Hi everyone,
This Friday (June 18) from 15:00 - 16:00 there will be another exciting lab meeting. In this session of the Online Hot Politics Lab, Gijs Schumacher (University of Amsterdam) will give a talk titled "Doing psychophysiology research in political science". This is joint work with Bert Bakker, Matthijs Rooduijn, Maaike Homan, Neil Fasching. See the abstract of his talk below.
The talk will be followed by a Q&A, and everybody is welcome to join via Zoom: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/96492065253https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fuva-live.zoom.us%2Fj%2F96492065253&data=04%7C01%7Cm.d.homan%40uva.nl%7C07a1f60224bc4cc6756408d92a65c1c3%7Ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7C1%7C0%7C637587438799663360%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=MEo6lcBdJWMmxLcNqQhAdel9PT1dV72ThMsOgR0vxSM%3D&reserved=0 at 3pm (CET).
Abstract: Facial electromyography (fEMG) is a type of a psychophysiological measurement that can register immediate positive and negative affective responses to experimental treatments. There is a clear benefit in registering affective responses while participants undergo a treatment, and at the same time fEMG can tap into the unconscious aspects of affective responses. As such, they offer clear benefits to the more popular survey questions that are used to measure affective responses to stimuli. However, fEMG is rarely used in political science because of formidable difficulties in processing, analyzing and interpreting this data. This paper addresses these issues by pooling 5 independent data collections, with in total 585 participants, 98 unique treatments and approximately 400,000 seconds of unique fEMG responses. We propose a scheme of how to process data, which addresses the heterogeneity of fEMG responses. We offer a way of analyzing fEMG data, that is particularly beneficial for the political science context in which we are unlikely to find large effects. By processing large amounts of treatment characteristics and respondent characteristics we also offer a range of benchmarks of useful comparison categories and guidance for new treatment design. Additionally, these analyses offer new perspectives on how "hot" politics is and for whom specifically.
Have a great rest of the week and hope to "see" you all Friday!
Maaike Homan PhD Candidate at the Political Science Department Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research University of Amsterdam Room B10.01 [logo hot politics]