Justin Mohn, a 32-year-old Pennsylvania man, is in police custody after allegedly murdering and decapitating his father, claiming the latter was a “federal employee” and a “traitor.” Before his arrest, Mohn posted a 14-minute video to YouTube in which he displayed his father’s severed head, proclaiming: "This is the head of Mike Mohn, a federal
Fortunately for those of us who don’t have a background in psychology: the folks who are experts tend to publish their findings!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/
So what do those parts do…
Anterior cingulate cortex: error detection, anticipation of tasks, attention, motivation, and modulation of emotional responses
Amygdala: formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events / emotional learning; fear conditioning.
…so, yeah conservatives are literally, physiologically hypersensitive to fear, and more prone to acting on emotion. WHO’DA THUNK?!?
I love a well sourced smackdown
Were you wanting to build some kind of argument or hypothesis with that segment, or did you just want to leave it to your reader to assume whatever it is you’re thinking? Cuz the knee-jerk reaction your post evokes is that you’re attempting to dismiss an entire study based on a disclaimer about brains being complicated… but such an attack to your critical thinking skills would ofc be a hasty and unfair conclusion considering you haven’t contributed a single word of your own yet. So by all means, state your case.
Least chill comment I’ve seen on lemmy lol I thought I was on reddit for a second… It’s a quote from the study you posted not everyone online is trying to debate you.
I’m a bit worked up. RL shit, not you - forgive my tone.
Meat of the last comment stands though: what’s your point? I know it’s a quote from the study, but that’s how studies work: they provide supporting or detracting evidence to whatever it is they’re evaluating. Even if that disclaimer wasn’t there at all, it’d still be implied bc no one study proves or disproves anything, they just contribute to a broader pool of knowledge that eventually leans toward something being accepted as truth.
And right now that lean is toward conservatives being driven by fear and emotion.
Well I don’t really have a point myself, the study has a point which is emphasizing that these neural processes measured aren’t a direct representation of political opinions per se.
I guess my only relevant opinion aligns with what they are saying in better ways in the study, to which I would add that it gets dicey whenever people’s thoughts/behaviors are reduced to something inherent about their biology. The authors of the study are putting in a good effort to avoid that reductive interpretation and explaining it very well. Biological indicators and many subsequent indicators are determined in complex ways by the conditions people are in and where they were born, etc.
LOL he’s been going on the attack around here. This concept has broken his brain and he’s just lost it.
I don’t have a background in psychology either, but the prefix hyper- in medical contexts usually means something is abnormally and dangerously excessive in size, amount, etc. Yet from your quote there’s no reason to conclude the on-average increased amydagla is necessarily abnormally increased. It isn’t, it’s just bigger, it’s not automatically pathological.
‘hyper’ doesn’t have a qualifier in scale; it’s just an increase. Your arm muscles will hypertrophy after a single pushup… not by a significant amount, but by a higher than zero amount.
My understanding of the amygdala situation is that it follows basically the same model: conservatives aren’t born with a massive amygdala that leaves them extra susceptible to fear and emotion; they do fear work-outs throughout their life by over-consuming shit like Fox News telling us the scary immigrants are here to out-breed us, or some preecher explaining how Jesus won’t let you into heaven if he sees you masturbating… over time they become the fear/emotional equivalent to a body builder; but when you start to look at the other parts of their brain, you might find they didn’t just skip leg day; but that the very concept of leg day is something they find offensive and actively oppose.