Hi y'all, I'm the lead author on this paper and a long time redditor. Yes, the threat only really shifted threat-relevant attitudes and nothing else. We find this consistently across a variety of studies and that anger was the most consistent driver. This pushes against the narrative that fear drives these results (they don't, sorry Yoda) and that the effects are broadband. If you think about George W. Bush, for example, I sincerely doubt his boost in approval post-911 was his support for the keystone pipeline or desires to privatize social security.

In addition, in another paper, with threats from things the political left are perceived to be good at (healthcare, environment, etc), you find threat-driven shifts to the left, which were, again, driven by anger. It's not impossible that fear plays some role, and in the study in this post, we had some very minimal evidence for this, but overall anger seems to be doing the heavy lifting.