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A Feeling Man's Game: Affect and Voter Information Processing and Learning in a Campaign
Unformatted Document Text:  allowed to ask questions and then dismissed. Manipulation Checks and Key Variables In order to assess whether our experimental manipulations of emotions did in fact have the effects we expected, we administered the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), a measure of both positive and negative affective states (Watson, Clark, and Tellegen, 1988) before the primary election campaign began and again after the primary election was complete. Subjects were asked to respond to a series of twenty words – representing ten positive and ten negative emotions – with an indication of how much those words described how they were feeling at that particular moment in time. 7 The ten positive and negative items were then averaged to create affective scores for each subject prior to and following the experiment. Because of the design of our manipulations we administered the initial PANAS before the generalized anxiety manipulation. Thus we cannot use the initial PANAS to test for differences in these groups. We can, however, compare the post-election PANAS results with the pre-election results for those subjects who were in the control group for the candidate-level manipulation, that is, those for whom candidate positions were not manipulated (38 of our subjects). The generalized anxiety manipulation had exactly the effect we hoped it would. Overall, subjects who received the prompt were more negative and less positive on the post-campaign PANAS scale than those who did not. At the same time, the initial PANAS (administered before the manipulation) shows no difference at all between the groups. But subjects in the generalized anxiety condition exhibited a greater decrease in 7 The prompts were: interested, irritable, distressed, alert, excited, ashamed, upset, inspired, strong, nervous, guilty, determined, scared, attentive, hostile, jittery, enthusiastic, active, proud, and afraid. The scale ranged from 1 to 5, with 1 rated “very slightly or not at all”, 2 rated “a little”, 3 rated “moderately”, 4 rated “quite a bit”, and 5 rated “extremely”. 19

Authors: Civettini, Andrew J.W..
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allowed to ask questions and then dismissed.
Manipulation Checks and Key Variables
In order to assess whether our experimental manipulations of emotions did in fact
have the effects we expected, we administered the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule
(PANAS), a measure of both positive and negative affective states (Watson, Clark, and
Tellegen, 1988) before the primary election campaign began and again after the primary
election was complete. Subjects were asked to respond to a series of twenty words –
representing ten positive and ten negative emotions – with an indication of how much
those words described how they were feeling at that particular moment in time.
The ten
positive and negative items were then averaged to create affective scores for each subject
prior to and following the experiment. Because of the design of our manipulations we
administered the initial PANAS before the generalized anxiety manipulation. Thus we
cannot use the initial PANAS to test for differences in these groups. We can, however,
compare the post-election PANAS results with the pre-election results for those subjects
who were in the control group for the candidate-level manipulation, that is, those for
whom candidate positions were not manipulated (38 of our subjects).
The generalized anxiety manipulation had exactly the effect we hoped it would.
Overall, subjects who received the prompt were more negative and less positive on the
post-campaign PANAS scale than those who did not. At the same time, the initial
PANAS (administered before the manipulation) shows no difference at all between the
groups. But subjects in the generalized anxiety condition exhibited a greater decrease in
7
The prompts were: interested, irritable, distressed, alert, excited, ashamed, upset,
inspired, strong, nervous, guilty, determined, scared, attentive, hostile, jittery,
enthusiastic, active, proud, and afraid. The scale ranged from 1 to 5, with 1 rated “very
slightly or not at all”, 2 rated “a little”, 3 rated “moderately”, 4 rated “quite a bit”, and 5
rated “extremely”.
19


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