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Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology

Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here, we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connecti...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Yang, Seo Eun, Wilson, James D, Lu, Zhong-Lin, Cranmer, Skyler
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9291242/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35860601
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac066
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author Yang, Seo Eun
Wilson, James D
Lu, Zhong-Lin
Cranmer, Skyler
author_facet Yang, Seo Eun
Wilson, James D
Lu, Zhong-Lin
Cranmer, Skyler
author_sort Yang, Seo Eun
collection PubMed
description Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here, we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connectivity (FC) across common fMRI tasks. Using convolutional neural networks, we develop predictive models of ideology using FC from fMRI scans for nine standard task-based settings in a novel cohort of healthy adults (n = 174, age range: 18 to 40, mean = 21.43) from the Ohio State University Wellbeing Project. Our analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives have noticeable and discriminative differences in FC that can be identified with high accuracy using contemporary artificial intelligence methods and that such analyses complement contemporary models relying on socio-economic and survey-based responses. FC signatures from retrieval, empathy, and monetary reward tasks are identified as important and powerful predictors of conservatism, and activations of the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus are most strongly associated with political affiliation. Although the direction of causality is unclear, this study suggests that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior run much deeper than previously thought.
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spelling pubmed-92912422022-07-18 Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology Yang, Seo Eun Wilson, James D Lu, Zhong-Lin Cranmer, Skyler PNAS Nexus Social and Political Sciences Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here, we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connectivity (FC) across common fMRI tasks. Using convolutional neural networks, we develop predictive models of ideology using FC from fMRI scans for nine standard task-based settings in a novel cohort of healthy adults (n = 174, age range: 18 to 40, mean = 21.43) from the Ohio State University Wellbeing Project. Our analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives have noticeable and discriminative differences in FC that can be identified with high accuracy using contemporary artificial intelligence methods and that such analyses complement contemporary models relying on socio-economic and survey-based responses. FC signatures from retrieval, empathy, and monetary reward tasks are identified as important and powerful predictors of conservatism, and activations of the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus are most strongly associated with political affiliation. Although the direction of causality is unclear, this study suggests that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior run much deeper than previously thought. Oxford University Press 2022-05-23 /pmc/articles/PMC9291242/ /pubmed/35860601 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac066 Text en © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Social and Political Sciences
Yang, Seo Eun
Wilson, James D
Lu, Zhong-Lin
Cranmer, Skyler
Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology
title Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology
title_full Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology
title_fullStr Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology
title_full_unstemmed Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology
title_short Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology
title_sort functional connectivity signatures of political ideology
topic Social and Political Sciences
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9291242/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35860601
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac066
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