The participants – 18 Democrats and 13 Republicans – wore a monitor called a research ring that measured their sympathetic responses while viewing the presidential debate.
Bolls explained that sympathetic arousal is the reaction from your sympathetic nervous system, which controls the “flight or fight” response to danger. While Bolls and his team are still looking through all of the data, it was clear that Democrat participants’ sympathetic systems were set off more during the debate than Republicans’.
The research ring recorded sympathetic arousal by measuring the sweat on their hands, said Jashojit Roy, the CEO of Senstream. Senstream, located in California, is the company that created the technology for the research ring that measures electrodermal activity, or EDA.
EDA is useful for measuring immediate reactions, according to Roy. The team at Murrow was able to see the spikes in EDA and identify the exact moments from the debate that caused them, which led to the discovery that participants’ sympathetic response was activated equally by both Harris and Trump.
Democrats see Donald Trump as a threat, Bolls concluded from the data. The intense emotional response from Democratic participants indicates that Trump elicited a similar biological reaction to a perceived danger, such as an important exam, Bolls said.
The emotions recorded in the study weren’t all negative, however.
“Many people from all political parties … were heavily anticipating watching their preferred presidential candidate take on their opponent,” acknowledged UW student Bortnick, who was not a participant in the WSU study.
Bolls’ second conclusion from the data was that Harris did well using this anticipation to energize her voter base to action, a statement reflected in a participant questionnaire after the study.
Each participant, who received $50 for their involvement, was asked after the study concluded whether they would be willing to donate part of their earnings to their party, and if so how much. More Democrats answered they would be willing to donate some of their earnings, and that they would be willing to donate a larger percentage than the Republican participants.
In a preliminary test of the research ring in 2016, Roy and his team found similar results in a study of participants’ reactions to Trump and Hillary Clinton campaign ads. Democrats and independents had more intense reactions to Trump’s “Build a Wall” ads, and were more likely to express interest in donating to Clinton’s campaign after the study, Roy said.
Matthew McGarrity, University of Washington professor of communication, rhetoric and public speaking, was unsurprised by the results of the study due to the changes in debate structure he’s observed over the years.
McGarrity argues that presidential debates are more accurately summarized as a “side-by-side press conference.” Over time, he explains, presidential debates have shifted from serving an information function — educating viewers on important issues and candidates’ stances on them — to a more personality-revealing function, more focused on who a candidate is as a person.
“One of the functions, potentially, of a debate is it increases voter information about issues, in which case these [presidential] debates have been steadily declining for a number of years,” he stated.
Debates have trended toward a discussion of a wider range of topics at a shallower level, more moderator interruptions and overall a less civil atmosphere, said McGarrity.
Bortnick, the UW student, said that even though she felt that the questions asked by the debate moderators in September were relevant, she was hoping for more detailed answers from the candidates.
“I felt like some of the responses we got from both candidates could have been elaborated on more in-depth,” she said.
Attacks against debate opponents used to be riskier, but are increasingly common in modern elections, according to McGarrity.
According to a transcript from ABC of the September debate, Harris poked at Trump’s ability as a speaker.
“And what you will also notice is that people start leaving [Trump’s] rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” she said.
Some tactics of modern debates include the increasing use of “gotcha” moments and attempts at sound bites, said McGarrity. These can then get turned into viral trends on social media and lead to a second wave of emotional response, said Bolls, the WSU researcher.
Bortnick notes how both campaigns have attempted to use this to their advantage, citing how Kamala HQ, a social media account dedicated to promoting Harris’s campaign, clipped moments from Trump during the debate as part of its TikTok and Instagram Reels content.
Although for this study, Bolls’ team purposely did not recruit participants who identified as independents, it was harder to recruit participants on the far right of the political spectrum, he said. The results of the study could have looked different if the participants had had more extreme political beliefs, Bolls said, but he says the study is still useful for understanding average Americans’ emotional responses to debates.
Roy agrees. “The psychological signal is more accurate than asking us [the viewers] directly or asking an expert what they think we’ll do,” he said. In other words, our bodies are more reliable predictors of long-term effects than public or expert judgment.
Bolls wants to expand the study.
“This is a very early foray into a much larger program of research,” he said.
One future area of focus is the role of emotional regulation, or the ability to control emotional responses to political media. He said he hopes more research on the neuroscience of media consumption will help us understand the emotional tension between parties.
“The most important and promising process for potentially throwing water on our burning fire instead of gas [is] emotion regulation,” he said.
Bortnick suggested another tool for responding to intense emotion surrounding future elections: Voters, especially first-time voters, should use resources such as campaign websites and a diverse range of articles to educate themselves on all races on their ballot, whether local, state or federal.
“The more informed you are as a voter,” she says, “the more you can feel like you’ve made a more logical decision in your vote.”
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