In a democracy, the quality of citizen engagement depends on the way people deal with political information. On encountering the news, they may seek to learn more, they may listen to what others are saying, and they may take into account others' needs when considering possible policy options. Or they may ignore everything and hold fast to their preconceptions. Recent research has shown that people's reactions to the news will depend on how that news triggers their emotional states (anxiety, anger and enthusiasm). Equally, those reactions will depend on people's traits, including their personalities and political identities.

This talk describes a long-term research project that examines the roles played by emotional states and personality traits in shaping peoples' political information processing. The experimental work shows that these components play distinctive and separate parts in the drama. And the experiments demonstrate that the transient emotional states will have longer term impacts on information processing through the incorporation of those emotional states into affective signatures.

The science suggests that our understanding of the possibilities of democratic deliberation will require that we learn a great deal more about how events, policies, and politics get translated into the language of personality and identity and emotion. 

Michael MacKuen is a Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. Over the years, his work has focused on both the broader macro political system (in the US) and also on the political psychology of individuals. His books include The Affect Effect (2007), The Macro Polity (2002), and Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment (2000). His current projects include a series of articles concerning the way that political emotion and personality play into the dynamics of citizen political attention and the beginnings of political deliberation. He is also working on a project that means to elaborate on the ways that, when they consider the role of government, ordinary people balance individual and family self-interest against a broader sense of public altruism.