Facial Expression Processing Varies with Political Affiliation
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- University of North Florida, Department of Psychology
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- Document Type:
- Manuscript
- Date:
- Received 19 October 2008 01:07 UTC; Posted 21 October 2008
- Subjects:
- Ecology, Neuroscience
- Abstract:
Conservative political beliefs have been linked to heightened stress reactivity and protective cognitive biases. Using a facial discrimination task designed to measure perceptions of threat (vs. non threat) and dominance (vs. submissiveness), I show that Republicans demonstrate a greater tendency to interpret ambiguous facial stimuli as expressing more threatening and more dominant emotions than do Democrats. The findings suggest the political ideology may be associated with basic social perceptual sensitivities.
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3 comments
The subjects were students that enrolled in a number of undergraduate psychology classes in Northern Florida. The subjects had no prior knowledge of the experiment, had not discussed political issues in the classrooms from which they participated, and were not familiar with the facial stimuli. In this sense, the sample (n = 740) is generalizable to college-aged Americans.
To re-phrase my question, did age, gender, political interests or political awareness play any role as an independent variable in this relationship? Whether or not the students discussed politics in class seems to be irrelevant, but knowing whether they follow politics in general seems to be vary important. This could have been assessed using a simple questionnaire.
The fact that the students were all from Northern Florida psychology classes may also produce a significant bias in the results. It seems important to repeat this with a more general population; more equality in gender, a larger age range, and with individuals who have received more variety in their training (i.e. types of classes, etc…).
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- License:
- This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
- How to cite this document:
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Vigil, Jacob. Facial Expression Processing Varies with Political Affiliation. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.2414.1> (2008)
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Noah Gray on 21 October 2008 20:30 UTC
With the data heavily skewed in gender (69% female) and age (mean 22.3 yrs old), it seems important to provide a table of the statistics involving the other independent variables besides political affiliation. Did the participants a priori know anything about the experiment going into the assessment? Did the participants regularly follow politics or self-report any interest in particular political issues? I have some reservations about secondary effects from a variety of other variables.