Preliminary support for a generalized arousal model of political conservatism

Is negativity bias intuitive for liberals and conservatives?

Previous research suggests that conservatives (right-wingers) tend to show more negativity bias than liberals (left-wingers) in several tasks. However, the majority of these studies are based on correlational findings and do not provide information on the cognitive underpinnings of this tendency. The current research investigated whether intuition promotes negativity bias and mitigates the ideological asymmetry in this domain in three underrepresented, non-western samples (Turkey). In line with the previous literature, we defined negativity bias as the tendency to interpret ambiguous faces as threatening. The results of the lab experiment revealed that negativity bias increases under high-cognitive load overall. In addition, this effect was moderated by the participants' political orientation (Experiment 1). In other words, when their cognitive resources were depleted, liberals became more like conservatives in terms of negativity bias. However, we failed to conceptually replicate this effect using time-limit manipulations in two online preregistered experiments during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the baseline negativity bias is thought to be already at peak. Thus, the findings provide no strong evidence for the idea that intuition promotes negativity bias and that liberals use cognitive effort to avoid this perceptual bias.

Strength of socio-political attitudes moderates electrophysiological responses to perceptual anomalies

People with strong (vs. moderate) political attitudes have been shown to exhibit less phasic reactivity to perceptual anomalies, presumably to prevent their committed meaning systems from being challenged by novel experiences. Several researchers have proposed that (but not tested whether) firmly committed individuals also engage in more attentional suppression of anomalies, likely mediated by prestimulus alpha power. We expected participants with strong (vs. moderate) political attitudes to display increased pre-stimulus alpha power when processing perceptual anomalies. We recorded electrophysiological activity during the presentation of normal cards (control group) or both normal and anomalous playing cards (experimental group; total N = 191). In line with our predictions, the presence of anomalous playing cards in the stimulus set increased prestimulus alpha power only among individuals with strong but not moderate political attitudes. As potential markers of phasic reactivity, we also analyzed the late positive potential (LPP) and earlier components of the event-related potential, namely P1, N1, and P300. The moderating effect of extreme attitudes on ERP amplitudes remained inconclusive. Altogether, our findings support the idea that ideological conviction is related to increased tonic responses to perceptual anomalies.

The hand in motion of liberals and conservatives reveals the differential processing of positive and negative information

Recent research revealed that political conservatives and liberals differ in the processing of valenced information. In particular, conservatives (vs. liberals) tend to weigh negative information more than positive information in their perception of the physical and social world. In the present work, we further investigated the ideology-based asymmetries in the processing of negative and positive information examining both the attention-grabbing power of negative information and the trajectories of the movements performed by respondents when required to categorize positive and negative stimuli. To this end we employed a modified version of the Mouse-Tracking procedure (Freeman & Ambady, 2010), recording hand movements during the execution of categorization tasks. Results showed that conservatives were indeed slower to start and execute response actions to negative stimuli, and, more specifically, the trajectories of their movements signaled avoidance tendencies aimed at increasing the distance from negative stimuli. In addition, this pattern of findings emerged both when participants were asked to categorize the stimuli according to their valence and when the same stimuli had to be categorized on the basis of irrelevant perceptual features. Overall, results demonstrate that conservatives and liberals process valenced information differently, perform different spontaneous movements when exposed to them, and that such asymmetries are largely independent from current processing goals.

A Constructionist Review of Morality and Emotions

Morality and emotions are linked, but what is the nature of their correspondence? Many “whole number” accounts posit specific correspondences between moral content and discrete emotions, such that harm is linked to anger, and purity is linked to disgust. A review of the literature provides little support for these specific morality–emotion links. Moreover, any apparent specificity may arise from global features shared between morality and emotion, such as affect and conceptual content. These findings are consistent with a constructionist perspective of the mind, which argues against a whole number of discrete and domain-specific mental mechanisms underlying morality and emotion. Instead, constructionism emphasizes the flexible combination of basic and domain-general ingredients such as core affect and conceptualization in creating the experience of moral judgments and discrete emotions. The implications of constructionism in moral psychology are discussed, and we propose an experimental framework for rigorously testing morality–emotion links.

Confounding valence and arousal: What really underlies political orientation?

The negative valence model of political orientation proposed by Hibbing et al. is comprehensive and thought-provoking. We agree that there is compelling research linking threat to conservative political beliefs. However, we propose that further research is needed before it can be concluded that negative valence, rather than arousal more generally, underlies the psychological motivations to endorse conservative political belief.