I don't think so. To continue the survivalist example - a survivalist who wanted the belief that civilization would collapse to be true would be making villainous plots to cause the collapse. A survivalist who simply wanted to be vindicated but didn't actually desire collapse would look at the first signs of collapse, tell everyone "I told you so" with a rather smug expression, and then join them in the fight to prevent civilization from collapsing.

I disagree with this based on my general observations of survivalists. I haven't noticed any of them plotting to undermine civilization. Also, I doubt that any of them word do much to prevent a collapse. Also, just introspecting, there are a lot of things I wish were different about the world but I am doing little or nothing to bring about such changes. I think my attitude is pretty common.

Perhaps more importantly, even if what you are saying is correct, how does it relate to the subject at hand -- which is predicting which topics will generate a lot of heat in discussion?

Being emotional is probably not a good signal of this. For example, plenty of atheists are emotional about religion -- that doesn't mean they are uncomfortably aware that it's actually true in some corner of their minds.

I agree that other things can get people worked up besides cognitive dissonance.

Some of these are discussed in the "belief in belief" articles - to the extent that they can do so without becoming consciously aware of it, the person will basically act as if they believe the uncomfortable truth is true, even while professing that it is false.

I like that idea. So one can hypothesize that, at a minimum, in any area where a lot of peoples' actions are inconsistent with their professed beliefs, then discussion of those beliefs will tend to generate a lot of heat, so to speak. Not sure that covers everything, but it seems like a good start.

There's exceptions of course - I've seen some particularly strong believers who really were relatively unperturbed in the face of death)

And quite possibly those same people remain relatively unperturbed when debating life after death. :)