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Did that Scare You? Tips on Creating Emotion in Experimental Subjects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Bethany Albertson  and
Shana Kushner Gadarian
Bethany Albertson
Affiliation:
Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712 e-mail: balberts@austin.utexas.edu
Shana Kushner Gadarian*
Affiliation:
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244
*
e-mail: sgadaria@maxwell.syr.edu
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Abstract

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The appropriateness of experiments for studying causal mechanisms is well established. However, the ability of an experiment to isolate the effect of emotion has received less attention, and in this letter we lay out a guide to manipulating and tracing the impact of emotions. Some experimental manipulations are straightforward. Manipulating an emotion like anxiety is less obvious. There is no magic “political anxiety pill” and placebo that can be randomly assigned to participants. While the magic political anxiety pill is still elusive, we advocate using multiple manipulations, extensive pretesting, and mediation models. These approaches have allowed us to situate a discrete emotional experience in a complex political environment.

Type
Symposium on Methods for Emotion Experiments
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , Autumn 2016 , pp. 485 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Footnotes

Author's Note: Thank you to the participants at the West Coast Experiments Conference for feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

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