Sven Pattyn

Internal and External Threat in Relationship With Right‐Wing Attitudes

OBJECTIVE Previous studies on the relationship between threat and right-wing attitudes have tended to focus on either internal threat, emanating from ones private life, or external threat, originating from society. However, these studies failed to examine whether these types of threats constitute two distinctive dimensions and which of these threats is most closely related to right-wing attitudes. METHOD In order to explore the dimensions underlying threat, a factor analysis on a variety of threat scales was conducted (Study 1; N = 300). Furthermore, in a meta-analysis (Study 2; total N = 22,086) and a questionnaire study in a large representative sample (Study 3, N = 800) the strength of the relationships of internal and external threat with right-wing attitudes were investigated. RESULTS The present studies revealed that internal and external threat can be considered as two distinct dimensions underlying threat. Moreover, whereas external threat yielded strong relationships with right-wing attitudes, internal threat only explained a minor part of the variance in these attitudes. CONCLUSIONS External rather than internal threat underlies the relationship between threat and right-wing attitudes.

SCA with rotation to distinguish common and distinctive information in linked data

Often data are collected that consist of different blocks that all contain information about the same entities (e.g., items, persons, or situations). In order to unveil both information that is common to all data blocks and information that is distinctive for one or a few of them, an integrated analysis of the whole of all data blocks may be most useful. Interesting classes of methods for such an approach are simultaneous-component and multigroup factor analysis methods. These methods yield dimensions underlying the data at hand. Unfortunately, however, in the results from such analyses, common and distinctive types of information are mixed up. This article proposes a novel method to disentangle the two kinds of information, by making use of the rotational freedom of component and factor models. We illustrate this method with data from a cross-cultural study of emotions.

Stripping the Political Cynic: A Psychological Exploration of the Concept of Political Cynicism

The high level of political cynicism in contemporary society is often considered a serious threat to democracy. The concept, however, has received only scant attention in psychology. The current work introduces political cynicism and extensively explores its psychological implications by investigating the concepts validity, predictive utility and status as a dispositional variable. Our results revealed that political cynicism is empirically distinguishable from the closely related constructs of social cynicism and political trust. Furthermore, political cynicism was found to strongly related to a wide range of political variables, such as voting intentions, political normlessness and political estrangement, as well as to broad social attitudes and racial prejudice. Finally, we show that political cynicism yields limited but meaningful relationships with Neuroticism and Agreeableness, although social cynicism is more clearly related to the Five–Factor Model personality dimensions. It is therefore concluded that political cynicism can be reliably measured and distinguished from closely related concepts and that it yields meaningful relationships with other relevant psychological variables. Copyright

A step into the anarchist’s mind: examining political attitudes and ideology through event-related brain potentials

The present study investigates patterns of event-related brain potentials following the presentation of attitudinal stimuli among political moderates (N=12) and anarchists (N=11). We used a modified oddball paradigm to investigate the evaluative inconsistency effect elicited by stimuli embedded in a sequence of contextual stimuli with an opposite valence. Increased late positive potentials (LPPs) of extreme political attitudes were observed. Moreover, this LPP enhancement was larger among anarchists than among moderates, indicating that an extreme political attitude of a moderate differs from an extreme political attitude of an anarchist. The discussion elaborates on the meaning of attitude extremity for moderates and extremists.