Document VersionAuthor's Accepted Manuscript This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1111/jopy.12011Accepted Article [Geef tekst op] [Geef tekst op] [Geef tekst op] © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. AbstractObjective. Previous studies on the relationship between threat and right-wing attitudes have tended to focus on either internal threat, emanating from one's 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 rightwing attitudes, internal threat only explained a minor part of the variance in these attitudes.Conclusion. External rather than internal threat underlies the relationship between threat and right-wing attitudes.Keywords: internal threat, external threat, right-wing ideological attitudes, authoritarianism Accepted Article [Geef tekst op] [Geef tekst op] [Geef tekst op] © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.From the early days of authoritarianism research, scholars have hypothesized that threat is related to right-wing attitudes (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). Studies have frequently reiterated this hypothesis over the years (e.g., Duckitt, 2001; Feldman & Stenner, 2003; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003; Sales, 1972 Sales, , 1973 Stenner, 2005; Wilson, 1973), focusing on both threat-inducing situations, such as threats emanating from terrorism and economic crises (e.g., Sales, 1972Sales, , 1973 Willer, 2004; Winter, 1996), and many different threat scales, which range from general (e.g., Davids, 1955; Endler & Shedlets, 1973) to highly specific, such as death anxiety (e.g., Landau et al., 2004). The diversity of these threats seems to reflect the belief of scholars that any form of threat can be a correlate of right-wing attitudes. However, one may justifiably wonder whether these various threat types are equally correlated to right-wing attitudes and, if not, which threat types are most closely related to these attitudes. Therefore, the aim of the present paper was to investigate whether different threat types yielded differential relations...

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 concept's 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.

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.

Categorization in well-known natural concepts is studied using a special version of the Varying Abstraction Framework . A varying abstraction framework for categorization. Manuscript submitted for publication; Vanpaemel, W., Storms, G., & Ons, B. (2005). A varying abstraction model for categorization. In B. Bara, L. Barsalou, & M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2277-2282). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). This framework assumes a continuum between highly abstract memory representations (prototypes) and highly detailed representations of concept members (exemplars). Comparison stimuli for categorization are obtained by taking for each category the centroids of a set of clusters, produced by K-means clustering, effectively producing the Generalized Context Model (GCM; Nosofsky, R. M. (1986) Attention, similarity, and the identification-categorization relationship. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 115, 39-57) and the Single-Prototype Model as extreme cases. The clustering version of the Varying Abstraction Framework was fit on a set of novel, to-be-classified fruits and vegetables (Smits, Storms, Rosseel, & De Boeck, 2002) and on a new set of novel, to-be-classified carnivores and herbivores. Better fit values were clearly obtained for a model based on intermediately abstract representations, indicating a strategy where people compare the novel stimuli to a set of multiple prototypes. This sheds a new light on the prototype versus exemplar discussion that has dominated the literature over the past 25 years.

No abstract