Crowd reactions influence whether people receive controversial political messages positively or negatively
Aston University
- Psychologist Dr Carl Senior at Aston University carried out research to look at people’s responses to an anti-immigration message from Nigel Farage
- The message was accompanied by either no reaction, applause, laughter, booing, or mixed laughter and booing
- Applause and laughter led to a more positive response from viewers, while mixed laughter and booing was especially damaging.
Positive crowd reactions like applause and laughter can make controversial political messages more acceptable to viewers, according to new research by psychologist Dr Carl Senior at Aston University.
The research suggests that how broadcasters and content creators use applause, laughter, and booing can subtly shape public perceptions of populist figures and divisive issues like immigration.
In carrying out the study, Dr Senior collaborated with Professor Patrick Stewart at the University of Arkansas, US, and Professor Erik Bucy at Texas Tech University, US. They played a 1m 19s clip of populist UK politician Nigel Farage attacking UK immigration policy. Immigration is a divisive topic in both the UK and the US.
The clip was shown to study participants with one of five soundtracks – no reaction, audience applause, laughter, booing, or mixed laughter and booing. They were then asked to rate the pleasantness of the clip and their perceptions of whether Farage ‘met expectations’ and ‘met his goals’.
When the message was shown with positive crowd responses, such as laughter and applause, participants rated the message as more successful and acceptable. A crowd response of mixed laughter and booing was particularly damaging, reducing pleasantness ratings compared with applause, laughter, and even the control condition.
Their findings show that studio audiences, crowd shots, and reaction tracks do more than provide ‘colour’. They can nudge how at home viewers judge a controversial leader without changing a single word of the speech, or the images shown. People do not just react to what a politician says, but also to contextual cues.
A viewer’s political ideology, as well as their country of origin, had an important effect on their perception of Farage and his message. More conservative participants and those in the US generally rated Farage as more pleasant, more successful, and more supportive of group values than participants in the UK.
The researchers say that future work could use other assessment methods such facial coding and facial electromyography (methods to track the movements of facial muscles) or vocal acoustics to more precisely track people’s emotional responses in the moment. They also call for studies to directly measure viewers’ familiarity with a politician, and for work that explicitly tests how audience response interacts with country and ideology to shape evaluations of leaders and their messages.
Dr Senior said:
“We wanted to test a more nuanced model of emotion in a real political case, moving beyond simple ‘like/dislike’ or basic emotion labels to examine how people appraise relevance, implications, coping, and norms when they watch a political message. We chose Farage because he is a controversial and high profile populist whose rhetoric on immigration is both consequential and polarising, making him an ideal case for studying how nonverbal cues and audience reactions influence evaluations across different national and ideological contexts.”
Visit www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2026.1721738/full to read the full paper, ‘Facing Farage: Using the Componential Processing Model of emotion to understand cross-national response to manipulated video of Nigel Farage’ in Frontiers in Political Science.
Journal
Frontiers in Political Science
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Facing Farage: using the componential processing model of emotion to understand cross-national response to manipulated video of Nigel Farage
Article Publication Date
22-Jul-2026
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