This book examines the effects of emotions aroused by televised ads in political campaigns. Its psychological theorizing about emotion goes beyond the now-familiar portrait of a “cold-hearted citizen” borrowed from cognitive psychology and rational choice theories. But it also goes beyond the tradition in political behavior research on party identification, candidate evaluations, online processing, and the like of treating affect simply in terms of positive or negative valence. Rather, this research takes seriously the unique features of qualitatively different emotions, building off the “affective intelligence” model of George E. Marcus and colleagues.

The core of the empirical analysis consists of results from two experiments manipulating enthusiasm and fear arousal, respectively. Ads embodying music and images associated with desirable outcomes were hypothesized to arouse enthusiasm, thereby increasing subjective involvement in politics, enhancing viewers' confidence in their prior preferences, and so polarizing the audience. Threatening audiovisual cues, by primitively signaling danger, were expected to arouse fear, and thereby a search for new information among the politically self-confident, perhaps disengagement among the less competent, and the possibility of successful persuasion.

The experimental designs nicely balanced experimental control with verisimilitude. Each experiment presented a 15-minute excerpt of a local television news program, in which a 30-second campaign ad was embedded, represented as taken from an actual ongoing (but quite low-profile) primary campaign in Massachusetts, counterbalancing which candidate sponsored the ad. The experimental manipulations varied only the visuals and music in the ad, holding constant the verbal message (positive for enthusiasm and negative for fear). The subjects were eligible voters from the general population, tested at a variety of research sites across the state, set up to resemble family living rooms.

The pattern of the data is generally consistent with the hypotheses. The results are wisely presented separately for the two categories of dependent variables, involvement and persuasion, highlighting comparisons between the two emotions. Enthusiasm consistently and significantly increased campaign involvement relative to the positive-message-only control condition, whereas fear increased involvement only among the more politically informed. The findings on persuasion are more uneven. Enthusiasm did increase the weight that viewers placed on their prior preferences, while fear tended to increase the weight placed on new information, such as issues and traits, consistent with the idea that it instigates a search for new solutions to a more threatening world. An unusually large number of analyses on persuasion are presented and their statistical significance sometimes falls short of conventional levels, and so the strength of the case comes more from consistency across conceptually different analyses than from any single finding. Still, in fairness, perhaps the miracle is that anything systematic came out at all, given the brevity and unobtrusiveness of the manipulations, and with the verbal messages held constant.

At the same time, no two experiments about a single minor election, with a modest number of cases (total N = 286), can be asked to definitively stake out newly opened territory. The omnibus experimental manipulations simultaneously varied several audiovisual elements, and so precisely what was manipulated is not certain. The verbal messages differed across experiments as well. To ensure that the single brief campaign ad remained an unobtrusive piece of the longer broadcast, the manipulation check was delayed to the end of the session, not asked of all viewers, and focused on a limited number of emotions. It yielded significant differences, but not large ones, and cannot reveal the relevant strengths of the two manipulations or what other emotions might have been manipulated as well. Even having a college class later rate the four ads on a wider variety of emotions might have fleshed out the exact nature of the manipulations.

The book as a whole nicely balances the experimental results with several other elements. An early engaging chapter systematically summarizes, in terms of six general beliefs, the conventional wisdom of citizens, academics, journalists, and consultants about the effects of emotional appeals. This is a nice contrast to the usual anecdotal catalog of others' mistaken speculations that we empiricists usually provide to demonstrate the superiority of our scientific analysis. The lengthy chapter on the psychology of emotion is perhaps justified by the relative paucity of such literature reviews in political science. Another welcome element is a content analysis of the emotional appeals used in real campaigns, describing the emotions that consultants do in fact try to arouse.

One helpful implication emphasized here is that, conventional wisdom to the contrary, emotion is not Mr. Hyde to reason's Dr. Jekyll. Ads contain both; emotion may be adaptive rather than merely the vehicle for blind transfers of affect from irrelevant symbols; aroused emotions do not seem to systematically interfere with other desirable civic orientations, such as efficacy and citizen duty; and almost all of the effects of emotions obtained here are stronger among the more politically sophisticated than among the less sophisticated. Conceptually separating emotion and reason (or cognition) is often useful, and they do operate somewhat differently, but they work hand in glove, neither with uniformly beneficent or malign effects.

The contrast between enthusiasm and fear initially seemed a somewhat narrow starting point for opening up the new territory of emotional arousals in campaign ads. Yet enthusiasm and fear also seem to be quite different from each other, not merely oppositely valenced mirror images, and apparently among the most common emotions typically used in campaign ads. Their asymmetrical effects profitably stimulate thought about emotion in politics beyond the specific focus on campaign advertising. If the author is correct, enthusiasm tends to strengthen the effects of routine and predilection, while fear may drive a search for new information and openness to change. Political leaders plainly often attempt to arouse them. Franklin Roosevelt's campaigns featured “happy days are here again.” Hitler often alluded to the corrupting effects of Jews and other groups on German society. Constant reference to “terrorism” and “9/11” have been staples of the Bush presidency's rhetoric. It is to be hoped that future research will provide more information about whether such efforts do have the interestingly asymmetrical effects described here.

Finally, a cautionary note might be raised about political science's current infatuation with experimental techniques. Traditional survey findings of modest media and campaign effects have long diverged from the behavior of campaign practitioners who pump massive amounts of money into televised appeals, as well as from contemporary experimental research claiming more widespread effects of news coverage and political campaigns. As the author wisely reminds us, experiments are more useful for telling us what can happen under some necessarily limited circumstances than for telling us what does happen under the typical and more varied circumstances of real life. These particular experiments may have had more ecological validity than is often the case, however, given the thoughtful efforts to enhance their realism, as in other similar work by Shanto Iyengar, Donald Kinder, Nicholas Valentino, and their colleagues.