Facing Farage: using the componential processing model of emotion to understand cross-national response to manipulated video of Nigel Farage

Basic Emotion Theory (BET), asserting that happiness, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness have prototypical facial expressions and physiological signatures, is being reconsidered because these emotions are inconsistently observed or interpreted as theorized. The Componential Processing Model (CPM) of emotion arguably improves upon BET by considering how individuals appraise relevant information using a multi-stage preconscious and conscious process that incorporates contextual factors. Information regarding relevance, implications, coping, and norms is processed on an ongoing basis, so appraisal patterns ought to vary with both stimulus and population. We consider CPM’s applicability to politics using a ~ 1 min 19 s long critique of UK immigration policy by Brexit proponent Nigel Farage as a stimulus. Across experimental conditions, we held the speech and video constant and manipulated the Observable Audience Response (OAR) by overlaying added audio tracks (applause, laughter, booing, or mixed laughter+booing) at a natural pause in the clip. We evaluated Farage’s facial behavior by manually coding it using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and then tested CPM expectations using a cross-cultural online experimental study of 356 U.S. and UK participants in a 2 (political context: U.S., UK) × 5 (OAR: control, applause, laughter, booing, and laughter+booing combined) experiment that evaluated the effects of the nine appraisal variables measured by the CPM. We conclude by outlining why these appraisal shifts matter in political evaluations.