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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Examining The Impact Of Political Identification And Morality On Compliance With Covid-19 Public Health Measures, Jessica Stump Apr 2022

Examining The Impact Of Political Identification And Morality On Compliance With Covid-19 Public Health Measures, Jessica Stump

Honors Theses

COVID-19 provides a unique opportunity to study the influence of individual and group differences on beliefs and behavior. In the present work, we examine COVID beliefs and behavior as a function of morality, ideology, and emotion. Data were collected in the spring of 2021 and the fall of 2021, allowing for distinct snapshots of an undergraduate sample at two periods of the pandemic. Of primary interest was the relationship between political ideology, moral foundation endorsement, and COVID-19 behaviors and beliefs. The results reveal that ideology drives COVID-19-related beliefs and behaviors. The results from Study 2 suggest that political liberals were …


Information Search And Political Ideology: Examining How An Individual’S Political Ideology Relates To The Category And Depth Of The Political Information They Pursue, Megan Elbel Mar 2021

Information Search And Political Ideology: Examining How An Individual’S Political Ideology Relates To The Category And Depth Of The Political Information They Pursue, Megan Elbel

Honors Theses

The expansion of news media in television and online allows the public to tailor their consumption of political news to their specific interests. Understanding how the public engages in political information search with respect to their political identities can provide insight into the type and amount of information an individual pursues before making a political decision. The present study examines how people of various political ideologies gather information related to political issues. Participants completed surveys gauging their attitudes toward a number of political policy issues following a task in which they were allowed to select political issue topics and control …


Who Can Deviate From The Party Line? Political Ideology Moderates Evaluation Of Incongruent Policy Positions In Insula And Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Ingrid J. Haas, Melissa N. Baker, Frank J. Gonzalez Oct 2017

Who Can Deviate From The Party Line? Political Ideology Moderates Evaluation Of Incongruent Policy Positions In Insula And Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Ingrid J. Haas, Melissa N. Baker, Frank J. Gonzalez

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Political polarization at the elite level is a major concern in many contemporary democracies, which is argued to alienate large swaths of the electorate and prevent meaningful social change from occurring, yet little is known about how individuals respond to political candidates who deviate from the party line and express policy positions incongruent with their party affiliations. This experiment examines the neural underpinnings of such evaluations using functional MRI (fMRI). During fMRI, participants completed an experimental task where they evaluated policy positions attributed to hypothetical political candidates. Each block of trials focused on one candidate (Democrat or Republican), but all …


Physiology And Political Beliefs: A Response To Knoll, O’Daniel, And Cusato, Johnathan C. Peterson, Kevin Smith, John Hibbing Sep 2016

Physiology And Political Beliefs: A Response To Knoll, O’Daniel, And Cusato, Johnathan C. Peterson, Kevin Smith, John Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

n a recent paper in this journal, Knoll et al. question three studies from our laboratory. In this response to that paper, we address deficiencies in their “reproduction.” Notably, we demonstrate that their data provide little evidence of a negativity bias among research subjects, suggesting a failure not only to reproduce findings from our earlier studies, but also a failure to find a widely acknowledged universal human physiological response trait. This situation raises a number of questions regarding the data on which their analyses are based. We explore these questions below and speculate that Knoll et al.’s data collection procedures …


Political Conservatism Predicts Asymmetries In Emotional Scene Memory, Mark S. Mills, Frank J. Gonzalez, Karl Giuseffi, Benjamin Sievert, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Hibbing, Michael D. Dodd Jan 2016

Political Conservatism Predicts Asymmetries In Emotional Scene Memory, Mark S. Mills, Frank J. Gonzalez, Karl Giuseffi, Benjamin Sievert, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Hibbing, Michael D. Dodd

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Variation in political ideology has been linked to differences in attention to and processing of emotional stimuli, with stronger responses to negative versus positive stimuli (negativity bias) the more politically conservative one is. As memory is enhanced by attention, such findings predict that memory for negative versus positive stimuli should similarly be enhanced the more conservative one is. The present study tests this prediction by having participants study 120 positive, negative, and neutral scenes in preparation for a subsequent memory test. On the memory test, the same 120 scenes were presented along with 120 new scenes and participants were to …


Obama Cares About Visuo-Spatial Attention: Perception Of Political Figures Moves Attention And Determines Gaze Direction, Mark S. Mills, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Hibbing, Michael D. Dodd Jan 2015

Obama Cares About Visuo-Spatial Attention: Perception Of Political Figures Moves Attention And Determines Gaze Direction, Mark S. Mills, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Hibbing, Michael D. Dodd

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Processing an abstract concept such as political ideology by itself is difficult but becomes easier when a background situation contextualizes it. Political ideology within American politics, for example, is commonly processed using space metaphorically, i.e., the political “left” and “right” (referring to Democrat and Republican views, respectively), presumably to provide a common metric to which abstract features of ideology can be grounded and understood. Commonplace use of space as metaphor raises the question of whether an inherently non-spatial stimulus (e.g., picture of the political “left” leader, Barack Obama) can trigger a spatially-specific response (e.g., attentional bias toward “left” regions of …