The DOI matches its Crossref record; 13 of the 13 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults
Open accessAbstract
Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex. 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 and recognition of emotional faces 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 to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.
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Cites
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Self-citationStructural plasticity in the bilingual brain
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Cited by
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The Partisan Brain: An Identity-Based Model of Political Belief
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Ideological Asymmetries and the Essence of Political Psychology
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Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology
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Metadata
- Authors
- Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G.
- Venue
- Current Biology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2011-04
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 677-680
- ISSN
- 0960-9822 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2165646521
- Cited by
- 464
- References
- 13
- FWCI
- 13.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
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- Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G. (2011). Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults. Current Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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