‘I didn’t know you had a side hustle with the Listener,” said one of my new master’s students. “I’ll have a look next time I visit my grandparents.” Ouch. Old people read the Listener, apparently. We were meeting Tyla’s co-supervisor, my colleague Paul Jose. As we left Jose’s office, he warned her, “Marc has a habit of writing about what his students are doing …” Not just yet, Tyla, but maybe once I’ve analysed your data.
Jose and I share several interests, including a pathological attention to American politics. Research meetings are a chance to talk about, well, research, but also the latest political dumpster fire in the US. We’re working on a couple of collaborations now to marry this interest with one of Jose’s other delights – emotion.
Political psychology has long treated emotion in a rather simplistic way, as “content”. By this, I mean there’s a fair bit of research focused on, for example, the emotional content of political messaging, and the impact that has on our political attitudes, what we think of politicians and how we vote. It has also looked at how our emotional reactions to candidates and issues work. Do we feel disgusted at the thought of boot camps for youngsters proffered by the right, or angry at what we might see as an excessive focus on minorities by the left?
But there are other ways that emotion is important in politics. Emotions aren’t just products of our interaction with the world – things that happen to us. They’re also not just inputs to how we think about things. Emotion is also a process.
I have previously written at length about emotion regulation, the processes we use to “manage” our emotional experiences, and the importance of this in things like self-injury. For example, research and practice suggest that avoiding unpleasant emotions through getting blotto or starting a fight is bad for us. Reframing our experiences to look for the silver lining, or distracting ourselves by doing something we enjoy tend to be better.
But Jose has a subtly different take – he’s particularly interested in our emotional goals. What emotions do we seek out, or avoid?
Common wisdom is that we want to accentuate the positive. We want to experience “good” emotions and avoid “bad” ones.
But returning to politics, what about “angertainment”? It’s a great portmanteau I first heard used by a political opponent of Republican bad-woman Lauren Boebert to describe her approach to politics. Specifically, Boebert was accused of creating entertainment for her followers by deliberately provoking righteous indignation.
This feels weird, right? Would anyone want to be angry?
Jose would say the common wisdom is not entirely correct. His research on emotional goals says most of us do what’s assumed – almost three-quarters of us look for positive emotions and avoid negative ones. But one in seven of us is “happiness averse” – we have a notably stronger tendency to avoid positive emotions, and try to experience negative ones. The remaining just-over-one-in-10 are characterised by a relative lack of emotional goals – these non-regulators say they’re not really trying to do anything with their emotions.
And these goals (or lack thereof) have consequences. Happiness-averse folk are more depressed, anxious, less optimistic or hopeful and feel fewer positive and more negative emotions in their daily lives. In short, they get what they’re looking for.
Why would anyone want to accentuate the negative? In my research on “maladaptive” coping (like drinking too much, for example), I find a lot of self-punishment. People who don’t feel good about themselves are more likely to do things to manage feelings like shame and guilt in ways that are bad for them and feed that cycle of self-loathing.
Maybe some people use politics to generate emotions like anger? Watch this space, as we’re crunching the numbers now.
