Collectively negative valenced emotions, such as fear, anger, hatred or humiliation, may contribute to the emergence of extreme political attitudes and behaviours. Empirical studies demonstrate that, e.g., group-based hatred is the most important antecedent of political intolerance. We refer to the impact of negatively valenced emotions on political attitudes and (in)tolerance as the “toxic power of negatively valenced emotions”. The neural mechanisms and neural characteristics of extreme political attitudes and related negatively valenced discrete emotions are represented in changes at the biochemical and molecular levels of related limbic and prefrontal cortical structures of affected brains. We propose “dominant emotional maps” as a particular form of representing dominant emotions within a group or a population. The toxic power of extreme political mental states might be reduced by Emotionally Based Strategic Communications (EBSC) as a communication method for transforming negative dominant emotional maps into more positive ones. The idea of EBSC introduced in this paper originates from our work on virtual reality adaptive stimulation of brain limbic networks in prevention and treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. EBSC are conceptualized as the “positively valenced stimulation” of a negatively emotionally affected group by an appropriate communications strategy in order to influence perceptions, attitudes and behaviour of targeted group. We argue for significant potential of EBSC to prevent the arousal of intense negative emotions within human collectives and groups, as well as mitigate the toxic power of negatively valenced emotions. Prevention and reduction of negative emotions may ease social and security tensions in politically polarized, culturally fragmented, or economically stratified social settings, thereby facilitating harmonization of diversified communities. Societal enrichment based on positively valenced EBSC might have positive social impact eliciting various positive neuronal responses and changes in the brains of affected people, ranging from different biochemical to neural structural changes like neurogenesis, synaptic plasticity, dendritic arborisation, increase of synapse-to-neuron ratios, axonal growth, neurotransmitter changes etc. We regard EBSC as potential contribution to a “soft power” approach to security policy and prevention of radicalized behaviours and action tendencies in afflicted societies. EBSC can also be viewed as a large-scale strategy of emotion regulation that might decrease destructive power of extreme political attitudes.
