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Dylan D. Wagner
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2022) 35 (1): 60–73.
Published: 01 December 2022
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With rampant polarization in current U.S. politics, it seems as though political partisans with opposing viewpoints are living in parallel realities. Indeed, prior research shows that people's impressions/attitudes toward political candidates are intertwined with their political affiliation. The current study investigated the relationship between political affiliation and intersubject neural synchrony of multivariate patterns of activity during naturalistic viewing of a presidential debate. Before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 20 individuals varying in political affiliation underwent functional neuroimaging while watching the first debate between candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Pairs of participants with more polarized political affiliations were higher in neural synchrony in a system of brain regions involved in self-referential processing when viewing the opposing candidate speak compared with that candidate's supporters regardless of which extreme of the political spectrum they occupied. Moreover, pairs of political partisans matching in the candidate they supported were higher in neural synchrony when watching the candidate they opposed compared with the one they both supported. These findings suggest that political groups' shared understanding may be driven more by perceptions of outgroups than of their own party/candidates.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2012) 24 (7): 1625–1633.
Published: 01 July 2012
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Experiencing negative affect frequently precedes lapses in self-control for dieters, smokers, and drug addicts. Laboratory research has similarly shown that inducing negative emotional distress increases the consumption of food or drugs. One hypothesis for this finding is that emotional distress sensitizes the brain's reward system to appetitive stimuli. Using functional neuroimaging, we demonstrate that inducing negative affect in chronic dieters increases activity in brain regions representing the reward value of appetitive stimuli when viewing appetizing food cues. Thirty female chronic dieters were randomly assigned to receive either a negative ( n = 15) or neutral mood induction ( n = 15) immediately followed by exposure to images of appetizing foods and natural scenes during fMRI. Compared with chronic dieters in a neutral mood, those receiving a negative mood induction showed increased activity in the OFC to appetizing food images. In addition, activity to food images in the OFC and ventral striatum was correlated with individual differences in the degree to which the negative mood induction decreased participants' self-esteem. These findings suggest that distress sensitizes the brain's reward system to appetitive cues, thereby offering a mechanism for the oft-observed relationship between negative affect and disinhibited eating.