According to the new conventional wisdom, social psychology has become captured by cognition; it should pay greater attention to affect. In that spirit, our article explores comparisons between conventional semantic judgments and affective reports. In two national surveys respondents were invited to ascribe personality traits to prominent national politicians as well as to report the feelings that the politicians elicited. We find first that summary scores of good feelings and bad feelings are nearly independent of each other, much more so than are good and bad trait judgments. Affective registrations, in short, seem less semantically filtered, less subject to consistency pressures. We also find that summary scores of affect strongly predict political preference. This effect is independent of and more powerful than that for personality judgments. Thus, affective registrations are not at all redundant with semantic judgments. Overall, these results should encourage the quickening interest in human emotion.Suddenly it is fashionable to write about emotion. According to a newly emerging conventional wisdom, social psychology has become too exclusively cognitive, and it is time to reexamine the role of affect (

Two experiments sustain Lippmann's suspicion, advanced a half century ago, that media provide compelling descriptions of a public world that people cannot directly experience. More precisely, the experiments show that television news programs profoundly affect which problems viewers take to be important. The experiments also demonstrate that those problems promimently positioned in the evening news are accorded greater weight in viewers' evaluations of presidential performance. We note the political implications of these results, suggest their psychological foundations, and argue for a revival of experimentation in the study of political communication.

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Two experiments show that by drawing attention to certain national problems while ignoring others, television news programs help define the standards by which presidents are evaluated. As predicted, this effect is greater for evaluations of the president's general performance than for judgments of his competence and integrity, and it is more pronounced among novices than among experts. Neutron bomb and related controversy covered.Carter wants more time. 7. Carter veto of new aircraft carrier sustained. Carter attacked as being soft on defense.8. Carter's State of the Union Address to focus on United States military policy.

Two experiments sustain Lippmann's suspicion, advanced a half century ago, that media provide compelling descriptions of a public world that people cannot directly experience. More precisely, the experiments show that television news programs profoundly affect which problems viewers take to be important. The experiments also demonstrate that those problems promimently positioned in the evening news are accorded greater weight in viewers' evaluations of presidential performance. We note the political implications of these results, suggest their psychological foundations, and argue for a revival of experimentation in the study of political communication.