Why liberals feel first and think later

From Chateau Heartiste: The stereotype of liberals as emotionally underdeveloped children who feel first and think later now has support from the very entity liberals have raised to divine status: SCIENCE!

Liberals and conservatives exhibit different cognitive styles and converging lines of evidence suggest that biology influences differences in their political attitudes and beliefs. In particular, a recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and conservatives have significantly different brain structure, with liberals showing increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, and conservatives showing increased gray matter volume in the amygdala. Here, we explore differences in brain function in liberals and conservatives by matching publicly-available voter records to 82 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging. Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did. Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization of party identification long thought to be one of the core findings of political science. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli. […]

These ideological differences between political partisans have been attributed to logical, psychological, and social constraints and past scholarship has focused primarily on institutional political processes or individual policy preferences, rather than biological differences in evaluative processes. But recent work has revealed physiological correlates of the differential responses to risk and conflict by liberals and conservatives. Consistent with the previously identified attitudinal divergence, conservatives have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli than liberals. Conversely, liberals had stronger physiological responses to situations of cognitive conflict than conservatives.

The insula and amygdala often function together in processing situations of risk and uncertainty [30]. The amygdala plays a critical role in orienting of attention to external cues [31] and fear conditioning [32]; however, this structure is also important for other emotional information processing and behavior [33]. Functional neuroimaging studies have shown amygdala activation in reward related processing [34], encoding of emotionally salient information [35], risk-taking [36], processing positively-valenced stimuli [37], and appetitive/aversive olfactory learning [38]. In comparison, neuroimaging studies of insular cortex have observed critical involvement of this neural structure in pain [39], interoceptive [40], emotion-related [41], cognitive [42], and social processing [43]. In particular, the insular cortex is important for representation of internal bodily cues crucial for subjective feeling states and interoceptive awareness[40], [44]. That differences in the processing of risk and uncertainty differentiate liberals and conservatives suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing ideology.Related study results: Testosterone level influences amygdala functioning.

The activity of the emotion centres in the brain – the amygdalae – is influenced by motivation rather than by the emotions themselves. This can be concluded from research carried out into the hormone testosterone. Testosterone increases amygdala activity in a person who is approaching a socially threatening situation and decreases the activity when such a situation is avoided. It was already known that the amygdala response to images of angry faces was stronger in a person who had received testosterone. This new study shows that this only happens when people approach angry faces and not when they avoid them.

Related study results: Testosterone level influences amygdala functioning.

The activity of the emotion centres in the brain – the amygdalae – is influenced by motivation rather than by the emotions themselves. This can be concluded from research carried out into the hormone testosterone. Testosterone increases amygdala activity in a person who is approaching a socially threatening situation and decreases the activity when such a situation is avoided. It was already known that the amygdala response to images of angry faces was stronger in a person who had received testosterone. This new study shows that this only happens when people approach angry faces and not when they avoid them.