Facing emotional politicians: Do emotional displays of politicians evoke mimicry and emotional contagion?

Emotional displays of politicians can be persuasive. According to prominent psychological theories, we can easily "catch" the emotional displays of others through mimicry and emotional contagion. Do these processes work for politicians too, or is it conditional on what voters think of the politician making the display? In a preregistered within-subjects laboratory experiment, participants observed images of neutral and manipulated emotional displays of politicians. We measured emotional mimicry (facial electromyography) and emotional contagion (self-reports). We do not find evidence for the matched motor hypothesis. Our findings are in line with the emotional mimicry in social context model. Namely, we find that the happy displays of in-party politicians elicit congruent facial activity (a positive facial index). Furthermore, the displays of the out-party politicians do not elicit mimicry, but instead our findings suggest a reactive response: Participants smiled in response to angry out-party politicians. The self-reported emotions indicated a small effect of emotional contagion. Taken together, our study provides insights in how voters are emotionally affected by politicians' emotional displays and highlights that our polarized prior beliefs color our emotional responses to politics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A Multilab Replication of the Ego Depletion Effect.

There is an active debate regarding whether the ego depletion effect is real. A recent preregistered experiment with the Stroop task as the depleting task and the antisaccade task as the outcome task found a medium-level effect size. In the current research, we conducted a preregistered multilab replication of that experiment. Data from 12 labs across the globe (N = 1,775) revealed a small and significant ego depletion effect, d = 0.10. After excluding participants who might have responded randomly during the outcome task, the effect size increased to d = 0.16. By adding an informative, unbiased data point to the literature, our findings contribute to clarifying the existence, size, and generality of ego depletion.

Yikes! Are we disgusted by politicians?

In the political domain, disgust is primarily portrayed as an emotion that explains individual differences in pathogen avoidance. We hypothesized that political rhetoric accusing opponents of moral transgressions also elicits disgust responses. In this registered report, we present the results from a laboratory experiment. We find that participants self-report higher disgust and have stronger physiological (Levator labii) responses to pictures of out-party leaders compared with in-party leaders. Participants also report higher disgust in response to moral violations of in-party leaders. There is more suggestive evidence that in-party leaders evoke more labii activity when they commit moral violations than when out-party leaders do. The impact of individual differences in moral disgust and partisanship strength is very limited to absent. Intriguingly, on average, the physiological and self-reported disgust responses to the treatment are similar, but individuals differ in whether their response is physiological or cognitive. This motivates further theorizing regarding the concordance of emotional responses.