In Defense of Video Games!

"Some research suggests that video games, especially action games that play with life and death, provide a particularly effective means of engaging our attentional mechanisms. By mobilizing our alerting and reward systems, video games massively modulate learning. The dopamine circuit, for example, fires when we play an action game. Psychologist Daphné Bavelier has shown that this translates into rapid learning. The most violent action games seem to have the most intense effects, perhaps because they most strongly mobilize the brain’s alerting circuits. Ten hours of gameplay suffice to improve visual detection, refine the rapid estimation of the number of objects on the screen, and expand the capacity to concentrate on a target without being distracted. A video game player manages to make ultra-fast decisions without compromising his or her performance. 

Parents and teachers complain that today’s children, plugged into computers, tablets, consoles, and other devices, constantly zap from one activity to the next and have lost the capacity to concentrate—but this is untrue. Far from reducing our ability to concentrate, video games can actually increase it. In the future, will they help us remobilize synaptic plasticity in adults and children alike? Undoubtedly, they are a powerful stimulant of attention, which is why my laboratory has developed a whole range of educational tablet games for math and reading, based on cognitive science principles."

Source: https://lithub.com/how-we-pay-attention-changes-the-very-shape-of-our-brains/

After a decade-long break from them, I recently started playing video games again for a few hours a week.  The research cited above makes me feel even better about my decision.  In addition to allowing me to relax and unwind, video games might also be great for my mental acuity. 

Outdated Evolutionary Responses

Evolutionary psychologists consistently emphasize a central theme; the human mind evolved and was shaped during a time period that contained environmental pressures that are no longer relevant today, and as a result, our responses to many modern problems are often times wrong. There are numerous ways that this phenomena manifests itself. Many times, the outcomes of our behavior are detrimental. For instance, the lack of any meaningful human action for addressing global warming and environmental degradation in general is one major context where this issue is strongly prevalent. Another context is how people respond to verbal confrontation and handle themselves during arguments. For instance:

arguing stirs up our fight-or-flight response. Once biological arousal takes over we start to feel the effects of nature's mechanism that prepares us for aggressive action. To understand our patterns of arguing, we need to learn about fight-or-flight arousal. Once we recognize the signs that we are in an aroused state, such as pounding heart and increased muscle tone, we may realize how often even trivial arguments are triggering full-blown biological responses. An argument about a TV clicker can seem to our mammalian brain as threatening as a lion leaping towards our throat.

It's clear why such needlessly intense responses to verbal confrontations are problematic; the nature of the problem (a simple verbal confrontation) does not warrant the intensity and seriousness  of the response. We do not need our bodies to go into fight-or-flight mode to deal with situations that  don't even pose a remote threat to our safety. We do not need our stress hormones flaring up. The fight-or-flight response has evolved to deal with emergencies and it's mistakenly being used to deal with relatively trivial everyday matters. Such a response can "protect us from threat, by physically preparing us to fight for our life or run for it. It can come in handy when there’s, say, a bus hurtling towards us and we need to get out of the way. It’s not so handy when the issue is that of Oreos, or more specifically, that someone has taken the last one."

Once our emotions and rational thinking are "hijacked" via the flight-or-flight mechanism, our rational and more restrained side "gets sidelined in favor of the more primitive, automatic, unthinking part. As a result, there’s likely to be yelling, personal sledging and aggression. Nobody listens and nobody is heard."

Additionally,

in situations of high stress, fear or distrust, the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down. And the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. The body makes a chemical choice about how best to protect itself...we default to one of four responses: fight (keep arguing the point), flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus), freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him)

None of the responses offered by the fight-or-flight mechanism make sense in most professional, interpersonal, and social situations. The severity and inappropriateness of the response often times leads to misunderstanding, unnecessary arguing, lack of cooperation, and hurt feelings. What makes the situation even more problematic is that our brains actually reward us for giving into these irrational responses because "when [we] argue and win, [our] brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes [us] feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right."

Ultimately, once a discussion turns into an argument or any sort of verbal confrontation, "It's no longer an exercise in logic and reasoning. It's just a fight. And being in a fight brings its own frame of mind, a whole set of attitudes, expectations, and conditioned reactions that go along with arguing. As soon as that happens, no one cares who is right and who is wrong. All that matters is who is friend and who is foe."

Given this information on how we seem to be "wired" to respond to even the slightest hint of verbal aggression, our goal should be to hijack the hijacker and cut off our automatic aggressive response before it has a chance to do damage. Consider the implications in professional settings where we need to work with strangers. If we are interacting with someone whose cooperation we need, what should our response be when we sense aggression from them in the form of a condescending or disrespectful tone? Should we match their tone and be aggressive in return? Given the information previously discussed, this would be a very poor course of action to take. Such a response will give the person in front of us a reason or the opportunity to allow the more "primal" parts of their brain to take over and sabotage their reasoning. Once this happens, we have lost the person and they are very unlikely to play along and comply with our requests. For all practical purposes, both their body and mind are now responding to us as if we are the "enemy" and we are literally putting their physical safety at risk. During such a state of emotional and physiological arousal, the last thing on the person's mind is to cooperate with the "foe" in front of them; an emergency mode has been activated and cooperation has been thrown out the window.

The proper response to the above situation is to do our absolute best to keep our calm and not allow the person to detect even the most minute evidence of aggressive behavior or tone. If we do not give their body and mind the opportunity to go into a "self defense" mode then they are much more likely to cooperate with us and treat us as a potential friend instead of an enemy. Maintaining emotional restraint under emotionally charged circumstances is easier said than done but the rewards greatly outweigh the immediate costs.



Sources cited:

http://www.mental-health-survival-guide.com/arguing.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/karen-young/brain-during-an-argument_b_7540148.html

https://hbr.org/2013/02/break-your-addiction-to-being/

http://theweek.com/articles/454234/how-win-every-argument

The Case of Mr. Thompson

This is the most brutal and depressing description of someone's mental condition I have ever read. This sounds like a nightmare. The worst part is the patient not even having the cognitive ability to realize the state that he is in.

The author is describing the patient "Mr. Thompson." The patient is unable to form new memories and his working memory is essentially a few seconds long. He forgets everything after that brief duration and has to start from the beginning over, and over, and over, and over again.

The following quotes are from the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.

He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds. For him they were not fictions, but how he suddenly saw, or interpreted, the world. Its radical flux and incoherence could not be tolerated, acknowledged, for an instant--there was, instead, this strange, delirious, quasi-coherence, as Mr. Thompson, with his ceaseless, unconscious, quick-fire inventions, continually improvised a world around him--an Arabian Nights world, a phantasmagoria, a dream, of ever-changing people, figures, situations--continual, kaleidoscopic mutations and transformations.

[He was] continually creating a world and a self, to replace what was continually being forgotten and lost. Such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment... Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy--hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania. Unable to maintain a genuine narrative or continuity, unable to maintain a genuine inner world, he is driven to the proliferation of pseudo-narratives, in a pseduo-continuity, pseudo-worlds peopled by pseudo-people, phantoms...

Here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing--and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him...

He can never stop running, for the breach in memory, in existence, in meaning, is never healed but has to be bridged, to be 'patched', every second. And the bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance, fail to work--because they are confabulations, fictions, which cannot do service for reality, while also failing to correspond with reality...

Our efforts to cure Mr. Thompson will all fail--even increase his confabulatory pressure. But when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out in the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there, in its quietness, he recovers his own quiet. The presence of others, other people, excite and rattle him, force him into an endless, frenzied, social chatter, a veritable delirium of identity-making and seeking; the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allow this identity-delirium to relax, to subside, and by their quiet, non-human self sufficiency and completeness allow him a rare quietness and self-sufficiency of his own, by offering (beneath, or beyond, all merely human identities and relations) a deep wordless communion with Nature itself, and with this the restored sense of being in the world, being real.

Tribute to Oliver Sacks

It's painful to accept the fact that this amazing human being is terminally ill and is going to pass away soon. Dr. Oliver Sacks has lived a rich, fulfilling, and relentlessly unapologetic life. This drawing is my tribute to him and my way of saying goodbye to someone who I greatly admire. I rarely call any specific individual an inspiration but Dr. Sacks is an exception. His infinite curiosity and love of learning is a constant reminder for me to strive to be the same way and I will forever remember him.

For anyone who hasn't read his recent autobiography, I HIGHLY recommend it:

On the Move: A Life


I also recommend reading his two most recent articles in the New York Times. He discusses the beauty of life and how little of it he has left. His writing is very emotional, thoughtful, and philosophical:

My Own Life

My Periodic Table

What do we learn at the bottom of the pit?

I descended into dark places recently and it has been one of the scariest experiences in my life thus far. As difficult as it is to write some of this, I would like to share it because I might possibly help someone else who is going through something painful and they see no way out.  I want to show them that there is a way out and there is a proper way of handling a terrifying situation.

Ultimately, I do not know how I managed to descend this far but I imagine it started with the initial panic attack which happened recently (about two weeks ago). After that particular incident, I was optimistic and every day I was feeling better and better. Then, I realized that I was not through the ordeal just yet and there was more to come. For those who don't know, a panic attack involves symptoms such as an increased heart rate, a sense of doom and dread, severe anxiety, a fight or flight response, and other symptoms. One key symptom that is very difficult to describe is what's called a "detached sense of reality." Imagine you know exactly where you are and what time it is and other details about your immediate environment and your life. However, something... something doesn't feel quite right. You feel as if you are outside your own body and you aren't a unified whole. You are a collection of parts.  There is a lack of continuity from one instance to the next.  This is the symptom I started to experience throughout the day and it started to cause immense anxiety because I was unable to be properly immersed in my environment and with the people in it. I also started to sleep only 2-3 hours a night instead of my usual 7-8 hours. Additionally, I could barely eat. The insomnia and hunger made the situation that much worse.

Unfortunately, these feelings took a turn for the worse. I started experiencing even darker thoughts and I was unable to experience any joy or happiness. The usual activities and things that would make me happy completely failed to make a difference. For instance, I was unable to smile or laugh at a picture of a puppy tumbling down the stairs.  In the past, I would have the widest grin on my face at such a sight. I was barely able to force a smile in the mornings when greeting a coworker. During conversations, people would be concerned and ask what was wrong. I was able to communicate and function and I looked relatively fine on the surface but underneath I was in a dark place and I was unable to connect with the world around me. I was unable to experience positive emotions or extract any joy out of situations that would usually make me happy.  Perhaps the most terrifying part during all this was the incredibly strong and disturbing illusion that these feelings were never going to go away and I was going to be forced to live such a detached and joyless life forever. Logic, my ever-comforting source of solace, kept failing me. I felt absolutely hopeless and was fighting a losing battle against my own mind. Once these fatalistic and catastrophic feelings started to take hold, I was on my way to the lowest point possible and started experiencing thoughts of death and suicide.  I was unable to stop thoughts such as "there is no joy, what's the point of living?" and "why are you even alive?" Perhaps the most paralyzing thought of all was "why don't you kill yourself?" It hurts me to even write these out but I can't deny that these thoughts haunted me.

Thankfully, I was never in any real danger and there was no real risk of me acting on these thoughts but since I had never had such ideas in my life, I was in a state of complete shock, mental paralysis, and defeat. I had absolutely no idea what to do. I had never experienced anything this dark and morbid. During one of the lowest points, I ran down the stairs while at work and I called the suicide help hotline to have someone, anyone, to hear me and tell me it's alright. The act of actually conveying these thoughts out loud to someone and being able to cry provided a deep sense of relief. This is when I realized I needed help and I could not take on this battle alone. I started to reach out to friends and coworkers. I am grateful that each and every one of them came through and talked to me and supported me. I am not religious but I feel blessed to have caring people in my life. This is when I learned my greatest lesson that I hope others will take to heart as well. During your darkest times, you cannot get out on your own. You need friends. You need family. You need someone to talk to. If you feel isolated and have absolutely no one, call a hotline or any other free service. The simple act of connecting with another human being, even a stranger, during such a vulnerable time is absolutely therapeutic even if you don't immediately realize or feel the effects. Your mind is a dangerous animal and it can make you believe that the situation is not going to get better and you will be stuck in pain forever. During these dark times, you will lose your ability to defend against such catastrophic thoughts and logic will very likely fail you and it will feel like your mind is divided and fighting against itself in some kind of internal mental civil war. You need allies. Sharing the dark thoughts and not feeling like you're alone in fighting them is absolutely essential. Do not take on the struggle alone and do not feel that you are "weak" for needing help. All of us need help at one point or another and that's absolutely ok. This is the other lesson I learned from this experience. It's alright to be vulnerable and let your heart out and allow people to be there for you. Often times, you are doing them a favor by allowing them to support you. You are not being a burden. It feels good to help someone in need, especially someone in immense need.

I would like to end on a positive note and with some words of wisdom. Treat your brain and your mind like you would treat any other muscle. If you lift too many weights or jog for too many miles, your body can fail you and you need a break. If you break an arm, you need a cast and other kinds of treatments to fix the issue. Your mind can suffer the same way. The way it gets "hurt" and pushed to exhaustion is through stress. Do NOT underestimate the effects of stressful events. If you deal with several major disappointments in a short period of time, this is most likely going to have some kind of effect on your mind and it's going to manifest itself in various ways after you surpass a certain tolerance level of mental threshold. What's essential to note here is that you will not consciously be aware of when this threshold is actually surpassed. For me, it seemed to show itself in the form of a panic attack and through the emotions and feelings I described above. For you, it might be other symptoms. Each person is affected by different events and to varying degrees and often times we aren't even aware of what can actually hurt us significantly. Don't think you are "above" being hurt by what you think is a minor setback. Logically, something might seem insignificant on the surface, but your mind and subconscious thought processes could still have a strong reaction.

At the end of it all, when nothing seems to help and everything seems hopeless, never forget that the people in your life can help and allow you to start climbing from the pit you fell in. All of us need help sometimes. Let them be there for you. A loving and long hug from your mother or your friend can mean a world of difference. Whatever you ultimately decide to do, never EVER isolate yourself and keep your feelings to yourself. You are not alone and you should not allow yourself to feel alone.

What the hell was THAT?

I am recounting my experience of something that happened very recently as a way of trying to make at least some sense of it.

I was taken to the ER for having my first ever genuine and prolonged panic attack. I figure that the best way to tackle an issue is to try to take it head on instead of avoiding thinking about it with the hopes that it won't happen again.  I believe avoiding an issue is generally a mistake.  Making decisions with fear as your motivation often ends badly.

I've had minor occurrences of panic attack'esque episodes in the past but this time it was distinctly different and a whole new kind of beast.  It occurred at 1:25am. I got up for a bathroom break like numerous times before. When I came back to bed and threw the sheets over me, I realized something was very very wrong.  I felt a fear so primal and unrecognizable that I had no idea what was happening to me. The incredibly foreign nature of what I was feeling added to the panic and made the whole situation that much more terrifying. I started trembling uncontrollably even though it was not cold.  My heart rate skyrocketed and I could feel my heart fiercely beating against my chest. I turned on the lights and sat on my bed in a complete daze. My father got alarmed and woke up from the light. He came into my room and repeatedly asked what was wrong.  I kept trembling and staring in random directions. I finally managed to mutter "emergency room... now..."

After the symptoms finally subsided and the nurses could find nothing physically wrong with me,  I thought about why I couldn't answer my father when he kept asking what was wrong with me.  I realized that the answer I wanted to give him would make me sound insane and that made me very afraid. A quick web.md search yielded the symptom I was too scared to even attempt to describe:

"Feeling unreal or detached from your surroundings."

Besides the physical symptoms such as trembling and an increased heart rate, this was the mental symptom I was utterly terrified of. I quite literally felt like I was viewing my body from somewhere high above and outside of it. I felt my "essence" fading from me. I couldn't stop myself from thinking about what actually makes me "Vahagn." I didn't think of myself as a unified whole. I thought of myself as a massive collection of cells. I saw myself as groups of organs surrounded by flesh. I viewed my brain as a collection of neurons and I could not stop thinking about how all those neurons work together to form who I am. I could not understand how they formed my consciousness and stored my memories.  I asked myself "why are these neurons working together to store my memories and who I am? What's stopping them from erasing me completely?"  I believe I was having an existential crisis in the most literal way I could possibly experience it and the ordeal was immensely terrifying and it caused me to question the very essence of reality and what ultimately makes me, "me."

I never want to go through this experience again but if it does decide to show up again. .. bring it the fuck on. I'm ready for you.

A guide for dealing with humans

This is going to sound quite pessimistic and cynical but please read on if you have the patience.

When dealing with fellow human beings, expect disappointment, unpredictability, and irrationality.  Why?  For several reasons.  Keep these observations in mind:

1) When dealing with an individual in a "cold" and emotionally unaroused state, don't assume they are going to be the same way when they are under the influence of emotions of any kind, whether it be happiness, anger, sadness, stress, confusion, etc etc..  When we are unaroused, we assume that we will act in a logical and consistent manner while under emotional arousal or stress.  Often times, this is false and we have absolutely no idea how we will act or what we will do when we aren't in a cold rational state.

2) We come from different backgrounds and drastically different experiences.  This can lead different people to view the same situation in radically different ways.  We really have no idea why we hold the preferences that we do and why some things that frustrate us greatly seem to have no emotional effect on others.  There is no way to accurately identify the root cause for a majority of our predispositions.

3) Neurologically speaking, we do NOT know how decisions are actually made and what happens in the brain, at a molecular level, when an individual has to make a choice.  It's still a mystery.  So, when a person makes a decision, at the most basic level, we have no idea how that decision was made and what kind of biological influences and reactions were at play.  Why did you decide to cut that driver off today but restrained yourself yesterday?

4) We are unconsciously influenced by a plethora of contextual and environmental factors.  The sheer amount of ways that we can be emotionally/mentally primed without even realizing it is immense.  The power of roles, costumes, anonymity, authority, and an unpredictable/unfamiliar environment can have a powerful influence on who you think you are and how you think you will behave in different contexts.  Consider yourself living in a first-world country in an urban setting and then realizing how differently you might act if you were placed in a third-world rural village with contaminated food and water and no social support of any kind for miles.  Chances are that you will behave in ways that will surprise you.  Does this mean you aren't who you thought you were?

5) Our willpower and ability to practice self-restraint varies throughout the day and even depends on how well fed we are.  An individual who has been dealing with crying children all day is going to be much more on edge and "touchy" than someone who has been lounging at the beach.  Does this mean that the first individual has less self-control and is just a more frustrated person in general? Absolutely not, that person's willpower has simply been depleted and their emotional restraint has diminished.

This list isn't exhaustive and there are many more factors at play that can lead to an individual behaving in unpredictable and irrational ways.  Given these observations, is it worth actively seeking and fostering friendships?  Is it worth falling into perhaps the greatest emotional abyss of them all? I am referring to love and relationships of course.  The answer is YES to all of these situations.  But, before you set yourself up for failure and disappointment, realize that you are dealing with a creature that is operating under all of the above restraints (and then some).  Don't create high expectations and be more forgiving when shit (inevitably) hits the fan.  We're only human.

NeuroPolitics

I present to you a collection of research quotes on the topic of physiological (and non-physiological) differences between Republicans (or conservatives) and Democrats (or liberals). As far as I know, all the quotes are from credible and legitimate studies published by various academic journals.  I will update this entry with further sources and quotes if I do additional research.


Latest update: August 3, 2012.

Source: http://assets1.bigthink.com/system/idea_thumbnails/38761/original/neuropolitics.jpg?1308180484

1. Chris Mooney stated the following in his article “How the Right-Wing Brain Works and What That Means for Progressives,” published by AlterNet on March 20, 2012.

Source: http://www.alternet.org/news/154607

"...what’s being called “morality” is emotional and, in significant part, automatic. It’s not about the conscious decisions you make about situations or policies—or at least, not primarily. Rather, the focus is on the unconscious impulses that shape how you think about situations before you’re even aware you’re doing so, and then guide (and bias) your reasoning."

2. Elisabeth Lyons posted the following in the press release "Political views are reflected in brain structure," published by EurikaAlert! on April 7, 2011.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-04/cp-pva040511.php

"We all know that people at opposite ends of the political spectrum often really can't see eye to eye. Now, a new report published online on April 7th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveals that those differences in political orientation are tied to differences in the very structures of our brains."

"Individuals who call themselves liberal tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes, while those who call themselves conservative have larger amygdalas. Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat, the researchers say."

"Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation," said Ryota Kanai of the University College London. "Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure."

"Kanai said his study was prompted by reports from others showing greater anterior cingulate cortex response to conflicting information among liberals. "That was the first neuroscientific evidence for biological differences between liberals and conservatives,"

3. Ryota Kanai, Tom Feliden, and Colin Firth, stated the following in their report "Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults," published by the journal "Current Biology" on April 26, 2011.

Source: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S0960982211002892

"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..."

"Although political attitudes are commonly assumed to have solely environmental causes, recent studies have begun to identify biological influences on an individual’s political orientation..."

"...the amplitude of event-related potentials reflecting neural activity associated with conflict monitoring in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is greater for liberals compared to conservatives . Thus, stronger liberalism is associated with increased sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern and with brain activity in anterior cingulate cortex...."

"Conservatives respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are

more sensitive to threatening facial expressions. This heightened sensitivity to emotional faces suggests that individuals with conservative orientation might exhibit differences in brain structures associated with emotional processing such as the amygdala..."

"Although these results suggest a link between political attitudes and brain structure, it is important to note that the neural processes implicated are likely to reflect complex processes of the formation of political attitudes rather than a direct representation of political opinions per se..."

"...our findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty. The amygdala has many functions, including fear processing. Individuals with a large amygdala are more sensitive to fear, which, taken together with our findings, might suggest the testable hypothesis that individuals with larger amygdala are more inclined to integrate conservative views into their belief system. Similarly, it is striking that conservatives are more sensitive to disgust, and the insula is involved in the feeling of disgust..."

"[it is difficult to] determine whether the changes in brain structure that we observed lead to changes in political behavior or whether political attitudes and behavior instead result in changes of brain structure"

4. Smith KB, Oxley D, Hibbing MV, Alford JR, and Hibbing JR, stated the following in their study "Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations," published by Plos One on October 19, 2011.

Source: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025552#aff1

"People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations. Given its primal nature and essential value in avoiding pathogens disgust likely has an effect even without registering in conscious beliefs. In this article, we demonstrate that individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images..."

"...people's physiological predispositions help to shape their political orientations..."

."..compared to people on the left, those on the right tended to report being more disgust sensitive..."

"It appears that those individuals who have the strongest physiological responses to an array of disgusting stimuli (none of which directly relates to sexuality or homosexuality) also tend to be the individuals who oppose gay marriage..."

"The central implication of our research is that, whether the relevant raw material of political attitudes is entirely environmental or partially innate, these attitudes sometimes become biologically instantiated in involuntary physiological responses to facets of life far detached from the political issues of the day..."

"To put it differently, the proper interpretation of the findings reported here is not that biology causes politics or that politics causes biology but that certain political orientations at some unspecified point become housed in our biology, with meaningful political consequences..."

5. Michael D. Dodd, Amanda Balzer, Carly Jacobs, Michael Grusczynszyki, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Hibbing stated the following in their report "The Left Rolls with the Good; The Right Confronts the Bad. Physiology and Cognition in Politics," published by The Royal Society on March 15, 2012.

Source: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1589/640.full

"We report evidence that individual-level variation in people’s physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-center and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-center political inclinations..."

"the hypothesis is that individuals on the right side of the political spectrum will exhibit increased electrodermal activity when viewing aversive images while those on the left side will exhibit increased electrodermal activity, in relative terms, when viewing the appetitive images..."

"in relative terms, individuals on the right spend a greater amount of time gazing at aversive

images while individuals on the left spend a greater amount of time gazing at appetitive

images..."

"Our core finding is that, compared to individuals on the political left, individuals on the right direct more of their attention to the aversive despite displaying greater physiological responsiveness to those stimuli..."

"...in spite of heightened physiological responses, individuals on the right often diligently attend to the aversive, which in turn is consistent with the fact that right-of-center policy positions are often designed to protect society against out-group threats (e.g., by supporting increased defense spending and opposing immigration) and in-group norm violators (e.g., by supporting traditional values and stern penalties for criminal behavior)..."

6. Douglas R. Oxley1, Kevin B. Smith1, John R. Alford, Matthew V. Hibbing, Jennifer L. Miller, Mario Scalora, Peter K. Hatemi and John R. Hibbing stated the following in their study "Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits," published in the journal Science on September 19, 2008.

Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5896/1667.short

"We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War..."

"Our findings suggest that political attitudes vary with physiological traits linked to divergent manners of experiencing and processing environmental threats."

7. Michael D. Dodd, John R. Hibbing, and Kevin B. Smith stated the following in their study "The Politics of Attention: Gaze cuing effects are moderated by political temperament," published by the University of Nebraska

Source: http://psych.unl.edu/mdodd/VAMP/A439B_DHS_PoliticalGaze_FinalAPP.pdf

"Gaze cues lead to reflexive shifts of attention even when those gaze cues do not predict target location. Though this general effect has been repeatedly demonstrated, not all individuals orient to gaze in an identical manner..."

"In the present study, we examine whether gaze cue effects are moderated by political temperament, given that those on the political right tend to be more supportive of individualism—and less likely to be influenced by others—than those on the left. We find standard gaze cuing effects across all subjects, but systematic differences in these effects by political temperament. Liberals exhibit a very large gaze cuing effect while conservatives show no such effect at various SOAs..."

"One factor that may correlate with gaze cuing effects is the degree to which an individual values personal autonomy since an individual with this orientation may be less likely to be influenced by others. To examine this possibility, the present study investigates whether gaze cuing effects are moderated by political temperament. Individuals on the political right tend to be more supportive of individualism than those on the left..."

"One question that remains is why, exactly, conservatives are less susceptible to gaze cuing effects relative to liberals? We have argued that conservatives tend to value personal autonomy more so than liberals, making them less likely to be influenced by others and, in turn, less responsive to gaze cues..."

8. Darren Schreiber, Alan N. Simmons, Christopher T. Dawes, Taru Flagan, James H. Fowler, and Martin P. Paulus stated the following in their study "Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans," published by the Social Science Research Network on August 13, 2009.

Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1451867

"We matched public voter records to 54 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging. We find that Democrats and Republicans had significantly different patterns of brain activation during processing of risky decisions. Amygdala activations, associated with externally directed reactions to risk, are stronger in Republicans, while insula activations, associated with internally directed reactions to affective perceptions, are stronger in Democrats..."

"...a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations achieves better accuracy in predicting whether someone is a Democrat or a Republican than a well established model in political science based on parental socialization of party identification..."

"Thus, it appears in our experiment that Republican participants, when making a risky choice, are predominantly externally oriented, reacting to the fear-related processes with a tangible potential external consequence. In comparison, risky decisions made by Democratic participants appear to be

associated with monitoring how the selection of a risky response might feel internally..."

"If Republicans are utilizing externally oriented processes in reacting to risks while Democrats are internally directed, then we would expect the one group to be more supportive of socially conservative policies and the other to be more sensitive to internal conflict..."

"Republicans and Democrats differ in the neural mechanisms activated while performing a risk-taking task. Republicans more strongly activate their ventral anterior cingulate and bilateral amgydala, associated with a more externally oriented reaction to risk. Democrats have higher activity in their right insula, associated with internally directed reactions to affective perceptions..."

9. Paul R. Nail, Ian McGregor, April E. Drinkwater, Garrett M. Steele, and Anthony W. Thompson stated the following in their study "Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives," published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology in July 2009.

Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103109000948

"These findings indicate that threat drove liberals to shift toward social attitudes that are normally more characteristic of conservatives. Because the source of the threat and the measure of defensiveness were not closely related, these findings cannot be easily explained under a rational defensiveness framework..."

"The results of three studies support the reactive-liberals hypothesis. Liberals became more conservative following experimentally induced threats. In fact, the threats consistently caused liberals to become as conservative as conservatives chronically were. The findings of all three studies are consistent with the view that conservative social cognition, whether political or psychological, is a defensive reaction against feelings of personal vulnerability...

"We believe that political conservatism has psychological properties that make it particularly appealing when vulnerability is dispositionally or situationally salient. Moreover, defensive conservatism appears to be a general psychological response to vulnerability that is not necessarily strategically linked to the eliciting threats. We conclude that significant threats always induce a tendency towards conservative social cognition. Whether this tendency is manifested directly in terms of increased political conservatism, or more indirectly in terms of increased psychological conservatism, will depend upon the particulars of the situation..."

10.

Scott Eidelman, Christian S. Crandall, Jeffrey A. Goodman, and John C. Blanchar, stated the following in their paper “Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism,” published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2012.

Source: http://psp.sagepub.com/content/38/6/808

“The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought… Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.”

“…we develop the argument that political conservatism is promoted when people rely on low-effort thinking. When effortful, deliberate responding is disrupted or disengaged, thought processes become quick and efficient; these conditions promote conservative ideology…”

“Bar patrons reported more conservative attitudes as their level of alcohol intoxication increased. Because alcohol limits cognitive capacity and disrupts controlled responding, while leaving automatic thinking largely intact, these data are consistent with our claim that low-effort thinking promotes political conservatism.”

“Participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than those not under cognitive load. Because cognitive load depletes available mental resources (Gilbert et al., 1988; Wegner & Erber, 1992), participants were left to draw more heavily on thinking that was easy and efficient… Cognitive load also produced a corresponding shift in liberal attitudes; when under load, participants’ endorsement of political liberalism decreased…”

 11.

Jacob M. Vigil stated the following in his study “Political leanings vary with facial expression processing and psychosocial functioning,” published in the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations in 2010.

Source: http://psych.unm.edu/faculty/Politics.PDF

“In the current study, I examined the hypothesis that political leanings reflect broader behavioral dispositions that are associated with individual differences in facial expression processing…”

“Independent sample t-tests revealed group differences in the averaged threat interpretation scores  of  the 10 facial stimuli. Republican sympathizers were more likely to interpret the faces as signaling a threatening expression as compared to Democrat sympathizers. Group differences were also found for dominance perceptions, whereby Republican sympathizers were more likely to perceive the faces as expressing dominant emotions than were Democrat sympathizers…”

“In the current study, I show that individuals who sympathize with the Republican Party have a lower threshold for processing threatening stimuli from ambiguous social information as compared to sympathizers of the Democrat Party.”

12.

Nicole A. Thomas, Tobias Loetscher, Danielle Clode, and Michael E. R. Nicholls stated the following in their study “Right-Wing Politicians Prefer the Emotional Left,” published by Plos One on May 2, 2012.

Source: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036552

“Conservatives have heightened sensitivity for detecting emotional faces and use emotion more effectively when campaigning. As the left face displays emotion more prominently, we examined 1538 official photographs of conservative and liberal politicians from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States for an asymmetry in posing. Across nations, conservatives were more likely than liberals to display the left cheek. In contrast, liberals were more likely to face forward than were conservatives. Emotion is important in political campaigning and as portraits influence voting decisions, conservative politicians may intuitively display the left face to convey emotion to voters…”

“…the left cheek is often displayed more prominently than the right cheek in portraits and photographs. This leftward bias is strongest when the model wants to display emotion, but is eliminated when concealing emotion.  A number of studies have demonstrated that emotions are rated as more expressive when they are displayed on the left side of the face and individuals who are more emotionally expressive are more likely to present the left cheek when posing for a portrait… ”

“If conservatives are more predisposed to express and perceive emotion, they should be more likely to present the emotional left cheek more prominently in portraits…”

“Overall, politicians were more likely to display the left cheek in their official photographs, consistent with prior reports of a leftward posing bias in portraiture. Interestingly, conservative politicians were significantly more likely to display the left cheek bias than were liberal politicians…”

“Liberals were more likely face forward than were conservatives. This could reflect a desire by liberal politicians to appear emotionally neutral as opposed to making use of emotion in their official photographs…”

“Given the predisposition of conservatives to express and use emotion, the preference to show the left cheek would allow conservatives to communicate emotions to voters through their portrait…”

“The current findings suggest that conservatives make better use of emotion than liberals by presenting the more emotional left cheek…”

13.

Scott P. McLean, John P. Garza, Sandra A. Wiebe, Michael D. Dodd, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Hibbing, and Kimberly Andrews Espy stated the following in their study “The Differential Attention Biases of Conservatives and Liberals,” published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on April 27, 2011 on its website.

Source: http://www.unl.edu/polphyslab/sites/unl.edu.incubator.politicalscience.unlpoliticalsciencephysiologylab/files/Flanker%20paper.PolPsychVersion.04-27-11.pdf

“In order to identify the relationship between people’s political orientation and their

tendency to focus attention on faces projecting particular emotions we turned to the flanker task. This paradigm seems particularly well-suited for testing the possibility that liberals and conservatives are differentially attentive to angry and to happy faces…”

“The flanker paradigm is a well-established research protocol for measuring attention…”

“…we adapted the flanker paradigm to determine whether differences across the political spectrum also exist in attention and emotion processing. The flanker paradigm makes it possible to investigate the effects of socially relevant stimuli (i.e., faces) on attention, in

different affective contexts.  The question we pose is whether individuals holding policy

preferences traditionally associated with a conservative ideology as opposed to those holding liberal preferences will differ in their affect and congruity-relevant processing of information…”

“On average, when targets are angry, individuals with conservative issue positions have response times for incongruent flankers that are nearly as fast or even faster than for congruent flankers.  Liberals, on the other hand, tend to be slowed down more by incongruent flankers as per traditional flanker effects.  What this suggests is that conservatives focus so much on the target when it is angry that the usual slowing effects of incongruent flankers do not much apply. When only happy targets are analyzed, political ideology is completely unrelated, with a coefficient that is close to 0 (-.01) and statistically insignificant at even the .10 level…”

14.

Luciana Carraro, Luigi Castelli, and Claudia Macchiella stated the following in their article “The Automatic Conservative: Ideology-Based Attentional Asymmetries in the Processing of Valenced Information,” published by Plos One on November 9. 2011.

Source: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026456

“In the current work, we argued that political ideology is related to selective attention processes, so that negative stimuli are more likely to automatically grab the attention of conservatives as compared to liberals. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that negative (vs. positive) information impaired the performance of conservatives, more than liberals, in an Emotional Stroop Task. This finding was confirmed in Experiment 2 and in Experiment 3 employing a Dot-Probe Task, demonstrating that threatening stimuli were more likely to attract the attention of conservatives. Overall, results support the conclusion that people embracing conservative views of the world display an automatic selective attention for negative stimuli…”

“Experiment 1 demonstrated that negative stimuli were more likely to grab the attention of conservatives, interfering with the execution of the primary task they had to perform (i.e., color-naming). Results from Experiment 2 and 3 further evidenced that ideology was related to spatial attention, and conservatives were more likely to quickly direct their attention toward negative images…”

“Thanks to attentional processes people filter the incoming information and left-right ideological differences appear to shape these early automatic processes. As a consequence, conservatives, as compared to liberals, may indeed build up discrepant representations of the world with the former being more biased toward negativity. The outcome of this automatic selective attention for threatening information, in turn, may then further increase the motivation to embrace ideological conservatism as a way to manage uncertainty and threat…”

15.

Kevin B. Smith, Amanda J. Balzer, Michael W. Gruszczynski, Carly M. Jacobs, John R. Alford, Scott Stoltenberg, and John R. Hibbing stated the following in their study “Political Orientations May Vary with Detection of the Odor of Androstenone,” published by University of Nebraska-Lincoln on June 7, 2011 on its website.

Source: http://www.unl.edu/polphyslab/sites/unl.edu.incubator.politicalscience.unlpoliticalsciencephysiologylab/files/Androstenone.06-07-11.pdf

“The particular social chemical analyzed in this study is androstenone, a nonandrogenic steroid found in the sweat and saliva of many mammals, including humans…”

“Only a few studies address androstenone‘s potential relevance to the broader (non-mating) aspects of social life…”

“…there may be grounds for speculating that those whose views are associated with the political right would also be more sensitive to the odor of androstenone, given that it  seems to provide emotionally meaningful cues.  Sensitivity to the emotional content of other people‘s odors, as well as to the emotional content of their faces, may be conducive to certain right-of-center political orientations…”

“A similar line of reasoning that leads to the same directional expectation is that, given its close relationship with testosterone, a substance often associated with aggression, competition, and risk-taking, those who readily detect androstenone in those around  them might be more likely to seek comfort and protection in the arms of the secure, traditional social order that conservatives often hold out as the end goal of their policy stances. Thus, heightened sensitivity to odors such as androstenone may be consistent with favorable attitudes toward decisive leaders, protection from both in-group rulebreakers and out-group invasions, and a desire to promote traditional rather than avantgarde lifestyles…”

“…a strong positively-signed relationship appears between intensity of androstenone detection and ―conservative political orientations.  Individuals espousing ―liberal political views (in the American sense of the term) tend to be less sensitive to the odor of

androstenone…”

“To the extent androstenone is the odor of aggression and possibly social threat, people more sensitive to it could be more likely to have the perception that the world is a dangerous place and therefore to support special efforts to protect the social order…”

“Certain individuals are sensitive to the odor of androstenone and they also tend to be the people who are eager to squelch threats to the social order…”

 16.

Erik G. Helzer and David A. Pizarro stated the following in their study “Dirty Liberals! Reminders of Physical Cleanliness Influence Moral and Political Attitudes,” published by the journal Psychological Science on March 18, 2011.

Source: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/03/17/0956797611402514.abstract

“Many moral codes place a special emphasis on bodily purity, and manipulations that directly target bodily purity have been shown to influence a variety of moral judgments. Across two studies, we demonstrated that reminders of physical purity influence specific moral judgments regarding behaviors in the sexual domain as well as broad political attitudes. In Study 1, individuals in a public setting who were given a reminder of physical cleansing reported being more politically conservative than did individuals who were not given such a reminder. In Study 2, individuals reminded of physical cleansing in the laboratory demonstrated harsher moral judgments toward violations of sexual purity and were more likely to report being politically conservative than control participants. Together, these experiments provide further evidence of a deep link between physical purity and moral judgment, and they offer preliminary evidence that manipulations of physical purity can influence general (and putatively stable) political attitudes.”

17.

Natalie J. Shooka and  Russell H. Faziob stated the following in their research article “Political ideology, exploration of novel stimuli, and attitude formation,” published by Journal of Experimental Social Psychology on April 3, 2009.

Source: http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/fazio/fazio/pages/documents/ShookFazio_JESPinpress.pdf

“In this study, the relations among political ideology, exploratory behavior, and the formation of attitudes toward novel stimuli were explored. Participants played a computer game that required learning whether these stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes. Learning was dependent on participants’ decisions to sample novel stimuli and discover the associated valence. Political ideology correlated with exploration during the game, with conservatives sampling fewer targets than liberals. Moreover, more conservative individuals exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry, such that they learned negative stimuli better than positive. Mediational analyses revealed that the differences in learning were due to the extent of exploratory behavior during the game. Relative to liberals, politically conservative individuals pursued a more avoidant strategy to the game, which led to their development of a more pronounced valence asymmetry in learning and attitude formation…”

“The findings from this study highlight some of the broader correlates of political ideology. Conservatives’ intolerance of the unfamiliar, perceptions of the world as dangerous, and fear of loss were reflected in the cautious strategy adopted when playing BeanFest and learning about the novel objects. Liberals demonstrated more openness to new experiences by exploring the new bean world to a greater extent. These different approaches to interacting with one’s environment led to differences in attitude formation and participants’ perceptions of the bean world.”

“…this study provides clear evidence for the existence of relations among political ideology, exploratory behavior, and attitude formation…The reluctance to explore that characterizes more politically conservative individuals may protect them from experiencing negative situations, for they are likely to restrict approach to known positives.”

18.

Dana R. Carney, John T. Jost, Samuel D. Gosling, and Jeff Potter, stated the following in their study “The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind," published in the journal International Society of Political Psychology on October 23, 2008.

Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2008.00668.x/full

“We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs. economic) dimensions of ideology. In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized...

A special advantage of our final two studies is that they show personality differences between liberals and conservatives not only on self-report trait measures but also on unobtrusive, nonverbal measures of interaction style and behavioral residue”