Robinson, Michael D. and Boyd, Ryan L. and Fetterman, Adam K. (2014) An emotional signature of political ideology:Evidence from two linguistic content-coding studies. Personality and Individual Differences, 71. pp. 98-102. ISSN 0191-8869
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
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.