Emotional Processing and Political Judgment: Toward Integrating Political Psychology and Decision Neuroscience

Emotional processing and political judgment 2 CONTENTS 1. In tro du ctio n 2. T heo ry a. The weight of traditional dichotomies b. The meanings of cognition and emotion i. Cognition ii. Emotion c. The centrality of the social d. Recurrent multilevel appraisal: a proposal for emotional processing in decision making 3. Met ho d a. The signal relationship: neural activity and the BOLD response b. Individual differences in the brain c. fMRI activations are tentative associations d. The limits of the lesion method 4. Ev ide nce a. Decision and Emotion b. Social Judgment and Emotion i. Mood and social attribution ii. Neural systems and social judgment 5. Con clusio ns Emotional processing and political judgment 3 1. In tro du ctio n Political psychology and decision neuroscience are both interdisciplinary fields aiming at empirically informed and testable models of human judgment and decision making. Although the contexts and scopes of the fields are not identical, they overlap considerably. Moving both fields forward while maximizing their explanatory power and conceptual coherence requires energetic multilevel development (Damasio et al. 2001; Cacioppo et al. 2000). One arena for fruitful interaction, as evidenced in the literature by the contributions in this volume, is the development of models that take account of how emotional processes work in human judgment and decision making, especially in political decisions. Attention to the role of emotional processes is also prominent in yielding progress at the interface between neuroscience and another key decision science, behavioral economics, in the field of neuroeconomics (Sanfey et al. 2003; We argue that the developing field of decision neuroscience, particularly where emotional processes are an intense focus of study, offers political psychology new handles on human behavior and mentation with which to investigate political judgment and decision making. Developing this interdisciplinary effort requires a clear acknowledgment of the theoretical and methodological challenges ahead, along with strategies for answering them. Along with considering important challenges, the paper articulates a theoretical framework designed both to offer responses to the stated challenges and to inform the discussion of empirical findings that follow. Specifically, the framework allows that emotional processes contribute critically to human judgment and decision making in various ways, including in ways that constitute and do not oppose adaptive outcomes. The rest of the paper considers recent work in areas relating emotional processes to prudential decision making and reward, and social judgment, and closes …