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Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 13:49 authored by Ryota Kanai, Tom Feilden, Colin Firth, Geraint Rees
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

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Current Biology

ISSN

09609822

Publisher

Elsevier

Issue

8

Volume

21

Page range

677-680

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-11-20

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