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Affective Intelligence Theory (AIT) asserts that anxiety reduces the effect of party identification on candidate preferences (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000), but recent studies have raised doubts about this causal claim. Rather than functioning as a moderator of party identification, perhaps anxiety has a direct effect on preferences, or perhaps the relationship is reversed and preferences drive emotions (Ladd and Lenz 2008). Alternatively, Marcus et al.'s measure of anxiety may simply be capturing partisan ambivalence, so the posited relationship is spurious (Lavine, Johnston, and Steenbergen 2012). This paper addresses each of these questions by examining the effect of experimentally induced emotions on the types of considerations that came to mind when a national sample of adult Americans was asked what they liked and disliked about Barack Obama. By directly manipulating anxiety, this experiment avoids the causal ambiguity plaguing this debate and ascertains the true nature of the relationship between anxiety and ambivalence. Consistent with AIT, anxiety led respondents to recall more contemporary considerations, whereas enthusiasm brought to mind more long-standing considerations. Because the political context at the time of the study (fall 2013) was a very tumultuous time for the Obama administration, the increased accessibility of contemporary considerations led Democratic participants to experience more ambivalence in the anxiety condition. This effect was concentrated among those Democrats who were exposed to the most newspaper coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The present study tests the hypothesis that deviations from "affective bipolarity" in the relationship between the positive and negative dimensions of whites' stereotypes of blacks--such as racial ambivalence--should be stronger among conservatives. Across two different data sets (the 2000 National Election Study and the 1991 National Race and Politics Study) and three different methodologies (heteroskedastic regression, confirmatory factor analysis, and a regression analysis of attitude-ambivalence scores), this hypothesis was supported. Further analyses indicated that the relationship between conservatism and ambivalent perceptions of blacks was mediated by conflict between humanitarian and individualistic concerns in the racial context, but not in the abstract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]