ABSTRACT
In recent years political communication has experienced a growth of new methods and analytical techniques that are bringing increased sophistication, precision, and rigor to the study of political phenomena. Psychophysiological measurement has been employed for some time in psychology but has been slowly gaining ground in political communication and political psychology. Although currently under-utilized, psychophysiology is a promising method that provides direct measures of citizen response—responses to political content during exposure as opposed to cognitively filtered self-reports after the fact—that is gradually gaining acceptance in the field. Employed in political communication research since the early 1980s (see Lanzetta, Sullivan, Masters, & McHugo, 1985), physiological measurement has recently been utilized in studies of viewer responses to political debates (Mutz & Reeves, 2005), negative political advertising (Bradley, Angelini, & Lee, 2007), still photographs of candidate faces (Kaplan, Freedman, & Iacoboni, 2007), and televised leader displays (Bucy & Bradley, 2004).
