Left or right-wing? Brain's disgust response tells all
The way your brain reacts to a single disgusting image can be used to predict whether you lean to the left or the right politically.
A number of studies have probed the emotions of people along the political spectrum, and found that disgust in particular is tightly linked to political orientation. People who are highly sensitive to disgusting images – of bodily waste, gore or animal remains – are more likely to sit on the political right and show concern for what they see as bodily and spiritual purity, so tend to oppose abortion and gay marriage, for example.
A team led by Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Virginia Tech in Roanoke, recruited 83 volunteers and performed fMRI brain scans on them as they looked at a series of 80 images that were either pleasant, disgusting, threatening or neutral. Participants then rated the images for their emotional impact and completed a series of questionnaires that assessed whether they were liberal, moderate or conservative.
The brain-imaging results were then fed to a learning algorithm which compared the whole-brain responses of liberals and conservatives when looking at disgusting images versus neutral ones.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26481-left-or-rightwing-brains-disgust-response-tells-all.html#.VFT25_RwqM8
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