The last decade has seen a major shift in how nations prioritize issues of national and international security, with terrorism coming to the fore as one of the most significant threats with which to contend. Building on prior research in this area, The Political Psychology of Terrorism Fears presents an integrated collection of empirical and theoretical studies that examine how emotional responses to terrorism, and fear specifically, influence political processes. These include not only how people make decisions about specific governmental policies they support, but also who they endorse for political office and why. Given that terrorism and political violence are an international phenomenon, this volume further demonstrates how these dynamics vary as a function of cultural and political context. It highlights how "high trust" societies may in fact buffer against negative emotional responses (e.g., fear), which in turn informs subsequent political processes in ways that are meaningfully different from other societies where baseline trust is not as prevalent. The volume concludes with a series of papers that discuss how western society at large has become a "fear-conditioned" society, which in turn has given rise to a new political and security culture with a vested interest in such fear dynamics. This book also addresses questions regarding how issues of terrorism are operationalized and studied, whether the resulting data are reliable, and the potential effects of this research on the existing political dynamic.

The psychology of terrorism, in its most basic form, is about fear. Although academics continue to debate the meaning of terrorism, the end result for victims of terrorism is very often fear and terror. Many studying the effects of terrorism have focused more exclusively on discrete psychopathological constructs, most of which are clinically based. Ironically, these paradigms fail to acknowledge the primacy of basic fear in the context of terrorism, as well as how fear affects people in both positive and negative ways-above and beyond whether one meets criteria for a clinical disorder.
The purposes of this book are to unpack the complexity of terrorism fears and to present a new paradigm for understanding the psychology of terrorism. As such, this book presents empirical and theoretical frameworks for understanding fear as a dynamic process that motivates and affects people on a myriad of levels, from the individual to society at large. The book also highlights the paradox of how fear can negatively impact people and societies, but also be a central force underlying resilience and post-traumatic growth. Finally, The Psychology of Terrorism Fears discusses how society has changed as a result of terrorism, and specifically, how our own systems for managing terrorism may in fact contribute to fear.