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Full-Text Articles in Other Political Science

Political Uncertainty Moderates Neural Evaluation Of Incongruent Policy Positions, Ingrid J. Haas, Melissa N. Baker, Frank J. Gonzalez Jan 2021

Political Uncertainty Moderates Neural Evaluation Of Incongruent Policy Positions, Ingrid J. Haas, Melissa N. Baker, Frank J. Gonzalez

Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior: Faculty and Staff Publications

Uncertainty has been shown to impact political evaluation, yet the exact mechanisms by which uncertainty affects the minds of citizens remain unclear. This experiment examines the neural underpinnings of uncertainty in political evaluation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During fMRI, participants completed an experimental task where they evaluated policy positions attributed to hypothetical political candidates. Policy positions were either congruent or incongruent with candidates’ political party affiliation and presented with varying levels of certainty.Neural activitywas modelled as a function of uncertainty and incongruence. Analyses suggest that neural activity in brain regions previously implicated in affective and evaluative processing (anterior …


Thinking About Race: How Group Biases Interact With Ideological Principles To Yield Attitudes Toward Government Assistance, Frank John Gonzalez May 2017

Thinking About Race: How Group Biases Interact With Ideological Principles To Yield Attitudes Toward Government Assistance, Frank John Gonzalez

Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

When are people more likely to evaluate race-targeted government assistance based on ideological principles rather than racial prejudice? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms by which prejudice influences political attitudes. In this dissertation, I develop a theoretical model for explaining how deep-seated, automatic group biases interact with higher-order, ideological principles in order to influence attitudes toward race-targeted government assistance. I suggest group-based principles are more important than individualistic values or ingroup favoritism in explaining race-targeted policy attitudes. I argue that when people evaluate race-targeted policies, controlled neural processes translate automatic neural processes into …


The Making Of A Hero: Cultivating Empathy, Altruism, And Heroic Imagination, Ari Kohen, Matt Langdon, Brian R. Riches Jan 2017

The Making Of A Hero: Cultivating Empathy, Altruism, And Heroic Imagination, Ari Kohen, Matt Langdon, Brian R. Riches

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Heroes are not born; they’re made. This article examines the commonalities in the backgrounds of people who take heroic action on behalf of others to theorize the ways in which our society can encourage citizens to prepare themselves to act heroically. In looking closely at a variety of people who have acted heroically, in a single moment or over time, we argue they have at least four crucial commonalities: They imagined situations where help was needed and considered how they would act; they had an expansive sense of empathy, not simply with those who might be considered “like them” but …


Political Psychology (Annotated Bibliography), Ingrid J. Haas Feb 2016

Political Psychology (Annotated Bibliography), Ingrid J. Haas

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

The field of political psychology explains political behavior as a function of both individual- and group-level psychological processes. While the field is interdisciplinary, political psychologists tend to work in either psychology or political science departments. Although the overall aim is often similar, researchers from each discipline approach the same questions in different ways, and interested scholars are encouraged to examine literatures from both fields. The general approach to research is to focus on individual political attitudes, emotion, beliefs, and behavior, and attempt to explain these phenomena using psychological research and theory. Historical approaches to research in this field often relied …


Challenging The Political Assumption That “Guns Don’T Kill People, Crazy People Kill People!”, Heath J. Hodges, Mario Scalora Jan 2015

Challenging The Political Assumption That “Guns Don’T Kill People, Crazy People Kill People!”, Heath J. Hodges, Mario Scalora

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Every time an infamous mass shooting takes place, a storm of rhetoric sweeps across this country with the fury of a wild fire. “Why are we letting these people carry guns?” “Why were they not hospitalized?” “The government needs to crack down on this issue!” What is the government’s response to these cries of concern? Politicians and the media attempt to ease public fears by drawing tenuous connections among a handful of poorly understood tragedies. The salient commonality is that these high-profile shooters had some history of mental illness. A cursory review of the Internet will paint a troubling picture …