Abstract
Cognitive scientists, behavior geneticists, and political scientists have identified several ways in which emotions influence political attitudes, and psychologists have shown that emotion regulation can have an important causal effect on physiology, cognition, and subjective experience. However, no work to date explores the possibility that emotion regulation may shape political ideology and attitudes toward policies. Here, we conduct four studies that investigate the role of a particular emotion regulation strategy – reappraisal in particular. Two observational studies show that individual differences in emotion regulation styles predict variation in political orientations and support for conservative policies. In the third study, we experimentally induce disgust as the target emotion to be regulated and show that use of reappraisal reduces the experience of disgust, thereby decreasing moral concerns associated with conservatism. In the final experimental study, we show that use of reappraisal successfully attenuates the relationship between trait-level disgust sensitivity and support for conservative policies. Our findings provide the first evidence of a critical link between emotion regulation and political attitudes.
Highlights
A large body of research suggests that political conservatives are more likely than political liberals to express and experience negative emotions like fear and anger [1,2,3,4,5]
Consistent with our hypothesis that one specific type of emotion regulation would be uniquely related to one’s support for conservative policies, we found in Experiment 1a that frequent reappraisal is negatively associated with support for conservative policies (r = –0.22, p = 0.01; See Fig. 1)
A wide variety of research has indicated that genetic variation plays an important role in explaining the variation in political attitudes [39,40,41,42,43,44]
Summary
A large body of research suggests that political conservatives are more likely than political liberals to express and experience negative emotions like fear and anger [1,2,3,4,5]. Political liberalism is associated with stronger brain activity in the dorsal region of the anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) [6], an area that detects and regulates the competition between cognitive and emotional processes [7,8]. Democrats are more likely than Republicans in a risky decision-making task to show activity in the left insula, a region associated with emotional self-regulation [9]. Republicans show more activity than Democrats in the right amygdala, a part of the brain that plays an important role in emotional reactions [9]. The accumulating empirical evidence on neurocognitive mechanisms suggests that differences between liberals and conservatives may stem from the way they process and regulate negative emotions
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