Obama in Your Heart

[Hestia]

Obama in Your Heart
How the president-elect tapped into a powerful—and only recently studied—human emotion called "elevation."
By Emily Yoffe
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008, at 7:03 AM ET

For researchers of emotions, creating them in the lab can be a problem. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Berkeley, studies the emotions of uplift, and he has tried everything from showing subjects vistas of the Grand Canyon to reading them poetry—with little success. But just this week one of his postdocs came in with a great idea: Hook up the subjects, play Barack Obama's victory speech, and record as their autonomic nervous systems go into a swoon.



Elevation has always existed but has just moved out of the realm of philosophy and religion and been recognized as a distinct emotional state and a subject for psychological study. Psychology has long focused on what goes wrong, but in the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in "positive psychology"—what makes us feel good and why. University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, "Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental 'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration."

Haidt quotes first-century Greek philosopher Longinus on great oratory: "The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport." Such feeling was once a part of our public discourse. After hearing Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, former slave Frederick Douglass said it was a "sacred effort." But uplifting rhetoric came to sound anachronistic, except as practiced by the occasional master like Martin Luther King Jr. or Ronald Reagan. And now Obama.

We come to elevation, Haidt writes, through observing others—their strength of character, virtue, or "moral beauty." Elevation evokes in us "a desire to become a better person, or to lead a better life." The 58 million McCain voters might say that the virtue and moral beauty displayed by Obama at his rallies was an airy promise of future virtue and moral beauty. And that the soaring feeling his voters had of having made the world a better place consisted of the act of placing their index fingers on a touch screen next to the words Barack Obama. They might be on to something. Haidt's research shows that elevation is good at provoking a desire to make a difference but not so good at motivating real action. But he says the elevation effect is powerful nonetheless. "It does appear to change people cognitively; it opens hearts and minds to new possibilities. This will be crucial for Obama."

for the rest of the article: http://www.slate.com/id/2205150/pagenum/all/#p2

[xchrom]

1. oh. my. god. --

this shit is getting creepy.

we are now pathologizing over reliance on one individual in the 21st century.

oh well none of my business.

[Hestia]

2. I didn't think it was creepy - kinda confirms that study about how

repug's look at life all a skeerd, while liberals have a more calm and cast a jaundiced eye at situations. One person? Did you read the article? It's about us. Though I have to admit I am sick to death of hitler this, hitler that. The way big stupendous difference between Obama and hitler is that Obama is FOR something (us) while hitler was AGAINST something (everyone else). Big difference in how Changed is affected (or is it effected? forgot my grammar rules today...).