neuropolitics.org/defaultfeb07.asp
Please take the new Iraqi Warfare Attitudes Survey February 2007 Nightmare on Elm Street Conservatives, Liberals, and Dreaming "I hop onto the Kerry Campaign trail-literally. I find Edwards on one boat, and Kerry is in the front boat. I feel safe, but there is a huge disruption of some kind and I find myself alone again with all of the zombie Bush supporters pulling me in every direction and trying to feed me some kind of processed meats from their barbecue (sausage/hot dog looking things). I don't trust this meat and find that it is human flesh from the Kerry supporters. I try to get away and am suddenly falling down a huge waterfall or waterslide with zombies grabbing me.
We've provided a lot of evidence about the variations in the behavior and cognitive styles of Liberals and Conservatives--which we refer to as the Ghost World. Other organizations are jumping into the fray, and are asking Democrats and Republicans whether they "re-gift" or are "happy". To many, these seem like irrelevant questions, but there is one problem with this view--personality and political-religious orientation are tightly enmeshed. This is why we keep detecting variations in the such seemingly "nonpolitical" behaviors such as wearing perfume, swearing, sweating, drinking coffee, occupational choices, etc, etc, etc. From this, one can extrapolate that political-religious disposition is not the result of emotionally neutral reasoning. Those people with strong conservative or liberal viewpoints activate neural regions involved in emotionally "hot" reasoning, such as the orbitofrontal cortex, while regions known for for emotionally "neutral" reasoning, such as the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, are not activated. However, the fact that both Conservatives and Liberals are using emotionally charged reasoning does not tell us why they differ so much in their political and religious attitudes.
But human brains are genetically structured to provide a substantial bit of flexibility to the environment, and political-religious disposition can change over relatively short periods of time. Mutation and meiotic shuffling have been spectacularly successful in mixing up genes to throw a steady stream of new DNA at the environment, which has tackled a wide range of problems, from ice ages to dangerous microbes. For humans, a substantial amount of microevolution can take place in just 1,000 years, and political-religious disposition has certainly been under the evolutionary gun since the inception of the species. But the fact that humans now inhabit every continent on the planet in such a wide spectrum of population densities makes them the most interesting animal in the field of population biology. Political-religious disposition plugs right into r/K population selection theory, which needs few modifications to account for the behaviors of Conservatives and Liberals. The social integration of these two adversaries, along with the less polarized Moderates and Libertarians, modulates a population's approaches to reproduction, ecological stress, and outgroup competition. Evolution has created quite a mixture of behavioral phenotypes in its architecture of the human gene pool, leaving the Conservatives and Liberals to anchor the ends of the r/K behavioral spectrum, while the Moderates and Libertarians quickly shift a population's direction towards either r or K Don't Fall Asleep As a result, we continually detect variations in the nonpolitical behaviors of Conservatives and Liberals, which frequently have subtle reproductive overtones, such as coffee or alcohol consumption. But long before we began our assault on the conscious world of Conservatives and Liberals, Kelly Bulkeley has been peeking into their dream world. The dream world of Conservatives and Liberals is as fascinating as their conscious world, with many parallels. As reported by Bulkeley, from 1996-2000, during the Clinton administration, Conservatives reported more nightmares than Liberals. From 2001-2004, during the Bush administration, the Liberals reported more nightmares and the Conservatives reported fewer, in spite of 9-11. The content of these dreams has some parallels with their conscious states. First, the Liberals recall more dreams than the Conservatives. Bulkeley also reported that Liberals have poorer sleep quality, which may be related to their tendency to recall more dreams.
Our survey results for dream-recall are consistent with Bulkeley's, as Liberals report that they remember dreams at a higher rate than Conservatives. In the graph below, we see the percentages reporting that they frequently remembered their dreams.
Those Reporting That They Frequently Remember Their Dreams by Political-Gender Cohorts (VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative) (F=Female, M=Male) As can be seen, females report better recall of their dreams than males. There is some evidence that the mechanisms of dream-recall may be slightly different in males and females. Dream-recall in males seems to be correlated with insomnia, as dream-recall is most likely to occur while awakened immediately after or during the dream. In females, emotional stress seems to correlate better with dream-recall. Females report higher rates of recall of emotional dreams. The dream-recall percentages reported by females certainly correlates well with the fact that females, in another of our surveys, reported higher levels of stress than males. The Liberal females also reported, on average, higher levels of dream-recall than Conservative females, and also reported higher stress levels than Conservatives. The Liberal males also reported higher levels of dream-recall than the Conservative males, possibly for the same reasons. Bulkeley also reported that Liberals incorporate more "fantastic elements" in their dreams than do Conservatives, who report much more "conventional" dreams. This correlates very well with the artistic nature of the Liberals. Liberals have a much stronger preference for the artistic occupations, and we will be reporting the specific statistics shortly. The contribution of the right hemisphere towards more "fantastic" dreams is certainly possible, but dreaming and hemisphericity is a very ambiguous and hotly debated topic. However, hemispheric asymmetry has been found to be interfering with the recalling of dreams. The more hemispherically "polarized" one is, the less likely they will recall their dreams. And since males are more "polarized" than females, this certainly fits the fact that males report fewer dreams. Another interesting note from Bulkeley's research is that Liberal females report more dreams of homosexuality.
However, we suspect that Conservatives are less likely to report homosexual tendencies and homosexual dreams than are the Liberals, so these results may indeed include a reporting bias.
White Liberal Males and Asian Females The relationship between sexual selection and political-religious affiliation has been of particular interest to us, as we suspect the rate of gene dispersal varies quite a bit among our political-religious cohorts. Physical attraction is highly correlated with sexual selection, and involves all the sensory systems via a wide variety of reproductive fitness cues, which are both innate and socially manipulated. The components of physical attraction are numerous, and we are now attempting to build a more comprehensive picture of what these are, and how they relate to both politics and religion. But for now, let's take a look at how race and physical attraction relate to political affiliation. Racial preference is one of the best indicators of the propensity for genetic variation and gene dispersal throughout a population. Since Caucasians were our only statistically significant racial sample, let's give them a closer look. We asked the 2,681 white respondents to our Ethnic and Religious Attitudes Survey which race they were most physically attracted to. We left off the other races, such as Indian, Native American, and Middle Eastern, due to their relatively small preferences among the Caucasians. First, white females were more attracted to whites than ar...
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