TY - JOUR TI - What are effective strategies in defusing contempt felt about political figures? DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3K64M63 PY - 2016 AB - This study examined the relative effectiveness of three different strategies in defusing contempt felt about political figures: rebut the attack which brought on the contempt (acting as the control), rebut the attack and counterattack, and rebut the attack and convey a message of hope. Contempt felt about the political figure was measured on a 20 item self-report contempt scale. In addition, a number of other dependent, mediating, and moderating variables were included in the survey to measure their relationship to the strategies to defuse contempt. Participants were instructed to read a fictional newspaper article, which first raised feelings of contempt about a fictional political figure, Congressman Blankenship, and then discussed Blankenship’s response to the issue that raised contempt, which contained one of the strategies to reduce contempt depending on condition. Participants then completed the contempt scale, which asked about their feelings and emotions towards Blankenship. Overall, the "rebut and counterattack" condition was found to be the only strategy that was significantly more effective in defusing contempt than the control condition. In addition, results found that the perceived undesirable qualities of the target of contempt fully mediated the relationship between the "rebut and counterattack" condition and amount of contempt felt about the target. Finally, results showed that neuroticism was a significant moderating variable in the study. These results begin to shed light on ways to diminish the impact of negative campaigning used against political figures. KW - Psychology KW - Communication in politics KW - Political science LA - eng ER -