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Fear and Anger in Great Britain: Blame Assignment and Emotional Reactions to the Financial Crisis.

ABSTRACT: While we know that emotional reactions are important influences on political behavior, we know far less about the sources of these emotions. This paper studies the causes of fear and anger in reaction to a negative stimulus: the financial crisis. Anger should have been experienced among individuals who believed a specific actor was to blame for the crisis. Moreover, individuals should have been particularly angry if they blamed an actor who should be accountable to them, for example the national government. I test these expectations using a panel survey run in Britain between 2005 and 2010. This data shows that British citizens experienced anger if they held an actor responsible for the crisis. Moreover, they felt particularly angry if they held the Labour government (and to a lesser extent the European Union) responsible. These findings underline the importance of studying the causes of emotional reactions and show how these may be linked to common institutional distinctions between political systems.

SUBMITTER: Wagner M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4734452 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Fear and Anger in Great Britain: Blame Assignment and Emotional Reactions to the Financial Crisis.

Wagner Markus M

Political behavior 20130709

While we know that emotional reactions are important influences on political behavior, we know far less about the sources of these emotions. This paper studies the causes of fear and anger in reaction to a negative stimulus: the financial crisis. Anger should have been experienced among individuals who believed a specific actor was to blame for the crisis. Moreover, individuals should have been particularly angry if they blamed an actor who should be accountable to them, for example the national ...[more]

PMID: 26855463

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Project description:IntroductionAnimal and human ancestors developed complex physiological and behavioral response systems to cope with two types of threats: immediate physical harm from predators or conspecifics, triggering fear, and the risk of infections from parasites and pathogens leading to the evolution of the behavioral immune system with disgust as the key emotion. Integration of the evolutionary concepts of the fear module and behavioral immune systems has been infrequent, despite the significant survival advantages of disgust in various contexts. Studies comparing attention to ancestral and modern threats accompanied by fear have yielded ambiguous results and what qualifies as salient modern disgusting stimuli remains unclear. We do not know whether disgust or the behavioral immune system, as inherent aspects of human psychology, have adapted to safeguard us from pandemic risks or poisoning by modern toxic substances.MethodsTo test these effects, we have developed a survey comprised of 60 short vignettes describing threats evoking fear and disgust belonging to one of the three main categories of threats: (1) ancestral (phylogenetic), (2) modern (ontogenetic), and (3) pandemics of airborne disease. Each vignette was evaluated on a 7-point Likert scale based on fear, disgust, and anger. In total, 660 respondents completed the survey. The data were analysed using a factor analysis and general linear model with the respondent as a random factor.ResultsThe results show that the strongest fear is triggered by modern threats (electricity, car accidents), while the highest disgust is evoked by ancient threats (body waste products, worms, etc.). Interestingly, disgust does not respond to modern threat stimuli such as toxic substances or radioactivity as these evoke mainly fear and anger. Finally, a distinct response pattern was found for pandemic threats, in which both fear (e.g., of disease and death) and disgust (e.g., of used face masks) are employed.DiscussionOur study offers valuable insights into the emotional responses to ancestral and modern threats and their adaptation to pandemic challenges. Ancestral threats are not always more powerful stimuli than adequate threats of the modern type, but they function specifically. Thus, snakes and heights as fear-inducing ancestral threats form separate factors in a multivariate analysis, whereas all ancestral disgust stimuli group together. The threat of a pandemic forms a specific category and people process it emotionally and cognitively. These insights contribute to our understanding of human psychology and behavior in an ever-changing world.

Dataset Information

Fear and Anger in Great Britain: Blame Assignment and Emotional Reactions to the Financial Crisis.

Publications

Fear and Anger in Great Britain: Blame Assignment and Emotional Reactions to the Financial Crisis.

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