Previous research has held that engaging with politics causes persistent, negative emotions. But a new study by Brown researchers found that the story might not be so simple — instead, they found engaging with politics lowers emotional well-being by increasing emotional volatility.
People engaging with politics “commonly feel emotions like anger and fear and outrage, and those accumulate,” said Alexander Walker, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences and the paper’s first author. “That was kind of the dominant framework: Politics is negative, and this is why it has these negative outcomes.”
The new study focused on examining the “pattern of emotions that occur over time when engaging with the (political) event,” Walker added. The examination goes beyond “static snapshots” used in previous research, employing longitudinal studies including long-form “diary” responses, according to the paper.
Jae-Young Son, a postdoctoral researcher in the cognitive and psychological sciences department and a co-author on the paper, described that an upsetting political event is more than a “one-and-done experience.”
“It’s not like I read the news, and I feel terrible about the state of the world, and then I go about my day as if nothing has happened,” Son said. “Exposure to politically upsetting negative events not only has that immediate impact, but it also destabilizes how we feel.”
Engagement with politics creates “affective instability,” characterized by “frequent and large fluctuations in affective states,” the paper reads. According to Son, “it’s this volatility, this instability in your emotions, that strongly predicts things like anxiety.”
The duration of these effects vary from person to person, he added.
The study assessed emotional changes following political engagement with protests that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd, using participant diary responses to determine their level of political engagement. They found that individuals exhibited elevated affective instability and reported more anxiety during the weeks in which they engaged with the protests, Walker said.
The researchers measured participants’ emotions by asking them to self-report their feelings on an “affect grid,” Son said. Affect is a “technical term” that is “related to, but not synonymous with, emotion,” he added. The grid allowed them to characterise experiences based on two dimensions: how positive or negative the feeling was and its intensity.
Emotional volatility was deduced by how participants moved around in this “affect space” over time, Son explained. Participants were more likely to “ping-pong” across affective maps following political engagement, suggesting affective instability.
“Their emotions are changing quite rapidly from day to day, week to week,” Walker added.
The study also found that strong partisans — those with greater “affective polarization” — on both sides of the political spectrum exhibit “the greatest fluctuations in daily affect,” the paper reads.
Although the study did not closely examine why this discrepancy exists, Walker hypothesized that it may stem from these individuals consuming “hyper-partisan news” designed to “evoke strong emotions.”
While there are ways a society can “make politics less polarizing,” Walker said, “there’s no perfect solution.”
“One obvious answer is to disengage,” he said, but disengagement has other drawbacks.
“People engage in politics for a reason,” Walker said. “They’re trying to change things about society, potentially that they don’t like. They’re trying to speak out against injustices.”
Nishita Malhan is a senior staff writer covering science and research.
