The Impacts of Emotion Elicited By Print Political Advertising on Candidate Evaluation

This study examines viewers' emotional responses to print political advertising. It demonstrates that positive and negative (direct attack) political advertising differ in the emotional responses that they elicit. Consistent with prior research on emotion, positive and direct attack political advertising generate different amounts of message recall and produce different quantities of positive and negative cognitive responses. Most importantly, this study establishes the importance of ad-evoked emotion in the formation process of ad exposure and candidate evaluation. Integrating findings from this study, a model is proposed that establishes the relationship of four important variables: ad valence, ad-evoked emotion, attitude toward the ad, and candidate liking. It suggests that (1) ad valence has an impact on attitude toward the candidate via the mediation of ad-evoked emotion; (2) ad valence has an impact on attitude toward the ad via the mediation of ad-evoked emotion; (3) attitude toward the ad has an impact on candidate evaluation; and (4) ad-evoked emotion can explain variations of candidate evaluations beyond that which can be accounted for by attitude toward the ad.     

Deciding the Fate of Others: The Cognitive Underpinnings of Racially Biased Juror Decision Making

In criminal law, jurors are supposed to ignore defendant race when considering factual matters of culpability. However, when judging the merits of a criminal case, jurors’ ability (or inability) to avoid bias may affect verdicts. Fact-based decision making expend cognitive resources, while heuristic-based decisions (e.g., using criminal stereotypes) conserve resources. Here, we investigated whether differences in cognitive resources and prejudice attitudes about Blacks influenced trial outcomes. We tested the impact of working memory capacity (WMC), cognitive load, prejudice, and target race (Black, White) on penalties ascribed to fictional criminal defendants in ambiguous-fact cases. Results showed that when “loaded,” prejudiced-low-WMC persons supported guilty verdicts with higher confidence more often for Black than White defendants. Conversely, regardless of WMC or prejudice attitude, participants penalized White defendants more often when not loaded. We suggest that cognitive resources and prejudice attitude influence fact-based decisions. Links to juror judgments and potential trial outcomes are discussed.