The Person in Political Emotion Colin Wayne Leach University of Connecticut ABSTRACT Recent social psychological theory and research on po- litical issues has returned to once-popular concepts such as political emo- tion and ideology. Strikingly, however, this work tends to avoid the notion of personality and explicit reference to individual differences. For example, the numerous studies that examine correlations between polit- ical beliefs, feelings, and preferences rarely acknowledge that such as- sociations show an ideological coherence in individuals. Instead, corre- lations between abstract constructs are interpreted as suggesting causal processes. Individuals, and their responses, are aggregated to generate such correlations but remain for the most part unexamined and unmen- tioned. I discuss 5 practices in research and reporting that make it difficult to find the person in correlational models of political emotion. I use my own research to illustrate these practices and to show how attention to macrolevel forces such as group membership, status, and structure may be integrated with attention to the individual person and meaningful ag- gregates. Politics are an important part of people’s lives. When something important to us is ‘‘at stake’’ in a political issue or event, we determine its evaluative meaning for us. This evaluative meaning is emotion (Arnold, 1960; Lazarus, 1991; Lutz & Abu-Lughod, 1990). To see someone angry about the government rescue of financial institutions, or to see someone fearful that his or her party will lose an election, is to see people imbue the political with a particular meaning. Anger and fear in these instances are the lived experience of politics in people’s lives (Leach & Tiedens, 2004). I would like to thank Eileen Zurbriggen, Nicolay Gausel, Valerie Earnshaw, Aarti Iyer, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Colin Wayne Leach, Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road, U-1020, Storrs, CT 06269-1020. Email: Colin.Leach@uconn.edu. Journal of Personality 78:6, December 2010 r 2010 The Author Journal of Personality r 2010, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00671.x