What is the influence that state-level nationalism exerts on dynamics of threat perception? The primary goal of this research is to investigate in what ways and to what extent state-level nationalism is used as an indicator of states’ intentions by governments in order to reduce uncertainty about the possible motivations and behaviors of other countries, informing their processes of threat assessment. The main objective of this research is to investigate if the type of state-level nationalism displayed by a specific state (civic/cultural/ethnic) affects the perceptions of threat developed by other countries. The hypothesis advanced here is that the further away a country is from the civic variety of nationalism, the higher the level of threat perception developed by others. In order to assess this hypothesis, a strategy that allies case-study qualitative research with large-scale quantitative analysis is applied. Three comparative case studies are performed, focusing on how the United States, France and Great Britain perceived the changes in the nationalisms of Germany and Italy from 1934 to 1938, and if these changes informed in any way their assessment of threat during the interwar period. In addition to this, the final part of this dissertation encompasses a quantitative analysis designed to look into the main question addressed by this project from a different perspective, in an attempt to seek for the possible objective basis of the threat perceptions investigated in the case studies.

This thesis integrated the cognitive-contextual model of Grych and Fincham (1990) and the emotional security framework of Davies and Cummings (1994; Cummings & Davies, 1996) to investigate the role played by children's threat perceptions in the relationship between interparental conflict and child adjustment. Past research has emphasised the importance of children's appraisals of the threat posed by parent conflict for understanding links between interparental conflict and child outcomes. However, little is known about what it is that children actually find threatening about parent conflict, and what contributes to children's appraisals of threat in the context of parent conflict. In study 1, children (n = 236) aged 10 to 16 years were recruited to examine the relative contribution of four specific threat subtypes - fear of parent conflict escalating, fear of being drawn into parent conflict, fear of parent conflict resulting in family breakdown, and fear of parent conflict disrupting attachment relationships with parents - in explaining links between interparental conflict and child adjustment. Results showed that boys' fear of being drawn into parent conflict mediated the relationship between conflict severity and child internalising problems, while for girls it was a fear of parent conflict disrupting attachment relationships with parents that mediated this relationship. Threat was not found to mediate relationships between interparental conflict and child externalising problems. In study 2, families (n = 57) were recruited to investigate how aspects of parent conflict, and characteristics of the context in which the conflict occurs, shapes children's appraisals of the four specific threat subtypes in response to interparental conflict. The study adopted broader measures, including independent observations, of conflict, context, and child adjustment to further delineate the pathways linking interparental conflict, specific threat appraisals, and child adjustment. Results indicated that children perceived greater threat in the context of destructive parent conflict resolution behaviour, and lower threat in the context of positive family relationships (particularly the mother/child relationship). Specific aspects of conflict and context were differentially related to the four threat appraisals. Direct, gender-specific relationships were found between aspects of parent conflict resolution behaviour and family relationship security, and child outcomes. However, once these relationships were accounted for, specific threat perceptions were not found to predict child outcomes. Overall, the findings of this study suggested that positive parent/child relationships (in particular the mother/child relationship) modulated the stressfulness of parent conflict for children, making it more benign in terms of its impact on children's threat appraisals, and their longer-term adjustment in the context of conflict. Results of the thesis are discussed in terms of the importance of studying relationships between specific aspects of conflict, context, appraisals, and adjustment to further understand those situations in which children find interparental conflict stressful, and those in which they cope adaptively with interparental conflict.

The late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related potential (ERP) component associated with increased affective processing which seems to strongly respond to threats and to be sensitive to emotional faces. Some studies indicate that the LPP is modulated by anxiety symptoms, while others fail to find support for these observations. The facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR) is a facial-masculinity metric that refers to cheekbone width, divided by upper facial height (top of the lip to between the brows). Consequently, FWHR has by some researchers been proposed to serve as a cue of threat. For example, high FWHR and diverse emotional faces (e.g., angry faces) are perceived as more threatening than low FWHR faces. Individuals with social anxiety are thought to be biased towards the threat. The literature has indicated that high FWHR faces in combination with angry facial expression can elicit larger LPPs compared to low FWHR and neutral faces. The current experiment investigated subjective ratings in addition to the LPP in response to high and low FWHR faces in combination with an angry and neutral expression, to examine how different facial morphology and affective cues influence the perception of threat to individuals with high social anxiety. This data, in combination, suggests that high FWHR is a salient threat-related social stimulus that might have a firm influence on the perception of other peoples’ faces. Initial results do not support a significant relationship between increased LPP modulation in individuals with high social anxiety compared to individuals with low social anxiety. However, it opens up for discussion regarding how social anxiety should be approached in future LPP research.

The master thesis analyses the perception of Information Warfare and Russia among German politicians. By using the Qualitative Content Analysis by Schreier, speeches given in the German Bundestag relating to Information Warfare, and Russia were analyzed from January 2015 until December 2018. Using International Relations (IR) theories and political psychological approaches, a theoretical framework was developed in order to determine factors which have an impact on the perception of politicians. The thesis divides this perception into three categories - friend, partner, and threat. Each category is analyzed in depth resulting in support for two of the four hypotheses. The thesis demonstrates that it is not only the political orientation, but also economic interests which determine if a state and its warfare tactics are perceived as a danger. Moreover, the deductive part of the analysis reveals that Russia's behavior which can be perceived as aggressive, irrational, and power-seeking, also determines whether the regime is perceived as threatening. Information Warfare per se is no issue of concern in the Bundestag. However, information warfare tactics such as disinformation campaigns, the spread of fake news and propaganda, and Russia's meddling in western politics are perceived as a danger to...

By some accounts, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) created a paradigm shift in American foreign policy whereby terrorist organizations receive a lot more attention than they did prior to 9/11, especially in terms of U.S. military intervention. Moreover, some argue that this represents a shift in international politics whereby non-state actors have more power than they did before 9/11. However, others maintain that terrorism in the post-9/11 era is indicative of continuity in international politics. They argue that despite any of the immediate consequences of using military force to respond to the 9/11 attacks, the distribution of capabilities among states in the international system has not changed from the pre-9/11 era. This thesis empirically tests the notion of continuity in international politics through a case study of U.S. military intervention and threat perception. This research analyzes how these two concepts evolve from the post-Cold War era into the post-9/11 era. To the extent that U.S. military intervention and threat perception are comparable before and after 9/11, this is indicative of continuity in international politics. Conversely, contrast across 9/11 indicates change in international politics. Though this thesis finds considerable empirical evidence supporting continuity in international politics in the post-9/11 world, it also finds empirical evidence for change which cannot be ignored. / Master of Arts / On September 11, 2001 (9/11), the United States was attacked on its own territory for the first time since Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. The difference on 9/11 was that the aggressors were stateless terrorists and not uniformed military members of a rival nation state. The United States is the most powerful country in the world, and it could not stop a small band of religious extremists from destroying the symbolic World Trade Center towers, causing major harm to the Pentagon, and claiming thousands of innocent American lives. As a result, the U.S. launched two of its largest military interventions in history by sending tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan in 2001 and then to Iraq in 2003. These interventions were also two of the longest interventions in U.S. history. Does this mean that the U.S. perceives threats to its national security— especially those from non-state actors—to be greater after 9/11? And does this mean that the U.S. will use military intervention more in the post-9/11 era than it did before 9/11? This thesis empirically measures U.S. military intervention and threat perception from the end of the Cold War to the end of President Obama’s first term to determine how they compare before and after 9/11. This research then draws some conclusions from this analysis to determine to what extent the U.S.’s behavior after 9/11 indicates that non-state actors have acquired meaningful power in a way that causes nation-states to worry. This thesis finds ample support for the idea that the U.S.—and all nation states—still retain the overwhelming majority of the political power to be had by all actors, whether state or non-state. However, it also finds support for the notion that non-state actors have wielded real power as measured by the U.S.’s increased threat perception and use of military intervention after 9/11.

This study examines perceptions of threats and the actors in the Swedish Nato-debate. The particular sequence of debate which is investigated took place in Swedish media during the summer of 2015. The objects examined in this study are the actors involved in the debate and the perceptions of threats formed by these actors. Lack of knowledge regarding how debates are formed by actors, through their perceptions of threats, makes us unable to fully comprehend how and why these perceptions are formed. This lack of knowledge makes us unable to evaluate the debate beyond the claims of the participating actors. This study seeks to explain how perceptions of threats in the chosen debate-sequence were formed through filtration. Theory considering filtration of perceived threats states that the actors forming perceived threats does this through psychological-, bureaucratic-, political- and medial processes. Actors and their perceived threats can also exercise power. Whether the actors and their discourses have exercised power in the Swedish Nato-debate is examined through a relational- and productive power perspective. Results show that the participating actors examined, scientists, journalists and politicians, have all formed perceived threats through different forms of filtration, and all actors have in some way exercised relational or productive power in the debate.

This thesis investigated the processing of emotional stimuli by the visual system, and how the processing of emotions interacts with visual awareness. Emotions have been given ‘special’ status by some previous research, with evidence that the processing of emotions may be relatively independent of striate cortex, and less affected by disruption to awareness than processing of emotionally neutral images. Yet the extent to which emotions are ‘special’ remains questionable. This thesis focused on the processing of emotional stimuli when activity in V1 was disrupted using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and whether emotional properties of stimuli can be reliably discriminated, or affect subsequent responses, when visibility is low. Two of the experiments reported in this thesis disrupted activity in V1 using TMS, Experiment 1 with single pulses in an online design, and Experiment 2 with theta burst stimulation in an offline design. Experiment 1 found that a single pulse of TMS 70-130 ms following a presentation of a body posture image disrupted processing of neutral but not emotional postures in an area of the visual field that corresponded to the disruption. Experiment 2 did not find any convincing evidence of disruption to processing of neutral or emotional faces. From Experiment 1 it would appear that emotional body posture images were relatively unaffected by TMS, and appeared to be robust to disruption to V1. Experiment 2 did not add to this as there was no evidence of disruption in any condition. Experiments 3 and 4 used visual masking to disrupt awareness of emotional and neutral faces. Both experiments used a varying interval between the face and the mask stimuli to systematically vary the visibility of the faces. Overall, the shortest SOA produced the lowest level of visibility, and this level of visibility was arguably outside awareness. In Experiment 3, participants’ ability to discriminate properties of emotional faces under low visibility conditions was greater than their ability to discriminate the orientation of the face. This was despite the orientation discrimination being much easier at higher levels of visibility. Experiment 4 used a gender discrimination task, with emotion providing a redundant cue to the decision (present half of the time). Despite showing a strong linear masking function for the neutral faces, there was no evidence of any emotion advantage. Overall, Experiment 3 gave some evidence of an emotion advantage under low visibility conditions, but this effect was fairly small and not replicated in Experiment 4. Finally, Experiments 5-8 used low visibility emotional faces to prime responses to subsequent emotional faces (Experiments 5 and 6) or words (Experiments 7 and 8). In Experiments 5, 7 and 8 there was some evidence of emotional priming effects, although these effects varied considerably across the different designs used. There was evidence for meaningful processing of the emotional prime faces, but this processing only led to small and variable effects on subsequent responses. In summary, this thesis found some evidence that the processing of emotional stimuli was relatively robust to disruption in V1 with TMS. Attempts to find evidence for robust processing of emotional stimuli when disrupted with backwards masking was less successful, with at best mixed results from discrimination tasks and priming experiments. Whether emotional stimuli are processed by a separate route(s) in the brain is still very much open to debate, but the findings of this thesis offers small and inconsistent evidence for a brain network for processing emotions that is relatively independent of V1 and visual awareness. The network and nature of brain structures involved in the processing of subliminal and low visibility processing of emotions remains somewhat elusive.

Previous studies support that the relative width of the upper face (facial width-to-height ratio; fWHR) has evolved to signal threat, but these studies rely greatly on subjective facial ratings and measurements prone to confounds. The present study objectively quantifies threat perception to the magnitude of the observers’ electrophysiological reaction, specifically the event-related potential (ERP) called the late positive potential (LPP), and investigate if brow height and jaw width could have confounded previous fWHR studies. Swedish and international students (N = 30, females = 11, Mage = 24 years, SDage = 2.9) were shown computer-generated neutral faces created with the underlying skeletal morphology varying in brow ridge height, cheekbone width and jaw width. Participants first rated how threatening each face was and then viewed 12 blocks of 64 faces while their electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. The results supported that the LPP could be used to index threat perception and showed that only brow height significantly affected both facial ratings (p < .001, ɳp2 = .698) and magnitude of the LPP within the 400 to 800 ms latency (p = .02, d = .542). Hence, brow height, not facial width, could explain previous findings. The results contradict the hypothesis that fWHR is an evolved cue of threat and instead support the overgeneralisation hypothesis in that faces with similar features to anger will be perceived as more threatening.

<p>In this thesis, I explore if Latvia has experienced, during the last ten years, a change in identity and threat perception that could allow for the building of a “cooperative security community” in Northern Europe. Recent constructivist researches contend that such change is in progress in neighboring Estonia. This research, performed through a discourse analysis of political elite’s speeches, reveals the presence – explained by the concept of interim inconsequentiality - of two opposite identity/security discourses. I link the first, inclusive, discourse to Latvia’s Western socialization, but not to a change in identity, as I contend that both threat images and identity have been instrumentalized for the sake of the accession strategy. As for the second, exclusionary, discourse that shows a persistent distrust of both Russia and the ethnic Russian minorities, and is the more prevalent in terms of political behavior, I link it to Latvia’s identity as a small ethnic nation vulnerable to external pressures - an identity strengthened during the period by Russia’s behavior. I verify this thesis by exposing the exclusionary discourse’s salience on the EU integration issue. I conclude that the period of reference, far from resolving the security dilemma, has, on the contrary, reinforced it.</p>

This thesis looks at the construction of China as a security threat in the United Kingdom, through the theoretical lens of techno-Orientalism. The main argument is that techno-Orientalist ideas influence the Western perception of China as a security threat, which leads to the creation of certain fears regarding China which affects the identity creation of both the United Kingdom and China. Techno-Orientalism shows how the West perceives itself as losing its grip on modernity, and thus the future; the East is being perceived as the producers of technology which lead to the opposite of the desired Western liberal humanism. Thus, the East is on its way to take over modernity and turn it into a technological oppressive future. These ideas influence how the United Kingdom perceives China as a security threat, and this is shown through a Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis of debates in the British Parliament.