review, 110, 145-172.
73.
RyanT. J. (2012). What makes us click? Demonstrating incentives for angry discourse with digital-age field experiments. The Journal of Politics, 74, 1138-1152.
74.
SchröderM. (2003). Experimental study of affect bursts. Speech Communication, 40, 99-116.
75.
SchriberR. A.ChungJ. M.SorensenK. S.RobinsR. W. (2017). Dispositional contempt: A first look at the contemptuous person. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113, 280-309.
76.
SellA.ToobyJ.CosmidesL. (2009). Formidability and the logic of human anger. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106, 15073-15078.
SparksH. (2015). Mama grizzlies and guardians of the republic: The democratic and inter-sectional politics of anger in the Tea Party movement. New Political Science, 37, 25-47.
ValentinoN. A.BraderT.GroenendykE. W.GregorowiczK.HutchingsV. L. (2011). Election night’s alright for fighting. The Journal of Politics, 73, 156-170.
81.
WagnerH. L. (2000). The accessibility of the term “contempt” and the meaning of the unilateral lip curl. Cognition and Emotion, 14, 689-710.
82.
WirthW.MatthesJ.SchemerS. (2011). When campaign messages meet ideology: The role of arguments for voting behaviour. In KriesiH. (Ed.), Political communication in direct democratic campaigns (pp. 188-204). New York, NY: Springer.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
