09.25.06
Political Allegiance Impacts Brain’s Response To Candidates
Political Allegiance Impacts Brain’s Response To Candidates
A new UCLA imaging study finds political party allegiance affects the brain activity of partisans viewing the faces of candidates.
Published online July 9, 2006, by the peer-reviewed journal Neuropsychologia, the study finds a partisan’s brain responds to the opposition candidate’s face by activating cognitive networks designed to regulate emotion.
Researchers at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA suggest the neural activity has one of three goals: 1) suppression of unpleasant emotions; 2) suppression of latent positive feelings toward an opposing candidate; or 3) an increase in negative feelings toward an opposing candidate.
