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Measuring Emotions in Context: Semantic versus Somatic Responses to Emotion Items in Political Surveys
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Measuring Emotions in Context: Semantic versus Somatic
Responses to Emotion Items in Political Surveys
Mary-Kate Lizotte
Milton Lodge
Charles Taber
Department of Political Science
Stony Brook University
Abstract. Political scientists and public opinion scholars often ask people to report emotional reactions to past events, using simple semantic prompts like: “Did you feel angry after the terrorist attacks of 9/11?” Responses to such questions are then used as predictors for political opinions and behaviors (e.g., Huddy, Feldman, Taber, & Lahav, 2005). In line with a great deal of research from social psychology (e.g., Innes-Ker and Niedenthal, 2002), we believe that these purely semantic recall items may be misleading as measures of the emotions actually experienced at the time of an event like 9/11 (they may be pale reflections of true emotions, thus understating the power of these emotions, or they may misrepresent experienced emotions). This paper describes an experiment designed to test differences in reported emotion and policy opinions about 9/11 across several measurement strategies designed to cause respondents to re-experience original emotions. Though results are preliminary, it appears that the experiment failed to show any sensible differences in reported emotions across conditions. This may be because (1) our hypotheses are wrong or (2) our experiment is flawed in some way (perhaps the stimuli were not powerful enough).
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Measuring Emotions in Context: Semantic versus Somatic
Responses to Emotion Items in Political Surveys
Mary-Kate Lizotte
Milton Lodge
Charles Taber
Department of Political Science
Stony Brook University
Abstract. Political scientists and public opinion scholars often ask people to report emotional
reactions to past events, using simple semantic prompts like: “Did you feel angry after the
terrorist attacks of 9/11?” Responses to such questions are then used as predictors for political
opinions and behaviors (e.g., Huddy, Feldman, Taber, & Lahav, 2005). In line with a great deal
of research from social psychology (e.g., Innes-Ker and Niedenthal, 2002), we believe that these
purely semantic recall items may be misleading as measures of the emotions actually
experienced at the time of an event like 9/11 (they may be pale reflections of true emotions, thus
understating the power of these emotions, or they may misrepresent experienced emotions). This
paper describes an experiment designed to test differences in reported emotion and policy
opinions about 9/11 across several measurement strategies designed to cause respondents to re-
experience original emotions. Though results are preliminary, it appears that the experiment
failed to show any sensible differences in reported emotions across conditions. This may be
because (1) our hypotheses are wrong or (2) our experiment is flawed in some way (perhaps the
stimuli were not powerful enough).
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