Emotional response to U.K. political party leader facial displays of affiliation, reward, and ambiguity during Brexit

Abstract

Objective: On December 12, 2019, the United Kingdom's ruling Conservative Party called an election that put the country's 2016 "Brexit" referendum on leaving the European Union to the test. The divisive campaign and a polarized electorate culminated in large losses by opposition Labour and Liberal Democratic parties. Amid a polarized electorate, lingering questions arise as to whether the election results reflect more upon partisan ties or the respective party leaders' ability to emotionally connect with followers through their nonverbal behavior. Methods: Using a unique pre-registered design, this study considers the emotional response to leaders of the three major U.K. political parties in the week prior to the December 2019 election by drawing upon a national sample of 546 partisan participants. We examine self-reported happiness, affinity, anger, and distress in response to reward and affiliative smiles as well as ambiguous facial displays in short videos shown without sound featuring Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson and his opponents Jeremy Corbyn (Labour Party) and Jo Swinson (Liberal Democratic Party). Results: The findings of this pre-registered study suggests partisan identity plays a powerful role in empathetic and counter-empathetic responses to leader facial displays generally. Further analysis reveals a more nuanced response to the competing leaders' facial displays with followers of all three parties responding to the different smiles in distinct manners.

Winners and losers: Emotional shifts across elections are conveyed by a politician’s smile

“…Nine short (7–10 second) video excerpts of Johnson, Corbyn and Swinson were collected from the public domain. We have described the imagery in detail in our previous report and would direct readers to that source for a detailed description of the material [ 31 ]. To maintain external validity, any textual background or media icons superimposed onto the video were not removed from the frame.…”

“…All participants were invited to complete the study over a 24-hour period one week before the UK General Election (starting 5 December 2019) and again one week after (19 December 2019). The full dataset of participants who responded the week prior to the election is reported elsewhere (see [ 31 ]). Here, only those individuals who responded both before and after the election are considered.…”

“…The strength of the emotion felt was indicated when participants moved the slider bar across the screen (from left to right), progressing from “Not at all”/0 to “Extremely”/100 with the default setting being “Not at all.” The eight felt emotion terms were combined into four 100-point variables, including “anger” (angry + disgusted), “distress” (fearful + anxious), “happiness” (happy + excited), and”affinity” (proud + interested). The resulting Cronbach’s α for the scales ranged from 0.78 to 0.97 [ 31 ].…”

“…The eight felt emotion terms were combined into four 100-point variables, including "anger" (angry + disgusted), "distress" (fearful + anxious), "happiness" (happy + excited), and"affinity" (proud + interested). The resulting Cronbach's α for the scales ranged from 0.78 to 0.97 [31].…”

“…In prior work, we assessed viewer reports of happiness, affinity, anger, and distress in response to the reward and affiliative smiles, as well as ambiguous facial expressions, of party leaders Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jo Swinson in the week before the December 2019 UK general election [ 31 ]. However, this work did not take into the account the complex social effects of the election itself.…”