Consider for a moment just how terrifying it must be to live life as a true believer on the right. Reality is scary enough, but the alternative reality inhabited by people who watch Glenn Beck, listen to Rush Limbaugh, or think Michele Bachmann isn't a joke must be nothing less than horrifying.

Research suggests that conservatives are, on average, more susceptible to fear than those who identify themselves as liberals. Looking at MRIs of a large sample of young adults last year, researchers at University College London discovered that “greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala”. The amygdala is an ancient brain structure that's activated during states of fear and anxiety. (The researchers also found that “greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex” – a region in the brain that is believed to help people manage complexity.)

That has implications for our political world. In a recent interview, Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain, explained, “The amygdala plays the same role in every species that has an amygdala. It basically takes over to save your life. It does other things too, but in a situation of threat, you cease to process information rationally and you're moving automatically to protect yourself.”

The finding also fits with other data. Mooney discusses studies conducted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in which self-identified liberals and conservatives were shown images – apolitical images – that were intended to elicit different emotions. Writing at Huffington Post , Mooney explains that “there were images that caused fear and disgust -- a spider crawling on a person's face, maggots in an open wound -- but also images that made you feel happy: a smiling child, a bunny rabbit.” The researchers noted two differences between the groups. The researchers studied their subjects' reactions by tracking their eye movements and monitoring their “skin conductivity” – a measure of one's autonomic nervous system's reaction to stimuli.

Conservatives showed much stronger skin responses to negative images, compared with the positive ones. Liberals showed the opposite. And when the scientists turned to studying eye gaze or "attentional" patterns, they found that conservatives looked much more quickly at negative or threatening images, and [then] spent more time fixating on them.

Mooney concludes that this “new research suggests [that] conservatism is largely a defensive ideology -- and therefore, much more appealing to people who go through life sensitive and highly attuned to aversive or threatening aspects of their environments.”

But those cognitive biases are only part of the story of how a political movement in the wealthiest, most secure nation in the world have come to view their surroundings with such dread. The other half of the equation is a conservative media establishment that feeds members of the movement an almost endless stream of truly terrifying scenarios.

The phenomenon of media “siloing” is pretty well understood – in an era when dozens of media sources are a click away, people have a tendency to consume more of those that conform to their respective worldviews. But there is some evidence that this phenomenon is more pronounced on the right – conservative intellectuals have had a long-running debate about the significance of “ epistemic closure” within their movement.

So conservatives appear to be more likely to be hard-wired to be highly sensitive to perceived threats, and their chosen media offers them plenty. But that's not the whole story because of one additional factor. Since 9/11, and especially since the election of President Barack Obama, one of the most significant trends in America's political discourse is the “mainstreaming” of what were previously considered to be fringe views on the right. Theories that were once relegated to the militia movement can now be heard on the lips of elected officials and television personalities like Glenn Beck.
http://www.alternet.org/story/155210/why_is_the_conservative_brain_more_fearful_the_alternate_reality_right-wingers_inhabit_is_terrifying

(The original peer reviewed paper)

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Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults

Highlights
Political liberalism and conservatism were correlated with brain structure
Liberalism was associated with the gray matter volume of anterior cingulate cortex
Conservatism was associated with increased right amygdala size
Results offer possible accounts for cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives

Summary

Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures [1]. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors [2,3]. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex [4]. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring [4] and recognition of emotional faces [5] by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work [4,6] to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(11)00289-2

Oh look, an ozboy thread belittling right wing ideologists.

I saw the title and knew he had made it :lol:

Science is a bitch, ain't it?

Enhanced Amygdala activity can also correlate with increased sexual behaviour or thoughts, or with stronger or more aggressive responses to stimulus. It's not exclusive to fear.

Selective reasoning is a bitch, ain't it?

[youtube]Qh2sWSVRrmo[/youtube]

Small business owners tend to be conservative voters while public sector employees tend to vote Labor. So much for your "science".

Stick to phrenology.

And this is why I informally vote.

Only donkeys informally vote.

and there are plenty here :lol:

God I hate left-minded ideology sometimes. So smug and pretentious.

"Well I have a PHD political anthropology so I'm going to use it to prove that people who don't share my political views are genetically inferior"

No, you informally vote because you're a rebel without a cause who thinks he's too cool for school.

Where'd you copy and paste that from?

Just because it's too smart for you to comprehend doesn't mean that I didn't write it, champ.

Your eloquent rebuttal and recycling of your lexicon has failed to achieve the introspective effect you so desired, I recommend you take the moral and intellectual high ground while using your Internet persona arrogance in your next textual entry

You posting about arrogance is so ironic I'm making a sandwich out of it.

:lol:

-PB

If liberals are so smart why aren't they intelligent enough to hold onto power?

Edited by rusty: 11/9/2013 02:49:51 PM

Amygdala volume correlates positively with fearfulness in normal healthy girls

Research into the neural underpinnings of fear and fear-related pathology has highlighted the role of the amygdala. For instance, bilateral damage to the amygdaloid complex is associated with decreased appreciation of danger and recognition of fear in humans, whereas enlarged amygdala volume is associated with internalizing syndromes. It is unknown whether amygdala volume and fearfulness are related in the absence of pathology. We examined the correlation between normal fearfulness and amygdala morphology in 116 healthy children and adolescents (60 boys, 56 girls, age 7–17 years). Fearfulness was measured using the parent ratings on the Pediatric Behavior Scale and amygdala volumes were determined by manual tracing. We found a positive correlation between right amygdala volume in girls (r = 0.29). This relationship was more robust and present bilaterally when analyses were limited to girls with a positive nuclear family history of depression (for left r = 0.63; for right r = 0.58). In boys there was no significant relationship which may suggest that biological mechanisms differ between sexes. Given the role of enlarged amygdala volume in pathology, these findings may indicate that variation in amygdala morphology marks susceptibility to internalizing disorders.

http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/02/11/scan.nsq009

Because they have to rely on the intelligence of the masses. And the masses are stupid.

'Stahp Ze Bowts' really is the height of intellectual policy. Not that the government was feeding on fear response....

If they have to rely on the intelligence of the masses and the masses are stupid, how do they get into power?

This study doesn't allow for the Amygdala's other stimulus responses. It's only concerned with fear and therefore is a biased result.

God the left is up itself. Fancy calling themselves "progressive".

They think they are the repository of goodness while the Right is just evil corporates exploiting people.

Talk about post-Industrial Revolution thinking.

Biting the hand that feeds them really. I'm pretty sure it's envy, they despise the wealthy but want it so bad, they can't have it so they complain.

Don't you mean the suppository of all wisdom? :lol:

Yes I think that's what he means.

Numerous studies demonstrate that the rhesus monkey is an excellent species with which to investigate mechanisms underlying human emotion and psychopathology. To examine the role of the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) in mediating the behavioral and physiological responses associated with fear and anxiety, we used rhesus monkeys to assess the effects of excitotoxic lesions of the CeA. Behavioral and physiological responses of nine monkeys with bilateral CeA destruction (ranging from 46 to 98%) were compared with five animals with asymmetric lesions (42-86.5% destruction on the most affected side) and with 16 unoperated controls. Results suggest that similar to rodent species, the primate CeA plays a role in mediating fear- and anxiety-related behavioral and endocrine responses. Compared with controls and the asymmetric-lesion group, bilaterally lesioned monkeys displayed significantly less fear-related behavior when exposed to a snake and less freezing behavior when confronted by a human intruder. In addition, bilaterally lesioned monkeys had decreased levels of CSF corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF), and both lesioned groups had decreased plasma ACTH concentrations. In contrast to these findings, patterns of asymmetric frontal brain electrical activity, as assessed by regional scalp EEG, did not significantly differ between control and lesioned monkeys. These findings suggest that in primates, the CeA is involved in mediating fear- and anxiety-related behavioral and pituitary-adrenal responses as well as in modulating brain CRF activity.

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/24/24/5506

Ozboy you keep changing the goalposts and bringing up irrelevant shit.

The point is: The experiment set out to prove that the enlarged Amygdala caused a stronger fear response but didn't explore other emotive responses to stimulus. If it doesn't explore whether the response to positive stimulus is equally as heightened then you're fitting your results to your hypothesis instead of the other way around.