A new study published in Psychophysiology has found that shifts in public opinion can influence how people physiologically respond to speaking about politically charged topics like immigration. Specifically, whether individuals experience this stress as a psychological challenge or a threat appears to depend on both the direction of social change and their political ideology. The findings suggest that individuals feel more empowered when public opinion moves in their favor, and more threatened when it moves against them—changes that are reflected not only in self-reports but also in cardiovascular patterns.
Public conversations about migration often trigger emotional and physiological reactions. These discussions are not just about abstract policy—they often touch on deeply held values and social identities. Previous studies have shown that people’s political beliefs can influence how they respond to changes in social norms and group status, particularly when these changes affect perceptions of belonging and control.
The researchers aimed to understand how such social shifts, especially those related to migration, affect people not only at a psychological level but also at a physiological one. More specifically, they wanted to explore how people on the left and right of the political spectrum react when they learn that public opinion is either becoming more aligned with their views or moving in the opposite direction.
“People often feel stress when engaging with contentious sociopolitical issues,” said study author Feiteng Long, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Neuropolitics Research Lab at the University of Edinburgh. “However, less is known about when this stress can be adaptive, termed challenge, and when it can be maladaptive, termed threat. Our research aimed to answer this question using a biopsychosocial approach. We sought to introduce cardiovascular measures into political psychology research to better understand how polarisation affects us at our ‘heart.’
The biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat distinguishes between two kinds of stress responses: challenge, which occurs when people feel equipped to handle a difficult situation, and threat, which occurs when they feel overwhelmed. These states are not only felt emotionally, but also registered in the body through cardiovascular signals.
The researchers recruited 203 Dutch university students and randomly assigned them to one of three experimental conditions. Participants were told about a (fabricated) national survey indicating that public opinion on migration had either become more progressive, more conservative, or stayed the same over the past decade. After reading this information, participants were asked to give a one-to-three-minute speech reflecting on the future of interethnic relations in the Netherlands. Throughout the task, the researchers recorded cardiovascular responses using multiple tools to track heart rate, blood pressure, and other physiological indicators.
These physiological measurements allowed the researchers to calculate what they called a Threat–Challenge Index. This index was based on two key signals: total peripheral resistance, which indicates the level of constriction in blood vessels, and cardiac output, which reflects how much blood the heart is pumping. Higher cardiac output and lower vascular resistance are considered signs of a challenge state. The reverse pattern suggests a threat response.
The key finding was that participants’ physiological responses depended on both the direction of the reported public opinion shift and their own political leanings. Participants who identified as politically left-leaning exhibited cardiovascular patterns associated with challenge when they were told public opinion on migration had become more progressive. In contrast, participants who leaned to the right showed a pattern indicative of threat under the same condition.
“The effect size is moderate,” Long told PsyPost. “However, it’s meaningful since we get to know something ‘under the skin.’ On contentious topics like migration, people may not be willing to express their real thoughts due to social desirability bias, and even if they honestly do so, they have no insights into their automatic, unconscious psychological processes. In this study, we therefore used cardiovascular measures in additional to traditional self-reports in psychology.”
“We distinguished between positive and negative cardiovascular stress responses, termed challenge and threat respectively. Challenge is an approach-oriented motivational state marked by dilation in arteries and increased cardiac output, while threat is an avoidance-oriented motivational state marked by constriction in arteries and decreased cardiac output. Drawing on these, we were able to look into something beyond what people explicitly reported.”
These physiological responses were matched by self-reported appraisals of the situation. Left-leaning participants in the progressive change condition felt they had more resources to handle the speech task and also reported less prejudice toward migrants. Right-leaning participants, on the other hand, expressed more prejudice toward migrants when told that public opinion had shifted in either a progressive or conservative direction, compared to when they were told it had remained stable.
“The main results were actually in line with what we preregistered,” Long said. “What was a bit surprising was a side finding that both progressive and conservative changes in public opinion, compared to a stability control condition, increased right-leaning individuals’ self-reported prejudice towards migrants. This may have reflected rightists’ tendencies to maintain the status quo and resist social change.”
In other words, a shift in either direction may be perceived as disruptive—either as a threat to existing norms (in the case of progressive change) or as a license to express views more openly (in the case of conservative change), which could explain the increase in self-reported prejudice in both cases.
“The key takeaway is, whether social change feels like an opportunity or a threat depends strongly on which ideological group one identifies with,” Long told PsyPost. “When public opinion on migration shifts to be more progressive, left-leaning individuals tend to show a more adaptive ‘challenge’ cardiovascular pattern in talking about future relations between migrants and the host society; they are also less prejudiced towards migrants in this case. However, such progressive changes lead right-leaning individuals to show a maladaptive ‘threat’ cardiovascular pattern and increase their prejudice.”
As with all research, there are some limitations to consider. One key issue is that the participant sample was primarily composed of left-leaning Dutch university students. This demographic may not represent the full range of ideological views present in the broader population, which limits the generalizability of the findings.
Another consideration is that the manipulation of conservative social change was not as effective as that of progressive change. Participants in the conservative change condition did not perceive as much of a shift in public opinion compared to those in the progressive change condition.
Finally, the study focused on a single type of speech task in a lab setting. Real-world political conversations often involve dialogue rather than monologue and may occur in more emotionally charged or less controlled environments.
The researchers plan to continue this line of work by studying how physiological stress responses unfold in more naturalistic discussions. They also aim to examine how these physiological states translate into actual behavior, which could have important implications for understanding polarization and resilience in politically divided societies.
“I aim to extend this line of research into field and online settings,” Long explained. “For example, I plan to combine focus groups with physiological measures to examine how polarization coincides with cardiovascular responses in more naturalistic, face-to-face discussions. I also intend to use remote PPG techniques to capture heart rate via webcams, enabling large-scale online studies with culturally diverse samples. Second, because challenge and threat responses are fundamentally motivational states, I aim to understand how and under what circumstances these responses translate into actual behaviors in future research.”
The study, “Leftists and Rightists Differ in Their Cardiovascular Responses to Changing Public Opinion on Migration,” was authored by Feiteng Long, Ruthie Pliskin, and Daan Scheepers.
