| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 890372 | Personality and Individual Differences | 2014 | 5 Pages |
•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.
