This article addresses the role of personality traits in shaping electoral participation. Utilizing data from a survey conducted after the 2009 German federal election, we demonstrate that agreeableness and emotional stability increase electoral participation. Yet, the main contribution of this article is to link personality traits to attitudinal predictors of turnout. First, we demonstrate that attitudinal variables, including party identification, civic duty, political interest, and internal and external efficacy, serve as intervening variables that mediate the impact of personality on turnout. Second, we show that personality traits exhibit conditioning effects by increasing or decreasing the impact of attitudinal factors on electoral participation. By and large, the evidence suggests that openness, agreeableness, and extraversion render attitudes (somewhat) less powerful in affecting turnout while conscientiousness and emotional stability increase the impact of certain attitudes. Third, we put indirect and conditioning effects together and find that emotional stability and conscientiousness exhibit particularly interesting patterns of effects: They shape attitudes in a way conducive to higher turnout and make these attitudes more powerful in affecting voter participation.

The goal of the current study was to examine the moderating role of in-group social identity on relations between youth exposure to sectarian antisocial behavior in the community and aggressive behaviors. Participants included 770 mother-child dyads living in interfaced neighborhoods of Belfast. Youth answered questions about aggressive and delinquent behaviors as well as the extent to which they targeted their behaviors toward members of the other group. Structural equation modeling results show that youth exposure to sectarian antisocial behavior is linked with increases in both general and sectarian aggression and delinquency over one year. Reflecting the positive and negative effects of social identity, in-group social identity moderated this link, strengthening the relationship between exposure to sectarian antisocial behavior in the community and aggression and delinquency towards the out-group. However, social identity weakened the effect for exposure to sectarian antisocial behavior in the community on general aggressive behaviors. Gender differences also emerged; the relation between exposure to sectarian antisocial behavior and sectarian aggression was stronger for boys. The results have implications for understanding the complex role of social identity in intergroup relations for youth in post-accord societies.

The election of President Barack Obama offers a unique opportunity to test the impressionable-years hypothesis—the theory of political socialization that predicts that widely experienced political events can have a lasting impact on the political attitudes of individuals who experience that event in their youth, thereby creating a generational distinction. Using data from an original survey embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we examine the racial attitudes of White youth who came of age during Barack Obama's presidential campaign and election to see if those individuals are significantly more liberal on racial attitudes than older generations of Whites. In other words, we look for early evidence that an “Obama generation” has emerged. We find there are indeed early signs of a generational distinction. Members of the “Obama generation” are more strongly opposed to racial resentment, but they exhibit similar levels of opposition to old-fashioned racism as older cohorts. Additionally, we uncover that the factors that traditionally structure racial attitudes among Whites, most notably contact, education, and residential proximity, work quite differently for members of this generation. We take these findings as initial evidence that Barack Obama's presidency will have a lasting impact on the racial views of a generation of Americans.

A theory of the historical anchoring and mobilization of political attitudes is proposed, arguing that culture-specific symbols, configured by historical charters, are an important resource in defining nationhood and legitimizing public opinion in a way that makes some political attitudes difficult to change. Five studies in New Zealand and Taiwan using diverse methods converged to show that historical events with “charter status” have an additive effect in explaining variance in political attitudes regarding biculturalism in New Zealand and independence in Taiwan even after controlling for the effects of Social Dominance Orientation, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, relevant social identities, and collective guilt. Field and lab experiments showed that the impact of historical symbols did not depend on the mobilization of social identity (e.g., increasing mean scores and indirect effects), but the historical anchoring of political attitudes in representations was resistant to change. Manipulations of the salience of historical events changed levels of social identification, but did not change mean levels of support for New Zealand biculturalism or Taiwanese independence. Even an intense and immersive pretest/posttest design taking high school students on a national museum tour failed to change attitudes towards biculturalism in New Zealand.

Having been traumatized by the actions of the Bosnian Serb army and its primary supporter Serbia in Srebrenica, the Netherlands insisted on applying strict EU conditionality criteria for Belgrade's candidacy. The Dutch determination to repeatedly stall the process of EU-Serbian negotiations and to snub the preferences of the rest of the EU members cannot be adequately explained without taking into account the role of self-conscious affect. The article not only provides a fresh perspective of the enlargement process, but it also offers revisions to the habituated-deliberative choice hypothesis, which to date has not taken into account the role of self-conscious affect.

Research from the United States suggests that the 9/11 terrorist attack increased trust in political institutions by creating a “rally effect.” In this research note we analyze Eurobarometer data collected immediately before and after the March 11, 2004 terrorist attack in Madrid to replicate and extend previous findings from the United States. We report that, first, trust in different types of institutions (political, media, justice) increased significantly immediately after the Madrid terrorist attack; second, the effect of the attack varied systematically across different types of institutions; and, third, the effect was generally short-lived. Our results suggest that the rally effect of terror on trust in institutions generalizes across national contexts but also that the effect differs across types of institutions.

The harmfulness of anti-Semitic beliefs is widely discussed in current political and legal debates (e.g., Cutler v. Dorn). At the same time, empirical studies of the psychological consequences of such beliefs are scarce. The present research is an attempt to explore the structure of contemporary anti-Semitic beliefs in Poland—and to evaluate their predictive role in discriminatory intentions and behavior targeting Jews. Another aim was to determine dispositional, situational, and identity correlates of different forms of anti-Semitic beliefs and behavior. Study 1, performed on a nation-wide representative sample of Polish adults (N = 979), suggests a three-factorial structure of anti-Semitic beliefs, consisting of: (1) belief in Jewish conspiracy, (2) traditional religious anti-Judaic beliefs, and (3) secondary anti-Semitic beliefs, focusing on Holocaust commemoration. Of these three beliefs, belief in Jewish conspiracy was the closest antecedent of anti-Semitic behavioral intentions. Study 2 (N = 600 Internet users in Poland) confirmed the three-factor structure of anti-Semitic beliefs and proved that these beliefs explain actual behavior toward Jews in monetary donations. Both studies show that anti-Semitic beliefs are related to authoritarian personality characteristics, victimhood-based social identity, and relative deprivation.

Although attitudes toward peace and war are usually treated as two opposite poles of one dimension, in this article we argue that they may represent two distinct dimensions. To investigate this idea, we developed and tested a new balanced measure, the Attitudes Toward Peace and War (APW) Scale, in three studies (N = 4,742) in the United States and Denmark. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that attitudes toward peace and war formed two distinct, though negatively related, factors. Structural equation modeling showed that antecedents of attitudes toward peace included egalitarian ideological beliefs, the values of international harmony and equality, and empathic concern for others, and consequences included intentions to engage in peace-related activities. On the other hand, antecedents of attitudes toward war included authoritarian ideological beliefs, the values of national strength and order, and less personal distress, and consequences included intentions to engage in warlike activities. Results also showed that political affiliation had an impact on the relationship between peace and war attitudes, with conservatives less likely to find the attitudes incompatible. The findings support the view that attitudes toward peace and war represent two distinct dimensions.

Traditionally Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) has been seen as a unidimensional construct. Recently, however, researchers have begun to measure three distinct RWA dimensions (Feldman, 2003; Funke, 2005; Van Hiel, Cornelis, Roets, & De Clercq, 2006). One of these new multidimensional RWA approaches has conceptualized these three dimensions as Authoritarianism, Conservatism, and Traditionalism (ACT), which are viewed as expressions of basic social values or motivational goals that represent different, though related, strategies for attaining collective security at the expense of individual autonomy. Findings are reported from two studies to assess the validity and predictive utility of the multidimensional ACT approach. First, a direct cross-national comparison showed that the three ACT dimensions were reliable and factorially distinct and demonstrated the measurement invariance of the three latent constructs across Serbian and NZ (New Zealand) samples. The three ACT dimensions predicted self-reported behavior differentially in both samples, and a comparison of latent means showed the Serbian sample higher than the NZ sample on the ACT dimensions of Authoritarianism and Traditionalism but markedly lower on Conservatism. Second, a reanalysis of previously collected NZ data showed that the three ACT scales differentially predicted three dimensions of generalized prejudice in a theoretically meaningful manner. These findings underline the importance of studying ideological attitudes, such as RWA, multidimensionally.

European and Chinese Canadians' perceptions and expectations of the Canadian government's apology for the head tax placed on Chinese immigrants during the early twentieth century were examined, along with Chinese Canadians' willingness to forgive the transgression. Among both European and Chinese Canadians, beliefs about the importance attributed to the event and perception of the apology as deserved and sincere heightened expectations of improved intergroup relations. Collective guilt acceptance among European Canadians heightened the relation between perceived sincerity and positive expectations, whereas collective guilt assignment by Chinese Canadians heightened the relation between sincerity and forgiveness. A one-year follow-up of whether Chinese Canadians were equally satisfied with the apology indicated that their willingness to grant forgiveness had waned, and although on the whole expectations of improved relations were met, those who assigned more collective guilt were less convinced. Intergroup apologies and their effectiveness at facilitating intergroup relations are discussed.

In 2008, ANES included for the first time—along with standard explicit measures of old-fashioned and symbolic racism—the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), a relatively new implicit measure of racial attitudes. This article examines the extent to which four different measures of racial prejudice (three explicit and one implicit) predict public opinion during and after the 2008 election, including Americans' views towards several racial policy issues, their evaluations of, and feelings toward, Barack Obama, and their attitudes toward a Black president in general. Oversamples of African American and Latino respondents in the 2008 ANES enable us to broaden our tests of these measures beyond traditional White samples. We find that racial prejudice played an important role for all racial/ethnic groups but that the traditional explicit measures of racism are by far the stronger predictors for all of our dependent variables (compared to the new implicit measure) for both White and Black respondents. Surprisingly, the AMP adds clear explanatory power only to models in the Latino sample.

This article explores identity work and acculturation work in the lives of British mixed-heritage children and adults. Children, teenagers, and parents with mixed heritage participated in a community arts project that invited them to deliberate, construct, and reconstruct their cultural identities and cultural relations. We found that acculturation, cultural and raced identities, are constructed through a series of oppositional themes: cultural maintenance versus cultural contact; identity as inclusion versus identity as exclusion; institutionalized ideologies versus agency. The findings point towards an understanding of acculturation as a dynamic, situated, and multifaceted process: acculturation in movement. To investigate this, we argue that acculturation research needs to develop a more dynamic and situated approach to the study of identity, representation, and culture. The article concludes with a discussion on the need for political psychologists to develop methods attuned to the tensions and politics of acculturation that are capable of highlighting the possibilities for resistance and social change.

Radical activist organizations face the complex task of managing their identity so as to draw political attention but also to appear legitimate and thus gain public support. In this article we develop a picture of the identities of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) members, a group mostly known for their direct action against whaling, via a thematic analysis of material from the SSCS website and interviews with SSCS members. In online commentary, founder Captain Paul Watson establishes several deliberately paradoxical notions of who the Sea Shepherds are. We relate these identity statements to interviews with core activists to examine how they manage the identity conflicts resulting from the group identity, such as being seen as “pirates” and “hard lined vegans.” We found that SSCS positions themselves as a diverse and unstructured organization, yet distinctively passionate and willing to take action where others will not. The implications of this research are discussed in relation to the importance of understanding the constraints and conflicts around political activist identities.

Threat relates to right-wing ideological attitudes at the individual level. The present study aims to extend this relationship to the national level. More specifically, in a sample of 91 nations, we collected country-level indicators of threat (including inflation, unemployment, gross national product, homicide rate, and life expectancy). Moreover, we analyzed data from the European and World Value Survey (total N = 134,516) to obtain aggregated country-level indicators for social-cultural and economic-hierarchical right-wing attitudes for each of these countries. In accordance with previous findings based on the individual level, a positive relationship between threat indicators and right-wing attitudes emerged. This relationship was stronger than what was usually reported at the individual level. In the discussion, we focus on the mutually reinforcing influence at the individual and national levels in terms of right-wing attitudes.

Conspiracy accounting is often regarded as an atypical, pathological form of political reasoning, and little research has considered how ordinary social actors may refer to political conspiracies in the course of argument. In this article, we consider the spontaneous use of conspiracy narratives by politically engaged Greek citizens in interview discussions of the Macedonian crisis. Analysis revealed that conspiracy narratives were typically used to challenge dominant representations that attributed the Macedonian crisis to Greek xenophobic nationalism. Specifically, conspiracy accounts were used to dispute assumptions concerning Greece's majority status by representing the political opposition as a consortium rather than a single out-group, by recasting the threat posed to Greece as a matter of realistic rather than symbolic competition, and by extending the historical frame of reference to encompass past and prospective future threats to the Greek people and the Greek state. In conclusion, we note how the use of conspiratorial reasoning may be used to construct complex causal arguments concerning intergroup relations and to challenge dominant ideological assumptions about social hierarchy and political legitimacy. In this respect, conspiratorial reasoning might be regarded as a prototypical form of intergroup representation.

This article draws upon recent findings from the field of neuroscience to explore how loss aversion affects foreign policy resolve. We theorize that U.S. policy makers are more resolute in pursuing preventive policies that seek to avoid losses than they are in pursuing promotive policies that seek to acquire new gains. To test our theory, we conduct the first large-n analysis of foreign policy hypotheses derived from the neuroscience of loss aversion using data from 100 cases of U.S.-initiated Section 301 trade disputes. The results provide strong support for the loss-aversion-based theory, revealing that American policy makers are willing to fight harder and hold out longer in trade disputes with preventive objectives than they are in cases with promotive ones. Our study demonstrates that hypotheses derived from neuroscientific findings can be tested using large-n techniques in study of foreign policy, revealing a new avenue of inquiry within the field.

Two studies investigated reciprocal effects of values and voting. Study 1 measured adults' basic values and core political values both before (n = 1379) and following (n = 1030) the 2006 Italian national election. Both types of values predicted voting. Voting choice influenced subsequent core political values but not basic values. The political values of free enterprise, civil liberties, equality, law and order, military intervention, and accepting immigrants changed to become more compatible with the ideology of the chosen coalition. Study 2 measured core political values before (n = 697) and following (n = 506) the 2008 Italian national election. It largely replicated the reciprocal effects of voting and political values of Study 1. In addition, it demonstrated that left-right ideology mediated the reciprocal effects of voting and political values. Moreover, voter certainty moderated these effects. Political values predicted vote choice more weakly among undecided than decided voters, but voting choice led to more value change among undecided voters.

Collective guilt from harm one's group has caused an out-group is often undermined because people minimize or legitimize the harm done (i.e., they generate exonerating cognitions). When a group action has harmed both the in-group and an out-group, focusing people on “self-harm”—ways in which the in-group has harmed itself—may elicit more collective guilt because self-harm is less likely to be exonerated. In Study 1, American participants who focused on how the invasion of Iraq had harmed the United States expressed greater collective guilt over harm inflicted on the people of Iraq than those who focused on Iraqi suffering. Study 2 showed that this effect is due to reductions in exonerating cognitions among people focused on self-harm. We consider the implications of these findings for intergroup reconciliation, particularly in situations where two groups have been involved in open conflict.

This research took a person × situation approach to predicting prejudice by looking at how social worldviews interact with real-world environmental factors to predict how people respond to immigrants within their local area. Taking a Dual Process Motivational approach, we hypothesized that a higher proportion of immigrants in the local community would be associated with negative attitudes toward immigration for respondents high in dangerous world beliefs. Conversely, we hypothesized that living in a highly affluent (as opposed to socioeconomically deprived) community would be associated with negative attitudes toward immigration for respondents high in competitive world beliefs. Both hypotheses were supported using regional information derived from national census data combined with representative survey data from a large telephone sample conducted in New Zealand (N = 6,489). These findings support the proposition that individual differences interact with specific features of the environment to predict people's levels of prejudice in distinct ways.

Using a nationally representative survey fielded in 2009, we analyze the relationships between personality traits and various modes of political participation in South Korea. We find statistically significant relationships between personality (measured by the Five-Factor Model) and several nonelectoral modes of participation. Openness correlates positively with protest participation, rally attendance, financial contributions to political causes, news media contacts, and political activities via the Internet. Agreeableness correlates negatively with these five participation modes as well as petition signing. Conscientiousness is positively associated with individual political acts (e.g., contacting news media and elected officials and donation), while it is negatively associated with collective actions such as participation in rally. However, we do not find any significant relationship between personality and voter turnout. Reflecting an unusually conflictual political climate of South Korea in 2008, we discuss these findings' implications focusing on the personality-situation interactions.

According to moral foundations theory (Haidt & Joseph, 2004), five foundations are central to moral intuition. The two individualizing foundations—harm/care and fairness/reciprocity—hinge on the rights of the individual, whereas the three binding foundations—in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity—focus on communal bonds. Recent work suggests that reliance on the various foundations varies as a function of sociopolitical orientation: liberals consistently rely on the individualizing foundations, whereas conservatives rely on both the individualizing and binding foundations. In an effort to further explore the relationship between sociopolitical orientation and morality, we argue that only certain types of sociopolitical attitudes and beliefs should relate to each cluster of foundations. Drawing on dual-process models of social and political attitudes, we demonstrate that the individualizing foundations are aligned with attitudes and beliefs relevant to preferences for equality versus inequality (i.e., SDO and competitive-jungle beliefs), whereas the binding foundations are aligned with attitudes and beliefs relevant to preferences for openness versus social conformity (i.e., RWA and dangerous-world beliefs). We conclude by discussing the consequences of these findings for our understanding of the relationship between sociopolitical and moral orientations.

Political efficacy is an important psychological orientation that has been used extensively by scholars to help explain voting and other forms of participation. However, very few scholars have sought to treat political efficacy as a dependent variable. In this research note, we look at the linkage between descriptive representation and political efficacy. Drawing from existing literature, we argue that an increase in descriptive representation positively affects levels of political efficacy. We examine support for this argument by looking at whether levels of efficacy increased among African Americans after the election of Barack Obama using data from the 2008–2009 American National Election Studies (ANES) panel study. We find that the effects of descriptive representation on efficacy varied depending on one's partisanship. Black Republicans, Independents, and weak Democrats experienced an increase in efficacy. However, Black Democrats and White Democrats who strongly identify with the party experienced a similar boost in efficacy, which suggests that partisanship can override the effects of having a descriptive representative.

We offer a theory of motivated political reasoning based on the claim that the feelings aroused in the initial stages of processing sociopolitical information inevitably color all phases of the evaluation process. When a citizen is called on to express a judgment, the considerations that enter into conscious rumination will be biased by the valence of initial affect. This article reports the results of two experiments that test our affective contagion hypothesis—unnoticed affective cues influence the retrieval and construction of conscious considerations in the direction of affective congruence. We then test whether these affectively congruent considerations influence subsequently reported policy evaluations, which we call affective mediation. In short, the considerations that come consciously to mind to inform and to support the attitude construction process are biased systematically by the feelings that are aroused in the earliest stages of processing. This underlying affective bias in processing drives motivated reasoning and rationalization in political thinking.

Research recently published in Political Psychology suggested that political intolerance is more strongly predicted by political conservatism than liberalism. Our findings challenge that conclusion. Participants provided intolerance judgments of several targets and the political objective of these targets (left-wing vs. right-wing) was varied between subjects. Across seven judgments, conservatism predicted intolerance of left-wing targets, while liberalism predicted intolerance of right-wing targets. These relationships were fully mediated by perceived threat from targets. Moreover, participants were biased against directly opposing political targets: conservatives were more intolerant of a left-wing target than the opposing right-wing target (e.g., pro-gay vs. anti-gay rights activists), while liberals were more intolerant of a right-wing target than the opposing left-wing target. These findings are discussed within the context of the existing political intolerance and motivated reasoning literatures.

This article presents a discursive analysis of participant accounts of authoritarianism, with the aim of understanding how participants construct accounts about authority, when, and for what purposes. Participants completed a 30-item Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale and were then interviewed about how they went about this task. Analyses revealed that, despite an overall consistency when answering items on an authoritarianism scale, participants in this study did not consistently choose to produce authoritarian responses in contrast to the nonauthoritarian alternative. Instead, the construction and expression of authoritarian ideas was found to be directly related to two rhetorical features of conversing about authoritarianism: (1) the ideological dilemma of society versus individual and (2) the mobilization of arguments about social and personal threat that allowed participants to construct accounts about collective rights or personal freedoms. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current debates about how authoritarianism should be theorized and studied.

In European Union (EU) countries, public debates about immigrants and citizenship are increasingly framed in cultural terms. Yet, there is no agreement within the citizenship literature on whether a cultural citizenship representation can be distinguished from the more established ethnic and civic representations and on how its measures relate to anti-immigrant attitudes. The present study tested measures of citizenship representations among high school students (N = 1476) in six EU countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Sweden). Factor analyses favored a three-factor model of citizenship representations (i.e., ethnic, cultural, and civic factors), which showed partial metric invariance. Across countries, ethnic and cultural scales correlated positively with each other and negatively with the civic scale. Moreover, ethnic and cultural scales related positively and the civic scale negatively to anti-immigrant attitudes. However, when analyzed simultaneously, relations of the ethnic scale with anti-immigrant attitudes were no longer significant, while those of the cultural and civic scales proved to be robust. Implications of these findings are discussed.

This article reports results from the first twin study of adults in the United States that focuses exclusively and comprehensively on political traits. These data allow us to test whether a common set of genetic and environmental influences act upon a broad variety of values, personality traits, and political attitudes. In short, it allows us to empirically investigate whether there are a core set of predispositions that form the basis of our political orientations and, if so, whether these predispositions are shaped by the same environmental and innate forces. The key finding from our analysis is that there are core political predispositions that are rooted in common genetic and environmental influences and that these predispositions are empirically distinct from broader personality traits.

Voters are continuously bombarded with information during political campaigns, yet a consistent conclusion from research on voter learning is that individuals remember far less information about political candidates than one might expect. What remains unclear is why memory for campaign information is so poor. The present study examines two explanations for memory failure. Using an experimental design, the present study explores whether campaign information fades from memory (trace decay) or whether extraneous information impedes an individual's subsequent ability to recall campaign information (interference). The results suggest that examining the ways in which the larger information environment influences recall of campaign information has important implications for the importance we attribute to campaign information in models of voter decision making.

Recent research has extended the belief-perseverance paradigm to the political realm, showing that negative information about political figures has a persistent effect on political opinions even after it has been discredited. However, little is known about the effects of false positive information about political figures. In three experiments, we find that discrediting positive information generates a “punishment effect” that is inconsistent with the previous literature on belief perseverance. We argue people attempt to adjust for the perceived influence of the false claim when the information is discredited. In this case, when trying to account for the effects of discredited positive information about a politician, people overestimate how much correction is needed and thus end up with a more negative opinion. (By contrast, people underestimate how much correction is needed to adjust for false negative information, leading to belief perseverance.) These results suggest that bogus credit claiming or other positive misinformation can have severe repercussions for politicians.

Political actors recognize the power of framing problems using personalized examples and causal stories to shape public opinion. Yet little is known about how these frames interact. This research presents the results of three studies designed to investigate the effect of “individualizing” the problem of childhood obesity, in combination with information about causes of obesity, on public support for obesity prevention policies (Studies 1 and 2) and to examine how frequently the news media rely on individual depictions of obese children to portray the problem in actual news coverage (Study 3). Results from two experiments consistently demonstrated that, regardless of how the cause of childhood obesity was framed, when a news report identified an individual obese child, participants were less likely to support prevention policies than when the report described the problem in more general terms. A content analysis indicated that news articles relatively infrequently frame the problem using individualized depictions of a specific child. When specific overweight or obese children were mentioned, news coverage emphasized internal (behavioral and genetic) causes rather than factors external to the child such as neighborhood, economic, or food-industry factors. Findings underscore the importance of considering attitudes toward a policy's target population when assessing how individual depictions of a policy problem influence public sentiment.

In times of war, news media coverage of the plight of civilian casualties plays a critical role in shaping attitudes regarding war's human costs. We proposed that these attitudes may also be surreptitiously influenced by the commercial advertisements that often accompany this coverage. Specifically, we hypothesized that when newspaper articles pertaining to civilian victims of war are flanked by luxury ads, conservatives, relative to liberals, will subsequently exhibit less concern for these victims. This proposition was based on the notion that commercial ads, particularly those promoting luxury items, make salient the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” and thereby, at least implicitly, threaten the legitimacy of the current socioeconomic system. Drawing upon system justification theory, we posited that this threat would lead individuals with stronger system-justification tendencies (conservatives), relative to those more open to challenging the current system (liberals), to show greater tolerance for civilian war casualties in order to defend the system's integrity. Evidence consistent with this hypothesis was found in a quasi-experimental study (n = 329).

Charismatic presidents like John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and now Barack Obama have been able to overcome stereotype-based barriers to political power by connecting emotionally with viewers, particularly through their nonverbal skills. In this study we focus on the facial displays of emotion by President Obama and how participants interpret them. This study builds upon the pioneering research of the Dartmouth Group concerning response to displays of happiness-reassurance by political leaders. It will first replicate and extend upon existing research by using Ekman and Friesen's Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to characterize facial displays by President Obama, specifically three neutral displays and three different types of smiles. Second, this study replicates research carried out over two decades ago concerning individual differences in sex, ethnicity, and age cohort on response to political candidates culturally defined as Black. Video focusing on the head and torso were FACS coded and presented in a web-based experiment to 79 participants working at a southern institution of higher education. The participants identified the emotions felt by President Obama on a scale ranging from “not at all” to “extremely” focusing on the basic emotion terms of: “Happy” and “Playful” (happiness-reassurance) and “Angry” and “Disgusted” (anger-threat). Findings suggest participants differentiate between subtle facial-display differences and that there are differences based upon ethnicity and support for President Obama when they interpret his facial displays of emotion.

This article focuses on the effects of group-based emotions for in-group wrongdoing on attitudes towards seemingly unrelated groups. Two forms of shame are distinguished from one another and from guilt and linked to positive and negative attitudes towards an unrelated minority. In Study 1 (N = 203), Germans' feelings of moral shame—arising from the belief that the in-group's Nazi past violates an important moral value—are associated with increased support for Turks living in Germany. Image shame—arising from a threatened social image—is associated with increased social distance. In Study 2 (N = 301), Britons' emotions regarding atrocities committed by in-group members during the war in Iraq have similar links with attitudes towards Pakistani immigrants. We extend the findings of Study 1 by demonstrating that the effects are mediated by a sense of moral obligation and observed more strongly when the unrelated group is perceived as similar to the harmed group. Guilt was unrelated to any outcome variable across both studies. Theoretical and practical implications about the nature of group-based emotions and their potential for affecting wider intergroup relations are discussed.

The relationship between political conservatism and left–right orientation was examined in 15 Western European and 13 former communist Central and Eastern European countries using the data from European Social Survey Round 3 (N = 46,103) and Round 4 (N = 50,601). Cross-culturally validated values were used to measure the two potential aspects of conservatism: resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. Both of these aspects were positively related to right-wing orientation in Western countries. In the former communist countries, the relationships were positive, negative, and nonexistent; they differed between the countries and varied between 2006 and 2008. The results indicate that conservatism can be related to left-wing or right-wing orientation depending on the cultural, political, and economic situation of the society in question. The results also show that despite the shared communist past, former communist Central and Eastern Europe is a diverse region that should be treated as such also in research.

Using data from an original two-wave panel survey of California high school students and a two-wave panel survey of high school students in Chicago, we find that different pedagogical approaches influence different forms of civic and political engagement. Specifically, controlling for prior levels of engagement and demographic factors, we find that open discussion of societal issues promotes engagement with political issues and elections. In contrast, service learning opportunities increase community-based and expressive actions. Both kinds of opportunities promoted commitments to participatory citizenship. These patterns can teach us about the kinds of opportunities (both in school and out) that can shape adolescents' civic and political development.

After continued pressure, the Canadian government offered an apology to Aboriginal peoples for its role in the Indian Residential School (IRS) system, where children were removed from their families in an effort to assimilate the Aboriginal population. Although the apology was sought after, it was unclear what Aboriginal peoples expected it to accomplish in relation to their treatment and quality of life within Canada. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed that, although Aboriginal adults (N = 164) felt the apology could potentially be a first step towards improved relations with the government and non-Aboriginal Canadians, expectations that such changes would actually come to fruition were generally pessimistic. In exploring predictors of such expectations, path analysis indicated that those who had been intimately impacted by IRSs reported greater perceived discrimination that, in turn, was associated with lowered intergroup trust and forgiveness. Those who perceived high levels of discrimination were less likely to expect changes following the apology, which was mediated by the low levels of intergroup trust and forgiveness towards the government, but not towards non-Aboriginal Canadians. Essentially, an apology was not enough to elicit hope for improved intergroup relations, especially when perceptions of continued discrimination impeded the restoration of intergroup trust and forgiveness.