Political Expertise and Affect: Effects on News Processing

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to investigate the various conditions under which political expertise (or prior knowledge in the general political domain) and affect (positive or negative feelings) might interact with each other in shaping the cognitive strategies that people employ in forming reactions to newspaper stories. Two hundred six subjects from a major midwestern university were randomly assigned to a positive affect or a negative affect condition to read an article about either a proposed change in the state of Michigan`s student loan program or the proposed deputization of campus police. A thought-listing procedure was employed to analyze subjects` reactions to the articles. In line with expectations, political expertise emerged as an important contributor to analytic processing of the news articles (measured by the generation of total thoughts, issue-relevant thoughts, and arguments). Predicted main effects of affective valence were not observed, but an interaction between expertise and affect was found. Political experts, but not novices, generated more issue-relevant thoughts in the negative affect condition. Implications of these results for political communication research (e.g., campaign effects) are discussed.