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

Abstract

The human smile can convey both rewarding and affiliative social intent and thus has significant utility in politics, where the ability to bond with and reassure voters is vital to electoral success. We examine experimental evidence from the 2019 UK general election to investigate the influence of a politician’s reward or affiliative smile on voter emotions. It was hypothesised that the winner’s affiliative smile would engender positive affect across all partisan groups compared to the winner’s reward smile display. Participants from a nationally representative sample were shown campaign footage containing both types of smiles from the leaders of the main competing political parties both before and after the election. Increases in happiness and affinity were revealed across all partisan groups when shown footage of the eventual winner’s affiliative smile; at the same time, supporters of losing parties indicated a decrease in negative affect. Affinity has been shown to increase civic engagement. Thus, we conclude that affiliative smiles displayed by leading candidates during the campaign likely acted as a mechanism to align voter behaviour with the dominant political message.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301113
Divisions: College of Health & Life Sciences > School of Psychology
Aston University (General)
Additional Information: Copyright © 2024 Senior et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Publication ISSN: 1932-6203
Data Access Statement: All relevant files are available from the OSF database (Link: https://osf.io/n2etq/).
Last Modified: 25 Nov 2024 08:53
Date Deposited: 01 May 2024 07:23
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://journal ... al.pone.0301113 (Publisher URL)
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2024-04-29
Published Online Date: 2024-04-29
Accepted Date: 2024-03-11
Authors: Senior, Carl (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-2155-4139)
Stewart, Patrick A.
Bucy, Erik
Lee, Nick

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