It's My Campaign I'll Cry if I Want to: How and When Campaigns Use Emotional Appeals

Recent research in the area of campaign advertising suggests that emotional appeals can influence political attitudes, electoral choices and decision‐making processes. Yet is there any evidence that candidates use emotional appeals strategically during campaigns? Is there a pattern to their use? For instance, are fear appeals used primarily late in the campaign by trailing candidates in order to get voters to rethink their choices? And are enthusiasm appeals used more commonly early on in order to shore up a candidate's base? We use affective intelligence theory—and supplement it with the idea of a voter backlash—to generate expectations about when candidates use certain emotional appeals (namely, anger, fear, enthusiasm, and pride) and which types of candidates are most likely to do so. We then test these ideas using campaign advertising data from several U.S. Senate races from 2004. Our research thus provides a link between research on campaign decision making—here the decision to “go emotional”—and research focusing on the effects of emotional appeals on voters.     

A dilemma for Epicureanism

Philosophical Studies - Perhaps death’s badness is an illusion. Epicureans think so and argue that agents cannot be harmed by death when they’re alive (because death hasn’t...     

It's Not Easy Being Green: Minor Party Labels as Heuristic Aids

This paper examines if, when, and to what extent U.S. minor party labels influence individual opinions over a range of political issues. Based on data from an experimental study, we reach three general conclusions. First, as cues, party labels are more likely to influence opinions over complex issues. Second, familiarity with and trust in a party condition cue acceptance. Third, as a whole, minor party labels act as effective cues less consistently than major parties. This finding, we suggest, indicates that there exists some threshold level of familiarity and trust that minor parties must reach in the mass public in order to be effective cues. This research is valuable because it extends current work on party labels as heuristic devices and more general work on cues; our findings are additionally important given recent trends in public opinion data, which indicate that the U.S. public is becoming more accepting of minor parties as permanent features of the political system.     

Contemporary Doctrine Classics: The Combined Reports by the Doctrine Commission of the General Synod of the Church of England – Church House

Book reviewed:
Contemporary Doctrine Classics: The Combined Reports by the Doctrine Commission of the General Synod of the Church of England , Church House Publishing 2005 (0-7151-4045-0), xxxiv + 475 pp., pb £20.00     

Brain Potentials from Normal Speakers and Stutterers

The purposes of this study were to determine the differences in self-esteeem and alienation between homosexual and heterosexual American males, and the differences in self-esteem and alienation in homosexual males, by selected demographic variables and sexual behavior. Eighty-six American male homosexuals indicated significantly greater alienation than heterosexual males, but similar self-esteem levels. Religion, oral-genital insertion preference, and marital status were significantly related to self-esteem and alienation, whereas anal intercourse insertion preference and degree of homosexuality were not found to be significantly related to self-esteem and alienation.     

Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar

ABSTRACT— In the current studies, we tested the prediction that learning of novel patterns of association would be enhanced in response to unrelated meaning threats. This prediction derives from the meaning-maintenance model, which hypothesizes that meaning-maintenance efforts may recruit patterns of association unrelated to the original meaning threat. Compared with participants in control conditions, participants exposed to either of two unrelated meaning threats (i.e., reading an absurd short story by Franz Kafka or arguing against one's own self-unity) demonstrated both a heightened motivation to perceive the presence of patterns within letter strings and enhanced learning of a novel pattern actually embedded within letter strings (artificial-grammar learning task). These results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning patterns are enhanced by the presence of a meaning threat.     

Parent Education in Youth Sport: A Community Case Study of Parents,Coaches, and Administrators

The present community case study was designed to highlight parent, coach, and administrator perceptions of community-based parent education in a youth sport community in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States. Interviews with parents (n?=?12), coaches (n?=?13), and administrators (n?=?11) were interpreted inductively using constructivist thematic analysis. Nine emergent categories are highlighted, including parents’ sport goals for their children, parents’ involvement in youth sport including impacts of involvement on children, and barriers to implementing parent education, as well as potential content for parent education. A proposed sequential framework informing community-based parent education, as well as suggestions for further action, and study limitations are included.