Recently, it has been claimed by Frimer et al. (2015) that there is a linear relationship between the level of prosocial language and the level of public disapproval of US Congress. A re-analysis demonstrates that this relationship is the result of a misspecified model that does not account for first-order autocorrelated disturbances. A Stata script to reproduce all presented results is available as an appendix.
@article{arxiv.1508.04155,
title = {Autocorrelated errors explain the apparent relationship between disapproval of the US Congress and prosocial language},
author = {Alexander Koplenig},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.04155},
year = {2015}
}