www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15549677
WASHINGTON - The grainy black-and-white images appear on television, while ominous music plays in the background. It's another in a blizzard of negative political ads and before you consciously know it, the message takes hold of your brain. You may not want it to, but it works just about instantly. In fact, the ad's effects on the brain "are actually shocking," says UCLA psychiatry professor Dr. Iacoboni's brain imaging research from the 2004 presidential campaign revealed that viewers lost empathy for their own candidate once he was attacked. Scientists around the country are logging the emotional and physical effects of negative political ads. Iacoboni tracked parts of the middle brain that lit up in brain scans when people watched their favorite candidates get attacked. Other scientists hooked up wires to measure frowns and smiles before the meaning of the ads' words sunk in. Mostly, researchers found that negative ads tend to polarize and make it less likely that supporters of an attacked candidate will vote. "Everyone says, 'We hate them, they're terrible,'" said psychology professor George Bizer of Union College in Schenectady, NY However, he added, "They seem to work." And politicians know it because the latest figures show that by nearly a 10-to-1 ratio, political parties are spending more money on negative ads than positive ones. Iacoboni's research usually has little to do with politics. At UCLA, he uses a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine to do brain mapping. However, in 2004, he and a political scientist studied the brains of supporters of President Bush and Sen. When the test subjects saw a picture of the candidate they supported, the medial orbital frontal cortex of the brain - the area behind the eyeballs associated with empathy - lit up. When they were shown a picture or TV ad for the candidate they opposed, the island-shaped insula in the middle of the brain lit up along with other areas "associated with distaste," Iacoboni said. Then, other parts of the brain activated, as if the participants were "using their rational brain areas to get upset at the other guy; they were using it to find a reason" to dislike the candidate, Iacoboni said. Repeating his original work later in the campaign after people had seen a flurry of negative ads on both sides, empathy for their own candidates just disappeared, indicating they no longer identified so much with their candidate. "The more you are bombarded by ads, the more you are going to be affected by that," Iacoboni said. "It's even philosophical - how much of free will do we have?"
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