This is your brain on negative ads

Negative ads make supporters of the attacker more likely to vote and followers of the victimized candidate depressed and less likely to vote, said Stanford University communications professor Shanto Iyengar, co-author of the book "Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate."

But the attack ads don't do much to independents, said Iyengar, who is finishing a study on people's reactions to positive and negative ads in seven close and nasty U.S. Senate races that will be decided on Tuesday. His online study measured "the basic gut feeling, the emotional reaction," of Democrats, Republicans and independents as they watched the ads, he said.

An attack ad of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee which featured a bare-shouldered blonde woman who spoke of meeting the African-American Ford at a Playboy party "is pulling people into separate camps," Iyengar said. Republicans reacted positively to the add, seeming energized to vote, he said, while Democrats reacted negatively, which could keep them from voting. Independents stayed near neutral.

These ads do not get people to switch sides, Iyengar said. "You can't get them to vote for you, but maybe you can get them to stay home."

What makes these ads work, Iyengar said, are "emotional triggers."

Those triggers reach into our brains faster than words, ideas and rational thought, said Williams College political science professor George Marcus. Marcus, president of the International Society of Political Psychology, has hooked people up to wires to measure frowns and smiles when they see campaign material and found that people respond to ads emotionally after about 80 milliseconds. It takes another 300 milliseconds before the words and issues hit the consciousness.

Bizer said his studies, which used fictional candidates, showed that when people form opinions based on negatives instead of positives, they are less likely to change their minds.

These ads allow people to take the easy way out, not studying issues and just relying on emotions, Iyengar said.

"If more people realized that this was all a question of pushing the right buttons ... I think there would be a realization that maybe I ought to sit down, take the time and study up on the issues," he said.

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