Emotional and Evaluative Consequences of Inappropriate Leader Displays

Abstract

This study manipulated the appropriateness of presidential reactions to images of compelling news events to investigate how a political leader's nonverbal behavior evokes emotional responses and trait attributions. A repeated-measures experiment examining the combined effects of valence and arousal on viewers' affective reactions and trait evaluations was conducted on two voting-age subject pools in different states. Participants were shown a series of four news story-presidential reaction message sequences and were asked to rate a series of felt emotions and communicative traits. Results indicate an evocative function for leader displays that nonperson-specific news images do not share, suggesting a critical role for appropriate nonverbal communication in politics. Inappropriate message sequences elicited negative emotions more intensely than positive emotions and produced uniformly lower trait evaluations, whereas appropriate sequences elicited positive emotions more intensely. Moreover, negative displays were evaluated as significantly more honest, credible, trustworthy, and appropriate than positive displays.

Presidential speechmaking style: Emotional response to micro-expressions of facial affect

“…At the same time, participant determination remained nearly the same from prior to until after the speech when the microexpressions were removed, but decreased markedly when the micro-expressions remained in the speech. In summary, President Bush's facial micro-expressions dampened emotional response to the semantic and nonverbal content of the speech, a finding in line with Bucy and colleagues' assessment of the impact of inappropriate facial displays (Bucy 2000(Bucy , 2003Bucy and Bradley 2004;Bucy and Newhagen 1999).…”

“…Leaders who are capable of expressing a range of emotions may be more effective in gaining support and empathy in a process of communication where emotional response by viewers of a speech plays a key role. Here, we find that congruence of expressions with the message presented plays a highly important role in viewer response (Bucy 2000(Bucy , 2003 Fig. 3 Change in reported feelings of being determined 1999).…”

“…Bucy and colleagues have found inappropriate display behavior violates viewer expectations, in turn affecting physiological, emotional, and evaluative response (Bucy 2000;Bucy and Bradley 2004;Bucy and Newhagen 1999). The effect of inappropriate display behavior is elevated in crisis situations, with positive (i.e., smiling) high intensity displays being seen as less credible and trustworthy than facial displays that are negative and low intensity.…”

Charismatic and Affective Rhetoric in a Presidential Campaign

“…According to Bono & Illies (2006), a leader's use of negative emotion in his/her rhetoric is a powerful tool given that it has stronger and longer effects on followers than positive emotion. Moreover, as indicated by Bucy (2000), followers may evaluate negative displays of emotion as more honest, trustworthy, and credible than positive displays. In some instances, followers may even perceive a leader's display of negative emotion such as anger to be indicative of the leader's competence (Glaso & Einsaren, 2008).…”

“…According to these researchers, leaders' positive affect arouses positive emotion in followers, which in turn results in positive mood. However, several researchers have also shown that the effects of affect are contextdependent, with negative affect being rated more favorably than positive affect in particular situations (Bucy, 2000;Bono & Illies, 2006;Damen et al, 2008;Glaso & Einsaren, 2008). Damen et al (2008) found that the display of positive or negative affect mainly depended on its perceived appropriateness.…”