Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work

Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work. By Ted Brader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 280p. 60. 00 cloth, 24. 00 paper. This book examines the effects of emotions aroused by televised ads in political campaigns. Its psychological theorizing about emotion goes beyond the now-familiar portrait of a “cold-hearted citizen” borrowed from cognitive psychology and rational choice theories. But it also goes beyond the tradition in political behavior research on party identification, candidate evaluations, online processing, and the like of treating affect simply in terms of positive or negative valence. Rather, this research takes seriously the unique features of qualitatively different emotions, building off the “affective intelligence” model of George E. Marcus and colleagues.