Abstract

In this article, the structure of emotional responses, relationship between those structures and influence of each structure on candidate evaluation were examined in the field of politics. The structure of emotion has been identified as having a two dimensional structure ; that is, emotional responses were clearly clustered into two dimensions orthogonally. Two dimensions are generally identified as the positive and negative emotionalities. These results demonstrate that whatever emotional responses are elicited by any information (cognition), such responses can be grouped into either positive emotionality or negative emotionality. And also results suggest that positive emotion is the more potent consideration influencing the disposition to vote for a candidate - though negative emotion is also a powerful factor. The evidence that there are cultural differences between the effect of positive emotion and of negative emotion was not found. On the other hand, differences in the amount of variance explained with those emotionalities between two countries were found. In another result, it was shown that the correlations between positive and negative emotion were very low in both countries. These results support Abelson et al's findings in 1982 that positive and negative emotion are nearly independent of each other. All of which provides further good evidence to validate the circumflex model.