Introduction
Politics evoke emotions. Political events such as elections and armed conflicts as well as
political issues such as segregation and abortion conjure up emotions, so it is not surprising that
survey researchers seek to gauge people’s emotional responses to these events and issues.
Moreover emotional response undoubtedly plays a significant role in the formation of policy
preferences and in guiding political behavior. Current research in social psychology, however,
raises serious questions about the adequacy of an approach to measurement that relies on the
simple recall of emotional states from the past. We intend to show that the semantic recall of
emotions is misleading and fails to correctly indicate affective reactions. In this paper, we
describe an experiment designed to explore whether individuals asked to recall their emotional
responses to the events of September 11th have different answers and different policy
preferences from individuals who actually “re-experience” those events.
Simple introspection has long been suspect in social psychology as a method for
retrieving attitudes, emotions, and beliefs. Semantic self-reports about attitude objects are not
equivalent to real affective responses. Breckler (1984: 1193), for example, found that without the
physical presence of an attitude object, one’s responses are “mediated by one’s cognitive
system,” causing inaccurate measurement. In one classic experiment, he found that semantic
reports of attitudes toward snakes were fundamentally different (in valance, extremity, and even
structure) from actual affective responses to snakes.
More recently, Innes-Ker and Niedenthal (2002) looked at the differences between
emotional feelings and the activation of semantic emotion concepts. In one experiment, they
found that inducing an emotional state through film and music produces emotion-congruent
judgments of a character’s emotional state in a fictional story. By contrast, a sentence
unscrambling task failed to produce emotion-congruent judgments because subjects did not
2
Convention