Political tolerance implies a willingness to permit the expression of ideas or interests that one opposes. In this era of widespread threat perceptions, physical or ideological, acceptance of the ‘other’ and support for civil liberties is eroding, making xenophobia, discrimination, and political tolerance central challenges for our society. In this presentation, I use political and social psychology theories to gain insights into the emotional, contextual, and political value-dependent antecedents of political tolerance. I examine how a mildly stressful political environment that generates anger or fear can interact with citizens’ values and influence tolerance judgments towards an Islamic group. I focus on manipulations of anger and fear because both are positively linked to perceptions of threat, and play a significant part in forming judgements about society and groups. These emotions however originate from and can result in different behaviours. The experimental study presented here was conducted in the Netherlands and measures changes in the level of reported tolerance for a fictional group named “Youth for Islam”. I manipulated the level of stress of participants (calm vs. stressful scenario) and their emotional appraisals of the event (eliciting fear vs. anger). The findings point to the interaction of the political context, the levels of citizens’ affective awareness and the nature of their civic values for the understanding changes in political tolerance.