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1. GuesSync!: An Online Casual Game To Reduce Affective Polarization

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3610190  

   Rajadesingan, Ashwin; Choo, Daniel; Zhang, Jessica; Inakage, Mia; Budak, Ceren; Resnick, Paul (October 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   The past decade in the US has been one of the most politically polarizing in recent memory. Ordinary Democrats and Republicans fundamentally dislike and distrust each other, even when they agree on policy issues. This increase in hostility towards opposing party supporters, commonly called affective polarization, has important ramifications that threaten democracy. Political science research suggests that at least part of this polarization stems from Democrats' misperceptions about Republicans' political views and vice-versa. Therefore, in this work, drawing on insights from political science and game studies research, we designed an online casual game that combines the relaxed, playful nonpartisan norms of casual games with corrective information about party supporters' political views that are often misperceived. Through an experiment, we found that playing the game significantly reduces negative feelings toward outparty supporters among Democrats, but not Republicans. It was also effective in improving willingness to talk politics with outparty supporters. Further, we identified psychological reactance as a potential mechanism that affects the effectiveness of depolarization interventions. Finally, our analyses suggest that the game versions with political content were rated to be just as fun to play as a game version without any political content suggesting that, contrary to popular belief, people do like to mix politics and play. 

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2. A Linguistic Strategy to Measure Negative Affective Polarization Through Text Content

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X251338360  

   Garzón-Velandia, Diana_Camila; Pennebaker, James_W (May 2025, Journal of Language and Social Psychology)

   Three studies developed and validated a linguistic dictionary to measure negative affective polarization in English and Spanish political texts. It captures three dimensions: negative affect, delegitimization, and political context. In the first study, two independent judges evaluated the candidate words, and reliability indicators were calculated, showing acceptable values for short texts (.572 in English, .541 in Spanish) and higher values for larger corpora (.964 in English, .957 in Spanish). The second study tested discriminant validity by comparing negative affective polarization scores in social media comments on politics and entertainment. Results showed significantly higher polarization scores in political content, confirming the dictionary's validity. The third study compared the dictionary to an existing online polarization measure, finding greater coverage and alignment with the construct. Additionally, it was observed that polarization scores were higher in texts containing hate speech compared to those where it was absent. The findings suggest that the dictionary in both languages have strong psychometric properties, making it a valuable tool for analyzing online content, particularly social media comments. It can be used as an independent measure or as input for machine and deep learning models. 

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3. Testing the Robustness of the ANES Feeling Thermometer Indicators of Affective Polarization

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423001302  

   TYLER, MATTHEW; IYENGAR, SHANTO (December 2023, American Political Science Review)

   Affective polarization (AP)—the tendency of political partisans to view their opponents as a stigmatized “out group”—is now a major field of research. Relevant evidence in the United States derives primarily from a single source, the American National Election Studies (ANES) feeling thermometer time series. We investigate whether the design of the ANES produces overestimates of AP. We consider four mechanisms: overrepresentation of strong partisans, selection bias conditional on strong identification, priming effects of partisan content, and survey mode variation. Our analysis uses the first-ever collaboration between ANES and the General Social Survey and a novel experiment that manipulates the amount of political content in surveys. Our tests show that variation in survey mode has caused an artificial increase in the mixed-mode ANES time series, but the general increase in out-party animus is nonetheless real and not merely an artifact of selection bias or priming effects. 

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4. The affective benefits of nature exposure: What's nature got to do with it?

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101498  

   Meidenbauer, Kimberly L.; Stenfors, Cecilia U.D.; Bratman, Gregory N.; Gross, James J.; Schertz, Kathryn E.; Choe, Kyoung Whan; Berman, Marc G. (December 2020, Journal of Environmental Psychology)

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5. Transnational Affective Circuitry: Public Information Campaigns, Affective Governmentality, and Border Enforcement

   https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2023.2226193  

   Williams, Jill M; Coddington, Kate (November 2023, Annals of the American Association of Geographers)

   Geographers have been central to identifying and exploring the shifting spatialities of border enforcement and how different enforcement strategies alter the geography of state sovereignty. Migration-related public information campaigns (PICs) are one strategy that has received increasing attention from geographers and social scientists more broadly in recent years. While existing research examines the sites and spaces where PICs are distributed, as well as the affective content of their messaging, little research has examined the development of campaigns and the transnational connections that enable their deployment. This article draws on work in the fields of carceral circuitry and transnational enforcement networks in order to expand our understanding of affective governmentality as a transnational strategy of border governance. Based on data collected as part of a large-scale comparative study of the use of PICs by the US and Australian governments, we argue that this form of affective governmentality relies upon transnational circuits through which people, money, and knowledge move to enable the development and circulation of affective messaging. In doing so, we develop the concept of transnational affective circuitry to refer to the often contingent, temporary relations and connections that enable PICs to operate as a form of transnational affective governmentality aimed at hindering unauthorized migration. Our analysis illustrates the transnational connections that enable increasingly expansive and creative forms of border enforcement to emerge while also expanding the scope of examinations of affective governmentality to attend to the relations that undergird and enable this form of transnational governance. 

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