Do politics make you sweat or frown?

Do politics make you frown? We tend to have strong feelings when it comes to politicians, ranging from disgust to enthusiasm. So just how deep-seated are these feelings? Bert Bakker, Matthijs Rooduijn and Gijs Schumacher studied physical reactions to political messaging and found that the human body actually reacts to politics. Their findings have now been published in the American Political Science Review. The metaphors 'voting from the heart' or 'voting from the gut' illustrate that emotions play an important role in our political decisions. But what role do these feelings actually play in practice? Do politics make you sweat or frown? Communication scientist Bert Bakker and political scientists Matthijs Rooduijn and Gijs Schumacher examined emotion's role in politics as a part of their Hot Politics Lab project. They gathered data at the University of Amsterdam's Behavioural Science Lab, and in addition visited the TT car races in Assen, the annual fair of the city of Tilburg, an evangelistic youth day, the music festival Lowlands and the Sound and Vision museum with a special mobile lab. Measuring physical reactions.