Political psychophysiology A primer for interested researchers and consumers.

The past decade has seen a rapid increase in the number of studies employing psychophysiological methods to explain variation in political attitudes and behavior. However, the collection, analysis, and interpretation of physiological data present novel challenges for political scientists unfamiliar with the underlying biological concepts and technical skills necessary for utilizing this approach. Our objective in this article is to maximize the effectiveness of future work utilizing psychophysiological measurement by providing guidance on how the techniques can be employed most fruitfully as a complement to, not a replacement for, existing methods. We develop clear, step-by-step instructions for how physiological research should be conducted and provide a discussion of the issues commonly faced by scholars working with these measures. Our hope is that this article will be a useful resource for both neophytes and experienced scholars in lowering the start-up costs to doing this work and assessing it as part of the peer review process. More broadly, in the spirit of the open science framework, we aim to foster increased communication, collaboration, and replication of findings across political science labs utilizing psychophysiological methods.

Friends, relatives, sanity, and health: The costs of politics.

Political scientists have long known that political involvement exacts costs but they have typically defined these costs in relatively narrow, largely economic terms. Though anecdotal evidence suggests that the costs of politics may in fact extend beyond economics to frayed personal relationships, compromised emotional stability, and even physical problems, no systematic evidence on these broader costs exists. We construct and validate batteries of survey items that delineate the physical, social, and emotional costs of political engagement and administer these items to a demographically representative sample of U.S. adults. The results suggest that a large number of Americans believe their physical health has been harmed by their exposure to politics and even more report that politics has resulted in emotional costs and lost friendships.

Disgust sensitivity and the neurophysiology of left-right political orientations.

Disgust has been described as the most primitive and central of emotions. Thus, it is not surprising that it shapes behaviors in a variety of organisms and in a variety of contexts--including homo sapien politics. 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. This relationship holds even when controlling for the degree to which respondents believe themselves to be disgust sensitive and suggests that people's physiological predispositions help to shape their political orientations.

Political attitudes vary with physiological traits.

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. 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. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.