Affective and semantic components in political person perception

In 2 national surveys, one with 280 and the other with 1,008 respondents, Ss ascribed personality traits to prominent national politicians and reported the feelings that the politicians elicited. It was found that summary scores of good feelings and bad feelings were nearly independent of each other, much more so than were good and bad trait judgments. Affective registrations, in short, were less semantically filtered and less subject to consistency pressures. Summary scores of affect strongly predicted political preference. This effect was independent of and more powerful than that for personality judgments. Thus, affective registrations were not at all redundant with semantic judgments. (23 ref)