An emotional signature of political ideology: Evidence from two linguistic content-coding studies

• Seeks to understand political ideology in affect-related terms.
• Codes anxiety and anger words in texts written by conservatives and liberals.
• Finds an ideology by emotion type interaction in two different types of studies.
• Anxiety is characteristic of conservatives and anger is characteristic of liberals.

Approach–avoidance frameworks for political ideology have been proposed with increasing frequency. Following such frameworks and a wider motivation–emotion literature, it was hypothesized that political ideology would be predictive of the extent to which anxiety (avoidance-related) versus anger (approach-related) words would be evident in written texts. Study 1 sampled user-generated text within conservative versus liberal Internet chat rooms. After correcting for the greater normative frequency of anger words, a crossover ideology by emotion type interaction was found. Study 2 found a parallel interaction among college students writing about a non-political topic. Political ideology thus has a discrete emotional signature, one favoring anxiety among conservatives and anger among liberals.