Humans sometimes pursue instrumental motives when regulating our emotions, meaning that we might prefer to experience an unpleasant emotion if we can expect later reinforcement. Furthermore,...Show moreHumans sometimes pursue instrumental motives when regulating our emotions, meaning that we might prefer to experience an unpleasant emotion if we can expect later reinforcement. Furthermore, previous research drew a link between believing an emotion to be useful and engaging in behaviour that induces that emotion. Support for such a connection was specifically established for the emotions of fear and hope in political leftists and rightists. Between leftists and hope a positive relationship was found which was mediated by the belief of it being useful in reinforcing their ideology. Similar findings exist for rightists and fear. In the study at hand we attempted to extend this hypothesis to the emotion of anger fir both ideological polarities. We examined, among 235 British political leftists and rightists, whether the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology increases the motivation to feel angry. By using fabricated articles stating that anger reinforces either the own or the other political affiliation, we aimed at inducing this belief. We tested whether those who read the article that associates anger with benefit for the own ideology, would later choose to read articles with anger inducing topics. However, a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed no significant interaction of the conditions and ideologies on their preference for anger inducing articles. Since we did not find support for our hypothesis, we conclude that there is no evidence for an association of assuming anger to be useful in reinforcing one’s beliefs and being motivated to read anger-inducing articles.Show less
Individuals have instrumental motives to feel anger, meaning that they might find anger useful depending on the situation. Leftists and Rights ideologies have different attributions to emotions....Show moreIndividuals have instrumental motives to feel anger, meaning that they might find anger useful depending on the situation. Leftists and Rights ideologies have different attributions to emotions. Previous findings indicated that believing that an emotion reinforces one’s ideology motivates one to experience the emotion. Based on this assumption, a research was drawn to examine if the same results were replicable to the emotion anger: Does the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology, reinforces one to feel angry? To closer examine this question, participants were given articles informing that anger reinforces their ideology. Subsequently, they were requested to rank eight different fictitious headlines according to their reading preference. These headlines were associated with either anger, hope, fear or neutral (two for each emotion), previously verified in a pre-test. The measure was done via a two-way analysis of variance (ANCOVA). The same analyzed whether the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology had an increase in the participants motivation to experience anger. However, the results were not significant. There is no apparent evidence that the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology does motivate one to feel anger.Show less
Previous research has shown that people are motivated to up-regulate certain emotions if they believe that it reinforces their ideological convictions. More specifically, Pliskin and colleagues...Show morePrevious research has shown that people are motivated to up-regulate certain emotions if they believe that it reinforces their ideological convictions. More specifically, Pliskin and colleagues reported that leftists were more likely to experience hope, and rightists were more likely to experience fear if they believed that the respective emotions reinforce their ideology in regard to the acceptance or rejection of social change. The present research expands on these findings by investigating whether people would be motivated to up-regulate their level of anger if they believe it reinforces their ideology, and whether such motivational effort differs between ideological groups (left vs right). To this end, we sampled 206 British participants (114 female, 90 male, 2 other, Mage = 33.18, SD = 11.96) of which 115 (40 male, 73 female, 2 self-identified; Mage = 29.15, SD = 9.9) reported a leftist ideology and 91 (41 female, Mage = 38.29, SD = 12.43) a rightist ideology. Both groups were presented with one of three bogus scientific articles claiming that anger reinforces a leftist ideology, anger reinforces a rightist ideology or a neutral control article. Subsequently, the participants were asked to rank order eight headlines that hinted at emotion-inducing articles (anger, fear, hope, neutral). The results of the ANCOVA revealed a non-significant interaction effect, disconfirming our formulated hypothesis. Such null findings may support the context-dependence of anger and point at the necessity of adopting a multi-dimensional, context sensitive approach to the study of ideological differences in the motivated regulation of emotions.Show less
Researchers have tried to link the motivation to experience certain emotions to specific ideologies. Recently there has been more support for taking context into account when studying the influence...Show moreResearchers have tried to link the motivation to experience certain emotions to specific ideologies. Recently there has been more support for taking context into account when studying the influence of ideology on the motivation to experience an emotion. One of these contextual factors is the belief that an emotion can reinforce one’s ideology. Therefore, this study investigated whether the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology motivates one to experience anger. Additionally, we tested whether leftists are more motivated to experience hope than rightists and whether rightists are more motivated to experience fear than leftists. The belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology was induced by reading a scientific article about anger and ideology. To test if participants were then more motivated to experience an emotion, participants created a ranking of their preference for reading anger, hope, fear and no emotion inducing articles. We found that reading an article that states that anger reinforces one’s ideology does not motivate one more to experience anger. There was also no evidence that leftists are more motivated to experience hope than rightists or that rightists are more motivated to experience fear than leftists. These results show the difficulty of convincing one that anger reinforces one’s ideology and that one can be hesitant to want to experience anger. The results that hope was not tied to leftists and fear not tied to rightists can be explained by the influence of a state of fear in the participants due to the use of Coronavirus-related stimuli. These findings indicate that future research should also take other contextual factors into account, like one’s current emotional state, when studying the influence of beliefs about emotions on motivated emotion regulation.Show less
The aim of this study was to find out whether the belief that anger reinforces your ideology can motivate you to feel anger. To investigate this, we conducted an online study where participants...Show moreThe aim of this study was to find out whether the belief that anger reinforces your ideology can motivate you to feel anger. To investigate this, we conducted an online study where participants read an article on how anger can strengthen the ideological convictions of leftists or rightists and were then asked to rank eight headlines in the order that they would want to read the corresponding articles. Six of these headlines were designed to indicate that their corresponding articles would induce either anger, fear or hope, while two of them were neutral in content. The participants’ preference for the headlines was intended to measure their motivation to experience the emotion that the headline was correlated with. The main hypothesis was that participants reading about how anger reinforces their ideology would want to engage with anger-inducing content more than participants in the other conditions. Unfortunately, the results were non-significant and the hypothesis was rejected. The participants were not more motivated to choose anger-inducing headlines after reading about how anger reinforces their ideology. Descriptively, the fear-related headlines were the most preferred out of all headlines. This can be due to a multitude of factors, the most important being the coronavirus pandemic, which could have influenced the preference for fear.Show less
This study aimed to examine whether the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology would motivate people to experience anger. This was examined for both leftist and rightist ideology. The...Show moreThis study aimed to examine whether the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology would motivate people to experience anger. This was examined for both leftist and rightist ideology. The participants were instructed to read articles about anger reinforcing leftist or rightist ideology, or an article about why mint tastes cold. These articles served as a manipulation. Afterwards, they were instructed to rank headlines of articles that could induce the emotions anger, fear, or hope and headlines of neutral articles, There was no significant difference in anger preference between the three conditions for either ideology. Investigating whether the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology will motivate one to experience anger can have implications for the way political campaigns will be designed.Show less
Recent research has shown that even in non-political contexts, leftists and rightists are motivated to experience hope and fear respectively, because of their belief that these emotions justify...Show moreRecent research has shown that even in non-political contexts, leftists and rightists are motivated to experience hope and fear respectively, because of their belief that these emotions justify their ideological convictions. This raises the question of whether the desire to reinforce one’s ideology could also influence the motivation to experience other emotions. In order to fill this gap in the research literature, the present study investigates whether believing that anger reinforces rightist (or leftist) ideology, would motivate people holding on to this ideology to feel more anger in response to politically neutral major current events. To test this, we conducted an online study with 235 adult participants from the United Kingdom, presenting them with (fabricated) scientific information stating that anger can promote and justify the principles of rightist (or leftist) ideology. Next, we assessed if this manipulation influenced participants motivation to experience anger, by measuring the order in which participants prioritized reading anger inducing news, as opposed to hope and fear inducing news, during the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our results indicate that manipulating the belief that anger reinforces one’s (or the opposite) ideology did not influence participants’ motivation to experience anger in this context. Also, contrary to the findings of previous research, leftists and rightists did not differ in their motivation to experience hope and fear. This thesis discusses the implications of these findings, and puts them into context with the world pandemic. Moreover, it proposes future directions for the study of ideological motivated emotion regulation.Show less
