Voters, Emotions, and Memory Andrew J. W. Civettini Knox College David P. Redlawsk University of Iowa In this paper we argue that emotional response to information encountered in campaigns has implications for the likelihood of remembering that information at the time of the vote. Most voting models are built on what voters remember—whether it is the placement of candidates on issues, or opened ended responses to prompts. That recall of memory is biased is well-known, but the extent to which those biases are driven by affective response to candidate information has not been studied. Using dynamic process tracing, we examine voters’ emotional responses, information search, and candidate evaluations during a simu- lated presidential primary campaign. By manipulating anxiety and the amount of incon- gruent information that voters encounter, we can detect the direct influence of affect in information processing. We find evidence that voters are more likely to remember informa- tion that generates any affective reaction as opposed to information for which the subjects report no emotional response. However, we find little evidence that anxiety has a special role, compared to enthusiasm or anger, in increasing the likelihood that an individual item is remembered. This challenges a primary contention of the theory of Affective Intelligence that anxiety leads to more memories for campaign information. KEY WORDS: Affect, Emotional response, Memory, Recall, Information processing The study of emotion is burgeoning in political psychology, and for good reason. It seems clear that politics is about feeling as much as it is about thinking. Recent research has suggested that emotions broadly defined (emotional response, affect, mood) can condition how and when political information is attended to and evaluated, perhaps heightening attention and learning (Marcus & MacKuen, 1993; Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000) or influencing the updating of evaluations (Kunda, 1990; Lodge, Taber, & Weber, 2006; Redlawsk, 2002; Redlawsk, Civettini, & Lau, 2007). Affect and mood may also have an impact on memory at Political Psychology, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2009 125 0162-895X © 2009 International Society of Political Psychology Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, and PO Box 378 Carlton South, 3053 Victoria Australia