“Resentment Is Like Drinking Poison? The Heterogeneous Health Effects of Affective Polarization”, Micah H. Nelson2022-02-11 (politics)⁠:

Affective polarization—the tendency for individuals to exhibit animosity toward those on the opposite side of the partisan divide—has increased in the United States in recent years. This article presents evidence that this trend may have consequences for Americans’ health.

Structural equation model analyses of nationally representative survey data from Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (n = 4,685) showed:

heterogeneous relationships between affectively polarized attitudes and self-rated health. On one hand, such attitudes were directly negatively associated with health such that the polarized political environment was proposed to operate as a sociopolitical stressor. Simultaneously, affective polarization was positively associated with political participation, which in turn was positively associated with health, although the direct negative effect was substantially larger than the indirect positive one.

These results suggest that today’s increasingly hostile and pervasive form of partisanship may undermine Americans’ health even as it induces greater political engagement.

See Also:

• The relationship between health and political ideology begins in childhood

• The Psychology of Online Political Hostility: A Comprehensive, Cross-National Test of the Mismatch Hypothesis

• Twitter use in the everyday life: Exploring how Twitter use predicts well-being, polarization, and sense of belonging

• Current research overstates American support for political violence

• Feeling Good Is Feeling Better

• The delusive economy: how information and affect color perceptions of national economic performance

• Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility

• Did Cooperation Among Strangers Decline in the United States? A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of Social Dilemmas (1956^–₆₁2017)

• The Psychophysiology of Political Ideology: Replications, Reanalyses, and Recommendations