This research looks at the effect that emotions have on people’s cognitive process when gathering new information and evaluating for policy proposals framed from a populist or in a programmatic point of view. The emotions of interest are: anxiety, hope, and anger. The study’s approach is from an appraisal cognitive perspective rather than considering the valence of the emotions. According to the appraisal cognitive approach the dimensions of emotions that impact people’s judgment the most are: certainty, pleasantness, attentional activity, anticipated effort, and attribution. The main hypothesis is that emotions that combine low pleasantness, high level of certainty, and attribution (i.e. anger) would tend to motivate subjects to support populist policies. The study allows to also test whether people seek more information and spend more or less time thinking about it before expressing a judgment. Participants took part in an online experiment to trigger people’s emotions and ask them to evaluate two policy positions on economic development in Hungary. The results show that it is the people in the anxiety condition who support more the populist frame, while only people in the hope condition seek more information. These results shade light to the role of context in the study of emotions, cognition, and political judgment.