Forty college students viewed videotaped excerpts of happiness/reassurance, anger/ threat, and fear/evasion expressive displays by President Reagan. Within each display condition one excerpt was presented in image-only and one in sound-plus-image format. Emotional reactions were assessed by facial electromyography (EMG) from the brow and cheek regions and by skin resistance and heart rate. Following each excerpt, subjects also reported verbally the intensity of eight emotions. Self-reported emotions were influenced strongly by both the expressive displays and prior attitude toward Reagan as well as by media condition. Facial EMG indicated smiling during happiness/reassurance displays and frowning during anger/threat and fear/evasion displays, especially during image-only presentations. Display effects were also found for skin resistance responses when the media conditions were combined and for heart rate changes in the sound-plus-image condition. In contrast to the self-report measures, expressive and autonomic differences did not reveal an interaction between prior attitude and display condition. These results indicate that expressive displays had a direct emotional impact on viewers and that prior attitudes influenced retrospective self-reports of emotion but did not affect autonomic or facial muscle responses during stimulus exposure.

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Analysis of network news during the 1984 presidential campaign shows that TV coverage of Democratic candidates differed in frequency and in the kinds of expressive displays shown over the course of the pre-convention period. Although political success was generally correlated with media attention, as predicted on the basis of ethology, Jackson was more successful than Mondale in becoming the unquestioned focus of news coverage. Ethological predictions of the type of display behavior shown were generally consistent with the data: happy/reassurance displays were more frequent in interviews, whereas anger/threat tended to be shown more often during speeches, and political success was generally associated with an increased frequency of happy/reassurance displays. Combined with experimental results reported elsewhere, these findings help to explain the outcome of the 1984 campaign and suggest that nonverbal leadership cues are an element in the influence of television in contemporary politics.