The paper “Hot Politics? Affective responses to political rhetoric” by Hot Politics Lab members Bert N. Bakker, Gijs Schumacher and Matthijs Rooduijn is now out at the American Political Science Review!
Do politics make you sweat or frown? In this study, our colleagues measured the intensity (arousal) and direction (valence) of affect in responses to politics using physiological measures at multiple lab experiments in different settings. What do they find? More knowledge does not produce more arousal. More extreme attitudes do produce more arousal. Also incongruent rhetoric produces negative affect. Congruent rhetoric does not produce positive affect.
You can find the publication here.
A short summery about the research can be found on the University of Amsterdam website, and more information on Twitter (here, here , and here) as well as (in Dutch) on the Stuk Rod Vlees blog.