Fear and Calmness Shape How Citizens in 11 Countries Mentally Map Protective Policies

When citizens think about the policies their governments design to protect them, what surfaces first in their minds is not a calm inventory of welfare programs or security budgets. It is, more often than not, fear. That is the central finding of an unusually large cross-national study published in Frontiers in Social Psychology, which asked more than 10,000 people across 11 European and Middle Eastern countries to reveal, word by word, how they mentally represent protective policies—and where emotions fit into those shared cognitive maps.

The research, led by Paulo Jorge Nogueira Ramos and Lisete dos Santos Mendes Mónico of the University of Coimbra, drew on data from the PROTEMO project, a European Union–funded investigation into the emotional dynamics of protective policies in an age of insecurity. Using a self-administered online questionnaire administered in April 2025 by a certified research company, the team collected responses from 12,308 adults in the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. After applying strict exclusion criteria, 10,147 valid cases remained for analysis, with participants ranging in age from 18 to 95 and a nearly balanced gender distribution.

The method at the heart of the study was deceptively simple. Participants were asked to write down the first five words or short expressions that came to mind when thinking about protective policies in their country, in the order they appeared. This free-evocation technique, a staple of Social Representations Theory, captures the spontaneous, socially shared meanings that people attach to abstract political objects before reflection and deliberation kick in. The deliberately open phrasing—”protective policies” was never defined for respondents—allowed each national sample to project its own social, cultural, and political context onto the object of study.

What emerged from the resulting 443 content categories was a striking structural pattern. Using prototypical analysis, a method that plots each evoked element by its frequency and its mean order of evocation, the researchers mapped every response onto the four zones of Abric’s structural approach: a stable central core, a first periphery that supports it, a contrast zone signaling minority or emerging views, and a flexible second periphery sensitive to context. The central core of citizens’ representations was dominated by cognitive and institutional elements—police and security forces, safety and security, criticism, the military, welfare, and insecurity—not by feelings. Not a single emotion made it into the core.

Instead, emotions clustered in the outer zones. In the pooled dataset, only three emotional components met the inclusion threshold of 33 occurrences: Fear, with 123 mentions; Calmness, with 79; and Joy, with 34. All three landed in the second periphery, the most context-dependent and least stabilized region of the representational structure. Fear was the only emotion present in all 11 countries, though its intensity varied dramatically—from just two mentions in the United Kingdom to 48 in Israel and 15 in Portugal. Calmness appeared in nine countries, Joy in six, while Disappointment, Disgust, Shame, and Tranquility surfaced only in specific national contexts.

The cross-national emotional tone diverged sharply. Poland, the United Kingdom, and Ireland showed predominantly positive profiles, driven largely by Calmness and, in Ireland and the UK, by Joy. Denmark hovered near equilibrium. Israel, by contrast, displayed a strongly negative emotional tone dominated by Fear, Shame, Disappointment, and Anxiety—a pattern the authors link to a representational core organized around the military, air security, and war, suggesting a collective appraisal of persistent external threat. A chi-square test confirmed that the association between country and emotional valence was statistically significant, with a moderate effect size, and standardized residuals showed the pattern was driven mainly by Israel, Poland, and the United Kingdom.

But the study’s most theoretically consequential finding came from a second layer of analysis. When the researchers built co-occurrence networks—mapping which emotions appeared alongside which concepts within the same participant’s response—emotions turned out to be anything but marginal. Two coherent affective-representational configurations emerged. One was centered on Calmness, tightly linked to safety and security, confidence, trust, peace, stability, and freedom. The other was organized around Fear, connected to insecurity, criticism, crime, police and security forces, and negligence. Criticism occupied a pivotal bridging position within the negative configuration, connecting Fear to Disappointment, Disgust, Shame, and Hate. Notably, safety and security was associated with both positive and negative emotions, functioning as a bridge between the two emotional worlds.

This leads to the paper’s key conceptual contribution: peripherality does not imply relational marginality. Although emotions sat outside the central core in the structural analysis, they were systematically woven into the representational network, contextualizing and operationalizing the meaning of protective policies for particular audiences. From the perspective of Affective Intelligence Theory, the findings suggest that citizens primarily evaluate protective policies through the surveillance system—the emotional mechanism that monitors the environment for novelty and threat—rather than the disposition system that reinforces habitual preferences. Fear and Anxiety signal that surveillance remains activated because threats feel unresolved; Calmness signals that the perception of restored security has satisfied it. The authors also note that Fear, unlike Anxiety, implies that citizens perceive threats as at least somewhat manageable through protective action.

The practical implications reach into political communication and public policy. The authors argue that emotional literacy should be understood not only as an individual competence but as a collective and societal capacity. Because emotions are embedded in the representational structures of protective policies and can signal threats or articulate policy meanings with lived experience, citizens need awareness of potential emotional vulnerabilities—vulnerabilities that political actors, including what the literature calls emotional policy entrepreneurs, may deliberately exploit through fearmongering and populist framing. In societies characterized by social acceleration and information overload, the peripheral positioning of emotions may paradoxically indicate that social representations of protective policies can absorb emotional volatility while keeping their structural core intact.

The study’s limitations are acknowledged by the authors themselves. Automated translation tools introduce risks of semantic drift, the free-evocation task may have favored cognitive over affective content, and prototypical analysis is inherently exploratory. Future research using centrality-questioning techniques or longitudinal designs could test whether prolonged exposure to emotionally saturated contexts gradually pushes emotional components toward more central zones of the representational structure. For now, the message is clear: in the mental architecture of protective policies across 11 countries, emotions do not rule from the center—but they are far from powerless at the edges, quietly shaping what citizens feel those policies are for.

Subject of Research: The structural position and cross-national role of emotions in citizens' social representations of protective policies

Article Title: Signals and meaning-context articulations: role of emotions and their salience in the social representations of protective policies in 11 countries

Article References: Nogueira Ramos, P. J., & Mónico, L. D. S. M. (2026). Signals and meaning-context articulations: role of emotions and their salience in the social representations of protective policies in 11 countries. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 4, Article 1880444. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2026.1880444

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2026.1880444

Keywords: social representations, protective policies, emotions, fear, calmness, cross-national comparison, prototypical analysis, Abric structural approach, political psychology, affective intelligence, PROTEMO project, emotional literacy