Trumping The Norm: Political Influence Of Negative Emotion In The 2016 Election

Emotion acts as a primer for our memory retention and encoding processes. In the 2016 election, we saw an increase in negative or hostile rhetoric from candidates. I argue this is due to the use of Twitter and the physical representation of engagement. This paper examines the effect of enthusiasm, anxiety, and hostility in response to political tweets. Tweets from Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio were analyzed for emotional response content to explore mean differences in retweets from the three emotions