Brief Report Conservatism as motivated avoidance of affect: Need for affect scales predict conservatism measures Luigi Leone a, * , Antonio Chirumbolo b a Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Rome ‘‘Sapienza’’, Italy b Faculty of Psychology, University of Chieti-Pescara, Via dei Vestini, 31, 66013 Chieti, Italy Available online 16 August 2007 Abstract We propose that individual differences in the motivation to avoid emotions are related to political conservatism. We argue that because conservatism is concerned with managing uncertainty and emphasizes ego-control, conservative ideologies match with the motivational concerns of those individuals who find emotions to be uncertainty-enhancing and dysfunctional. In a group of 267 participants, positive associations were found between emotion avoidance and right-wing authoritar- ianism, social dominance orientation, and support for conservative policies. Negative associations were found between emotion approach and conservatism measures. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Conservatism; Need for affect; Motivation; Motivated social cognition 1. Introduction Recent theorizing interprets adoption of ideologies, such as conservatism and liberal- ism, as a form of ‘‘motivated social cognition’’ (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). This line of research proposes that a set of dispositional factors represents the moti- vational underpinnings of ideological preferences. Meta-analytical studies (Jost et al., 2003) have found reliable associations between conservatism and such epistemic motives as need for order, structure and closure, uncertainty avoidance, and openness to 0092-6566/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2007.08.001 * Corresponding author. Address: Department of Psychology of Socialization and Developmental Processes, Via dei Marsi, 78, 00185 Rome, Italy. Fax: +39 0649917652. E-mail address: luigi.leone@uniroma1.it (L. Leone). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Research in Personality 42 (2008) 755–762 www.elsevier.com/locate/jrp