Ascribing beliefs to ingroup and outgroup political candidates: neural correlates of perspective-taking, issue importance and days until the election

Abstract

We used the five weeks leading up to the 2008 presidential election as a backdrop to examine the ways that the brain processes attitudes and beliefs under different circumstances. We examined individual differences in personal issue importance and trait perspective-taking, as well as the temporal context in which attitude representation took place (i.e. number of days until the election). Finally, we examined the extent to which similar or dissimilar processes were recruited when considering the attitudes of political ingroup and outgroup candidates. Brain regions involved in social cognition and theory of mind, and to a lesser extent the limbic system, were modulated by these factors. Higher issue importance led to greater recruitment of neural regions involved in social cognition, across target perspectives. Higher trait perspective-taking was also associated with greater recruitment of several regions involved in social cognition, but differed depending on target perspective; greater activity was observed in prefrontal regions associated with social cognition when considering the perspective of one's own candidate compared with the opponent, and this effect was amplified closer to the election. Taken together, these results highlight ways in which ability and motivational relevance modulate socio-affective processing of the attitudes of others.

Sharing pain and relief: neural correlates of physicians during treatment of patients

“…The perspective-taking score is an independent measure of the ability to imagine how things look from another person’s perspective 31 , often referred to as the cognitive aspect of empathy 34 . High perspective-taking scores have previously been associated with greater somatosensory activations during observations of touch in others 35 and greater recruitment of brain regions involved in social cognition regions during a social belief task 36 . In line with previous validations of the relevance of perspective-taking skills in social interactions and clinical expertise 37, 38 , the present data suggest that physicians with high perspective-taking skills were more likely to activate the rACC during ‘treatment’ and, if our hypothesis is true, simulate the patient’s pain relief.…”

Reality TV and vicarious embarrassment: An fMRI study

“…The middle temporal gyrus, for example, has been identified as a part of the mentalizing network in an activation likelihood estimate (ALE) meta-analysis with more than 200 studies and is activated in ToM tasks (Bzdok et al, 2012). Furthermore, this region has been associated with the processing of false belief stories (which presuppose ToM abilities) in a meta-analysis (Schurz et al, 2013), the need to take the perspective of another person in a communicative task (Dumontheil et al, 2010), trait perspective taking abilities (Falk et al, 2012) and the processing of social rejection (Premkumar et al, 2012). These results fit well to our own results: To be able to exhibit a vicarious reaction, our participants needed to put themselves into the shoes of the protagonists.…”

Neuroanatomy of intergroup bias: A white matter microstructure study of individual differences

“…We contend that these structural findings explain why functional studies find increased activation in the TPJ and DMPFC for ingroup members in comparison with outgroup members and why this activation is often associated with higher levels of intergroup bias (Baumgartner et al, 2012;Falk et al, 2012;Harris & Fiske, 2006). Equal treatment of ingroup and outgroup members is a difficult task.…”