Dispositional Traits and Susceptibility to Political Anxiety

Research within political science has found a relationship between experiencing state anxiety and an increase in information seeking. Specifically, when individuals feel anxious, they seek out threatening information relevant to the source of anxiety. But this research has generally treated exposure to anxiety-inducing information in the social environment as a given. This can be misleading because some people are more likely to experience political anxiety than others by virtue of their personal attributes. I assert that a person’s inherent anxiety level, independent of context (trait anxiety) will shape attention, processing information in one’s environment, to threatening information, which in turn makes that individual more or less likely to experience anxiety over politics. These differential experiences of political anxiety lead to variations in how people consume information. Utilizing a simulated information news board, I test this series of links and find that individual traits affect the propensity to experience political anxiety via attentional biases and this propensity influences the type of political information with which individuals engage. People high in trait anxiety show attentional biases towards anxiety-inducing content, the first study in political science to show trait anxious people show cognitive differences from people who are not trait anxious when it comes to politics. People high in trait anxiety also seek out a larger amount of threatening political information when experiencing anxiety over politics. Once individuals seek out a higher amount of threatening political information, they express more desire to engage in politics. This work highlights the importance of incorporating dispositional traits in research on emotions and politics.