Proliferation of populist policies and strengthening of political populism in several liberal democracies has been accompanied by campaigns full of public anger, anxiety and fear. Our research contributes to understanding how negative emotions shape selected political attitudes. We designed an experiment with 72 participants randomly assigned to three groups. The aim was to impose anxiety by using a stimulus that is incidental, i.e. having unrelated content to the attitudes under study. In addition to self-reported emotional state measured by post-test survey, we also measured the heart rate activity. Regarding political attitudes, next to attitudes towards immigrants we measured attitudes towards marijuana decriminalization as well. Findings indicate that while imposed anxiety leads to more negative attitudes towards immigrants, there seems to be no such effect on attitudes towards marijuana. We explain the difference by presence/absence of the in-group/out-group division in the types of political attitudes under study.

中文翻译：

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焦虑在激进政治态度中的作用：来自斯洛伐克的实验证据

在几个自由民主国家，民粹主义政策的扩散和政治民粹主义的加强伴随着充满公众愤怒、焦虑和恐惧的运动。我们的研究有助于理解负面情绪如何塑造选定的政治态度。我们设计了一项实验，将 72 名参与者随机分配到三组。目的是通过使用偶然的刺激来强加焦虑，即具有与所研究的态度无关的内容。除了通过测试后调查测量的自我报告的情绪状态外，我们还测量了心率活动。关于政治态度，除了对移民的态度之外，我们还衡量了对大麻合法化的态度。调查结果表明，虽然强加的焦虑会导致对移民的消极态度，对大麻的态度似乎没有这种影响。我们通过所研究的政治态度类型中组内/组外划分的存在/不存在来解释差异。