Advancing Security Psychology

Security is a psychologically mediated condition rather than an objective one. How individuals and groups interpret, prioritise, and respond to threat - real or perceived - shapes their behaviour, their institutions, and the political systems in which they operate (Hopner, Carr, Young et al., 2025). Security Psychology is an emerging field within Political Science and builds on this premise. Unlike political psychology broadly conceived, it centres security perception - the cognitive and affective appraisal of threat, safety, and stability - as its primary explanatory construct. Unlike studies of misinformation or polarisation, it treats those phenomena as downstream consequences of deeper security dynamics rather than as endpoints in themselves.Within this framework, “security” encompasses multiple registers - existential, institutional, economic, epistemic, and physical - and the psychological mechanisms linking perception to outcome are explicit. These include threat appraisal, identity-protective cognition, motivated reasoning under uncertainty, and the social construction of legitimacy and trust. It is through these mechanisms that individual-level perceptions scale up to meso- and macro-level effects: social fragmentation, democratic backsliding, the rise of authoritarian or populist movements, and the erosion of institutional trust. This Research Topic maps its frontiers across three levels of analysis. At the macro level, it examines how widespread insecurity drives systemic political change. At the meso level, it addresses how communities and institutions respond to disruption and division. At the micro level, it explores how individuals navigate existential and political uncertainty in everyday life. Papers in this collection are expected to foreground the psychological mechanisms connecting security perception to political and social outcomes. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions (theoretical, empirical, policy-oriented, and review articles) that engage explicitly with this framework. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:• Populism and authoritarian appeal as security responses• Trust in governments and democratic institutions• Conspiracy theories and mis/disinformation as epistemic insecurity• Artificial Intelligence, technological disruption, and social stability• Violent extremism and radicalisation pathways• Nationalism and identity-based threat perception• Geopolitical uncertainty and public psychology• Corruption, governance failure, and legitimacy• Surveillance, control, and perceived safety• Conflict, threat perception, and collective behaviour• Climate anxiety and political backlash• Electoral psychology and security-driven political behaviour• Migration, identity threat, and social cohesion Topic editors: Veronica Hopner, Stuart Colin Carr, Annamaria Di Fabio Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82705/advancing-security-psychology