This study builds on the functionalist approach to examine whether emotions are specifically and robustly linked to action tendencies outside of the laboratory. In the year following the events of 9/11, four samples, totaling 546 college students, participated in a series of studies. Participants reported their negative emotions after viewing photographs of the 9/11 attack. The behavior of the participants and their support for President Bush's decision to deploy troops in the Middle East were assessed as proxies for action tendencies. Anger specifically predicted support for military action. Fear predicted current and anticipated future avoidant behaviors. All of these links between emotion and action tendency were robust across the four naturalistic circumstances. The results supported the functionalist approach to emotions, and provided a new angle to understand the public support for war. The results are discussed in the context of frustration-aggression, fear tactics, dimensional and discrete views, as well as classic literature on war.The abundance of historical data and the dire consequences associated with war have attracted countless investigations. The widely cited causes for war include regional differences in religion, politics, and resources (Bennett & Rupert, 2003; de Mesquita, 1981), as well as the mindset of individual citizens (Cohrs & Moschner, 2002;Fiske, 1987). Although it is quantitatively convenient to understand war from a strictly analytical perspective, war is a hot-blooded enterprise fueled by
Most acculturation research has been conducted in immigrant settings. The present study examined the generalizability of acculturation models and the adaptiveness of acculturation strategies in another bicultural environment — a colonial setting. The sample included 138 girls ( M = 13.8 years) and their parents from Hong Kong, a former British colony. Results verified that both Chinese and western acculturation occurred on individual psychological levels and that the bidimensional model was a suitable acculturation framework. Using hierarchical multiple regression, results suggested that acculturation towards Chinese (majority) culture was related to better adaptation in terms of higher academic achievement and positive family dynamics (parental nurturance and closer family relationships). Acculturation towards western (minority) culture was related to poorer adaptation in terms of engaging in greater misconduct and negative family interactions (larger intergenerational value discrepancies and family conflicts). Thus, acculturation towards the majority culture held adaptive implications, whereas acculturation towards the minority culture held maladaptive implications. Consideration of the bicultural composition (e.g., status, prestige, strength of cultural networks of each culture) should be incorporated into acculturation theory to better understand adjustment implications across a wide range of contexts.
This study uses appraisal theory, functionalist approach to emotions, and recent theory on group emotions as a basic framework to model the genesis of supporting military action. During the year after the events of 9/11, 588 college students participated in a series of four studies that assessed religious affiliation, appraisal antecedents, anger response to viewing photographs of the 9/11 attack, and support for military action. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that the relation between support for the war and attitudes toward terrorism and relevance could be explained adequately by a model in which anger mediated the effects of attitudes and relevance on support. Attitudes toward terrorism were further identified as mediators that could explain the group effect by Christians. The result was not only generalizable across the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in terms of how consent for war manifests itself--outright calls for bloodshed versus more subtle, politically loaded, posturing (e.g. entreaties to "support our troops").
A popular explanation for the emergence of right-wing populism is that perceived threats toward migrants triggered a wave of anti-migrant sentiment. This kind of insecurity narrative paints ethnocentrism as a reaction to ongoing events rather than an entrenched belief that coexists with related right-wing ideologies. A mediation model was constructed with an anti-migrant sentiment as the outcome, a sense of insecurity as the mediator and a composite of right-wing ideologies as predictors. Study 1 was conducted with 220 Americans and 231 Germans a few months after the Paris terrorist attack. Study 2, a preregistered replication, was conducted two years later on 151 British as well as 183 Spanish participants where both countries saw a recent terrorist attack on their own soil. A replicated finding across the four samples rejected insecurity as a mediator. In all samples, the indirect pathways showed the same weakness-while conservatives were risk averse, their sense of insecurity was not a linchpin to anti-migrant sentiment. The significant direct pathways confirmed the integrity of the conservative belief system where anti-migrant sentiment was best explained by related componential beliefs, such as right-wing authoritarianism, nationalism, and neoliberalism. Concerns about terror threats and migrant crises seem to have been hijacked to sugarcoat the ideological nature of ethnocentrism, at least under the present threat scenarios. Suggestions are made to further examine the insecurity narrative in the future. How to cite this article: Cheung-Blunden V. Situational insecurity versus entrenched ideologies as the source of right-wing voters' anti-migrant sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic. J Appl Soc Psychol. 2020;50:337-350.
As postindustrial societies become more dependent on technology, they also become encumbered by greater risk. With the mounting news reports of cyberattacks, a common reaction to these technology‐based hazards is anxiety. Whether anxiety enhances or erodes information processing is a topic of debate in previous literature, and equally uncertain is whether mass anxiety facilitates or hobbles the public's ability to contemplate current events. In light of three theoretical models in the basic research of anxiety, we hypothesized that (1) anxious participants are less able to recall the information in a news report of cyberattack than their nonanxious counterparts, (2) they become increasingly inept at recalling the details as the storyline unfolds, and (3) this impairment is unique to anxiety. Participants in Study 1 (130 college students) and Study 2 (392 American adults) viewed a news story of a cyberattack and then reported their emotional states and their levels of understanding of the various parts of the report—except that the anxiety in Study 1 was naturalistic, and in Study 2, experimentally manipulated. Results from both studies showed that anxiety undermined recall performance. In addition, Study 1 found that the recall was worse towards the middle and the end of the news story and that other emotions were not significantly associated with memory deficit. Anxiety is discussed as a barrier for the public to stay informed about cyberattacks.
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