The impact of happiness in political ads on party evaluation: A data donation study with emotion recognition

• Visual expressions in emotions in political advertisements might have an impact on party evaluations. • Happiness in political ads has indeed a positive influence on party evaluations. • Effects of happiness on evaluations is partly mediated by respondents’ anger and enthusiasm. Laughter is contagious. A happy stimulus could arouse positive affections and inhibit negative responses. This study investigates the impact of projected images of happiness in election campaigns on ad-evoked emotions and party evaluation. An elaborate data collection was conducted during the final weeks of the 2021 Dutch General Election campaign. An experience sampling method was applied where 126 participants donated a total of 2626 online political ads they encountered daily. The happy stimuli in the donated ads were recognized using Pykognition and manual content analysis. Hypotheses were tested using two multi-level models. The results indicated that happiness in online political ads directly affected voters’ evaluation of the promoted party. We also found that happiness had a positive effect on ad-evoked enthusiasm and a negative effect on ad-evoked anger, and these impacts subsequently affected party evaluation. Taken together, this study provides insights into the impacts of visualized positive emotions in political campaigns.