DISGUST AS A DISCRETE EMOTION: CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES FOR POLITICAL BEHAVIOR

This dissertation uses literature from political psychology and evolutionary psychology to develop specific, testable expectations regarding the behavioral consequences of disgust within the political context. These expectations are placed within the broader context of political science research on anger and anxiety, two other negative emotions which have received more study in the past. The expectations derived in this paper serve to establish disgust as discrete emotional construct with discrete causes and consequences, rather than simply an analogue for other negative emotions, or for generalized disapproval. These expectations are that disgust correlates with a uniquely large increase in negative evaluation of political opposition, that disgust felt in a bipartisan way results in withdrawal from political engagement, and that Republicans are particularly susceptible to these effects by comparison to Democrats. The hypotheses derived from these expectations are tested across three studies using both the American National Election Studies 2016 time-series dataset as well as two survey experiments, one conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, another as a module on the 2019 Congressional Cooperative Election Studies. Not all of the hypotheses are supported, with the evidence from survey experiments in particular failing to produce results, but all of these expectations do find some degree of support in the observational data of the American National Election Studies.