Presidential Expressions and Viewer Emotion: Counterempathic Responses to Televised Leader Displays

Abstract

Despite the biological predisposition to recognize and mimic facial expressions, research has shown that contextual or experiential factors may elicit emotionally incongruent, or counterempathic, responses. This experimental study reports how counterempathic responses to televised leader displays may be evoked in political communication. Findings suggest that unexpected nonverbal communication is subject to cognitive appraisal, which may influence emotional responding. Subjects were shown a series of four news stories, each followed by a 30-second televised reaction of President Bill Clinton. The story-reaction sequences varied by story topic, level of emotion and degree of leader display appropriateness. Physiological (heart rate, skin conductance and facial muscle activation, or EMG) and emotional self-report measures indicated that evaluations of display appropriateness moderated how much attention was given to the display, the affective direction of viewers' facial muscle activation and the level of autonomic activation, or arousal. The EMG data showed that viewers frowned in response to positive expressive displays that followed positive news. Smiling activation also decreased for high-intensity, positive displays. By manipulating the valence and intensity of the associated news event, facial mimicry, and emotional responses to leaders generally, are shown to be situationally influenced by the larger social and informational context. Downloaded from Résumé. En dépit des prédispositions biologiques qui permettent d'identifier et d'imiter des expressions faciales, la recherche montre que des facteurs contextuels ou empiriques peuvent induire des réponses émotionnellement non-pertinentes, ou contreempathiques. Cette étude empirique montre comment des réponses contre-empathiques à des expressions faciales télévisées de dirigeants politiques peuvent se produire dans la communication politique. Les résultats suggèrent qu'une communication non-verbale inattendue est soumise à une évaluation cognitive qui peut influencer la réponse émotionnelle. On montre aux sujets une série de quatre sujets d'information, chacun suivi d'une réaction télévisée de 30 secondes du Président Bill Clinton. Les séquences sujet d'information-réaction sont très différentes par le thème, le niveau d'émotion et le degré de pertinence de la réaction du dirigeant. Des mesures physiologiques (rythme cardiaque, conductivité de la peau et activation des muscles faciaux, ou EMG) et des mesures d'auto-évaluation émotionnelle indiquent que l'évaluation de la pertinence de la réaction modère le niveau d'attention porté à la réaction, la direction affective de l'activation des muscles faciaux des spectateurs et le niveau d'activation autonome, ou stimulation. Les données des mesures électromyographiques (EMG) montrent que les spectateurs froncent les sourcils en réponse à des expressions positives succédant à une information positive. L'activation du sourire décroît également pour des expressions très fortement positives. En manipulant la valence et l...

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).…”

“…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.…”

Dimensions of Political News Cultures: Sound Bite and Image Bite News in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States

“…We first captured the content of image bites by distinguishing five types of facial displays that are loosely based on categories developed by Kepplinger (1987Kepplinger ( , 1999 and Bucy and Bradley (2004).We coded whether the candidate appeared agitated (operationalized as energetic, aggressive, activated, powerful), broadly positive (operationalized as smiling, laughing, optimistic, upbeat, hopeful, self-confident, certain of victory), neutral (operationalized as expressionless, self-controlled, calm), moderately negative (operationalized as uneasy, unsure, uncomfortable, anxious, tense, helpless, surprised), or even clearly negative (operationalized as a noticeably unfavorable or inappropriate depiction of demeanor).To measure "picture selection bias," we calculated the number of stories containing moderately negative and clearly negative image bites in all four countries' television news (see first row of Table 6). Contrary to our expectation, we found no evidence for a systematic bad-news tendency on U.S. news.…”

Advances in Research Using the C-SPAN Archives

“…When considering news stories involving President Bill Clinton's leadership across a range of domestic and international news stories , as well as President George W. Bush's response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks (Bucy, 2003), participants expected and deemed low-intensity presidential reactions, in which strong emotions were either absent or subdued, as most appropriate. On the other hand, when President Clinton was shown experiencing high-intensity reactions displaying strong emotions such as anger or happiness, respondents used more cognitive capacity to consider this violation of nonverbal expectancies , findings in turn supported by psychophysiological analyses (Bucy & Bradley, 2004). These results are presumably due to the preference for leaders to be in control of themselves when facing challenging circumstances.…”

“…Extensive research by Bucy and colleagues considering the effect of presidential display behavior during television news stories found that there was an emotional appropriateness heuristic used by viewers (Bucy, 2003;Bucy, 2000;Bucy & Bradley, 2004). Here, when display behavior by the president was considered appropriate in terms of both its valence and its intensity, viewers engaged in automatic and cognitively effortless processing of information.…”