Emotional Responses to Disturbing Political News: The Role of Personality

Abstract

Recent scholarship in political science identifies emotions as an important antecedent to political behavior. Existing work, however, has focused much more on the political effects of emotions than on their causes. Here, we begin to examine how personality moderates emotional responses to political events. We hypothesized that the personality trait need for affect (NFA) would moderate the emotions evoked by disturbing political news. Drawing data from a survey experiment conducted on a national sample, we find that individuals high in NFA have an especially vivid emotional response to disturbing news—a moderating relationship that has the potential to surpass those associated with symbolic attachments.

A little bit of knowledge: Facebook’s News Feed and self-perceptions of knowledge

“…Those scoring high in a need for affect also tend to take the party line on policies, even when it conflicts with their values, as well as apply double standards when evaluating politicians of the opposing party (Arceneaux and Vander Wielen, 2013, 2017). We extend this logic to epistemic overconfidence, as evidence indicates that a high need for affect moderates how individuals process political news (Ryan, Wells and Acree, 2016). Specifically, we expect those who are high in need for affect to form relatively strong opinions based on the limited information gleaned from the Facebook News Feed and, therefore, be more likely to come away with an illusion of confidence in their knowledge relative to those who score lower on need for affect.…”