They were less likely to vote for mainstream center-right parties. Those whose internalizing symptoms decreased over time were especially likely to vote for far-left political parties.

Center-right vs Far left? Was this written by a fascist?

Fear is a reaction to a perceived actual threat while anxiety is a reaction to a perceived potential threat. The difference is more about your proximity to it and how imminently dangerous it is. You fear immigrants when you think they're all around you believe they are actively trying to harm you, anxiety when you see crime attributed to immigration on the news and think "that could happen here." Another example is with social anxiety- the fear isn't that you're going to die in the midst of it, but that you'll fuck up and that will lead to ostracism. If that happens and you have to hunt, gather, etc. all alone, then you will fear every new person or challenge you face. The fear of death is more prescient.

Conservatives perceive everything as an imminent threat and they live in fear of it. They raise kids with high anxiety because they are taught everything is a potential threat but their parents do still tend to shield them from the worst possible harms.

Guess how I know :)

I agree with you that it tracks the way you read it. But, they might be using the terms to mean internalizing as mental health issues (anxiety, depression) and externalizing as behavioural issues (rule breaking). This also tracks, at least in my experience.

Fear is a huge thing that should be looked at. Perhaps there is a different term used in psychology. Jealousy too. The right wing people I have to hear can be summarized as: fearful, jealous, and prone to overreaction, but not about real threats like COVID or global warming.

The sample size is more than sufficient to make these statements. The only flaw is that all participants are from Norway so there may be selection bias.

2200 people would be enough for a phase 3 clinical trial with a lot of participants. You know, the type of study after which your medication/treatment will be approved if successful:

Phase III studies are randomized controlled multicenter trials on large patient groups (300–3,000 or more depending upon the disease/medical condition studied) and are aimed at being the definitive assessment of how effective the drug is, in comparison with current 'gold standard' treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research

A number of people who haven't run into sampling before often intuitively think that a sample size needs to be some given proportion of the population size, but it does not.

Sampling doesn't work by relying on checking a large proportion of a population and relying on the fact that it's impossible for the sample to deviate by more than a given amount from the population, since so much of the population has been covered.

Sampling works by relying on the fact that it becomes extremely statistically unlikely for a randomly-chosen sample to deviate dramatically from the larger population once one reaches a (relatively small) number of absolute samples. Most sample sizes you'll see in random polling or similar are maybe 1k or 2k. Doesn't matter what the population size is (or, it does matter a tiny bit, but the benefit of covering a large portion of the population becomes extremely small very quickly as one's sample size grows).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)

To put it this way, say you had an Olympic swimming pool full of randomly-mixed red and yellow jellybeans. If you picked 100 with your eyes shut, and none of them were red, you could say that it's very unlikely that there are very many red jellybeans in the pool. That would be true regardless of whether you had one Olympic swimming pool or whether you had so many pools that you had a whole ocean of jellybeans.

Sampling doesn't provide a hard guarantee, but probabilistic ones. Yes, technically, it's possible for you to get 100 yellows in a row, even if the the pool is 50% red and 50% yellow. But the chance of that happening would only be about 0.5¹⁰⁰, or 1 in 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376; staggeringly unlikely.

If you picked a thousand jellybeans at random, and got 1000 yellows, it'd be about 1 in 10,715,086,071,862,673,209,484,250,490,600,018,105,614,048,117,055,336,074,437,503,883,703,510,511,249,361,224,931,983,788,156,958,581,275,946,729,175,531,468,251,871,452,856,923,140,435,984,577,574,698,574,803,934,567,774,824,230,985,421,074,605,062,371,141,877,954,182,153,046,474,983,581,941,267,398,767,559,165,543,946,077,062,914,571,196,477,686,542,167,660,429,831,652,624,386,837,205,668,069,376. If your Threadiverse client truncates this, it's 302 digits long.

That's true even though in both cases, the jellybeans you picked, the sample size, is a vanishingly tiny proportion of the total jellybeans in the pool, the population size.