(Press-News.org) Political attitudes and opinions can and do shift, sometimes drastically. Recent psychological research from Washington University in St. Louis offers insight into how emotional responses to threats contribute to shifts in political attitudes.
One striking example of how emotions drive political shifts is that people tend to become more supportive of conservative views during times of external, or foreign, threat.
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, for example, national polls showed that support for President George W. Bush — a moderately conservative Republican — soared by 39 points to a record-breaking 90% approval rating. During that time, people supported conservative policies, such as the Patriot Act, which emphasized national security.
The underlying processes responsible for these shifts have been less clear, though. Psychologists have long assumed fear makes people seek security. This idea goes back to early theories of authoritarianism, which suggest that strict rules and strong leaders are more appealing when people are fearful. However, previous research in this field has not measured emotion to confirm that fear is, in fact, driving these changes.
A recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General provides much-needed clarity on these issues. With evidence from carefully structured experiments, researchers found that anger, not fear, is responsible for driving shifts in political attitudes.
“Anger is a more viable candidate for driving these sorts of effects,” said Alan Lambert, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at WashU. He said that anger is one of the few emotions associated with the “approach” part of the brain. As a result, experiencing anger causes people to lash out rather than retreat.
“They want retribution (for terrorist attacks), they want to punish the people who did it, that motive is driven primarily by anger,” added Lambert, who co-authored the research with Seattle University’s Fade Eadeh. To study whether anger might be the main force behind these political shifts, Lambert and Eadeh conducted three experiments with over 2,000 participants.
In one experiment, participants read either a news story about a terrorist attack or a neutral scientific article about food intolerance. Then they rated a politician who supported a military or diplomatic approach to terrorism. In a second experiment, people were either reminded about terrorism, framing it in terms of justice or security, or they read an article unrelated to terrorism. In a third study, they asked people what made them angry or fearful about terrorism or to write about something irrelevant. In these latter two experiments, they also asked participants to evaluate various political policies, some related to Islamist terrorism and some that were not. Afterward, participants shared their views on different political issues, some related to terrorism and some not.
Across all three studies, the researchers found that anger — not fear — was the primary emotion tied to a shift toward conservative views. But these changes were narrow. In particular, people shifted their opinions only on topics connected to the threat they were considering. For example, anger about terrorism made people more supportive of aggressive military policies towards Islamists, but had no impact on unrelated issues, such as abortion, big business or anti-Mexican attitudes.
As shown by earlier research by Eadeh, anger also plays the dominant role in cases where a threat makes liberalism more appealing. In particular, when people were reminded of a danger in an area where liberals are seen as more capable — such as health care or the environment — anger again led to a shift in political preferences related to these specific issues, but this time toward liberal views.
The issue is complex, warned Eadeh, who was a doctoral student with Lambert at WashU before joining Seattle University.
“Sometimes, political views and public policies may be the answer to certain threats. But it’s also possible that some threats can lead to political polarization, while others have no clear impact on politics at all,” he said.
In the future, Lambert hopes to explore whether some threats might lead people to become even more set in their beliefs, making liberals more liberal and conservatives more conservative.
Eadeh FR, Lambert AJ. An anger-based framework for understanding terrorism-driven “shifts to the right”: How and why Islamist-focused threats produce narrow changes in political preferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Epub 2025. DOI https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001737
END
Research shows anger, not fear, shifts political beliefs
2025-10-16
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Gale and Ira Drukier Prize in Children’s Health Research awarded to pediatric rheumatologist at Boston Children’s Hospital
2025-10-16
Dr. Lauren Henderson, a physician-scientist whose research focuses on children with difficult-to-treat juvenile idiopathic arthritis and other autoimmune disorders, has been awarded the 10th annual Gale and Ira Drukier Prize in Children’s Health Research, Weill Cornell Medicine announced today.
The Drukier Prize honors an early-career pediatrician whose research promises to make important contributions toward improving the health of children and adolescents. Dr. Henderson is an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a pediatric rheumatologist ...
UNF chemistry professor awarded NSF Grant to advance laser-based measurement technology
2025-10-16
The University of North Florida has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to advance laser-based measurement technology to find more accurate and reliable chemical measurements across diverse scientific fields.
Dr. Willis Jones, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, will lead the study that will pursue groundbreaking advances in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), a powerful but often limited analytical technique.
LIBS uses a high-powered laser to create a small plasma that reveals the elemental compositions of solids, liquids and gases with minimal preparation. While powerful, the method is hindered by ...
Research shows how Dust Bowl-type drought causes unprecedented productivity loss
2025-10-16
EMBARGO: THIS CONTENT IS UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 2 P.M. U.S. EASTERN STANDARD TIME ON OCT. 16, 2025. INTERESTED MEDIA MAY RECIVE A PREVIEW COPY OF THE JOURNAL ARTICLE IN ADVANCE OF THAT DATE OR CONDUCT INTERVIEWS, BUT THE INFORMATION MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, OR POSTED ONLINE UNTIL AFTER THE RELEASE WINDOW.
A global research effort led by Colorado State University shows that extreme, prolonged drought conditions in grasslands and shrublands would greatly limit the long-term health of crucial ecosystems that cover nearly half the planet. ...
Non-hibernating pikas' protein restriction tweaks their gut microbiome to help them survive the winter, when winter-active herbivores often struggle to find dietary protein
2025-10-16
Non-hibernating pikas' protein restriction tweaks their gut microbiome to help them survive the winter, when winter-active herbivores often struggle to find dietary protein
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: https://plos.io/4nI13TV
Article title: Increased urea nitrogen salvaging by a remodeled gut microbiota helps nonhibernating pikas maintain protein homeostasis during winter
Author countries: China, Israel
Funding: see manuscript END ...
Not for hearing but for symbiosis
2025-10-16
Like us humans, insects possess sensory organs responsible for vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. For vision, insects primarily rely on compound eyes. But what about hearing? For example, crickets develop tympanal organs on their forelegs, which function like a human’s eardrum to detect sound. They use these “ears on the legs” to listen to courtship songs and sense approaching enemies.
The tympanal organs have evolved in insects repeatedly. For example, cicadas, grasshoppers, moths and mantises have tympanal ears on their abdomen or thorax. Uniquely, stinkbugs of the family Dinidoridae, encompassing around 100 species representing ...
Disconnected cerebral hemisphere in epilepsy patients shows sleep-like state during wakefulness
2025-10-16
Sleep-like slow-wave patterns persist for years in surgically disconnected neural tissue of awake epilepsy patients, according to a study published October 16th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Marcello Massimini from Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy, and colleagues. The presence of slow waves in the isolated hemisphere impairs consciousness, however, whether they serve any functional or plastic role, remains unclear.
Hemispherotomy is a surgical procedure used to treat severe cases of epilepsy in children. The ...
Incentivizing risk to inspire investments in clean innovation for aviation
2025-10-16
In a Policy Forum, David Victor and colleagues outline a framework for incentivizing meaningful investments into high-risk, transformative clean technologies in the aviation industry. While massive reductions in global emissions are needed to combat climate change, most current clean investments focus on low-risk, mature technologies such as renewable energy, batteries, and electric vehicles. However, many sectors, including aviation, which accounts for about 3% of global emissions, face steep technological and economic barriers to decarbonization, making ...
Stinkbug leg organ contains symbiotic fungi to shield eggs from parasitic wasps
2025-10-16
What looked like a hearing organ on a tiny stinkbug’s leg turned out to be something far stranger: a fungal nursery that mother bugs use to coat their newly laid eggs in protective symbiotic hyphae, shielding their offspring from parasitic wasps. Tympanal organs have repeatedly evolved in many insect species and are often considered to be used for sensing sound. Previous studies have reported a conspicuously enlarged structure on the real legs of adult female dinidorid stinkbugs, which has long been interpreted as a tympanal ...
Extreme, multi-year droughts drive cumulative collapse in terrestrial productivity
2025-10-16
Although many ecosystems can weather several years of moderate drought, consecutive years of extreme dryness push them past a tipping point, resulting in dramatic declines in plant growth, researchers report. The findings – borne from a global experiment spanning six continents – reveal threats to Earth’s grasslands and shrublands as climate extremes intensify. Although most droughts are brief and moderate, the most ecologically and economically damaging events are both prolonged and extreme. Evidence suggests such extreme events are becoming more frequent with ongoing climate change. However, the effects of multi-year ...
Researchers chart path for investors to build a cleaner aviation industry
2025-10-16
Cutting planet-warming pollution to near-zero will take more than inventing new clean technologies—it will require changing how the world invests in them. That’s especially true for industries like aviation, where developing and adopting greener solutions is risky and expensive, according to a University of California San Diego commentary piece in Science.
The paper calls for smarter ways of managing investment risk could help speed up the shift toward cleaner air travel and other hard-to-decarbonize sectors.
“The aviation sector—a ...