*Political brain

Article:
'Emory Study Lights Up the Political Brain'

"The Democrats and Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate threatening information about their own candidate. During the task, the subjects underwent fMRI to see what parts of their brain were active..."We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory who led the study. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted -- not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward -- similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.
 ...
Behavioral data showed a pattern of emotionally biased reasoning: partisans denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate. Importantly, in both their behavioral and neural responses, Republicans and Democrats did not differ in the way they responded to contradictions for the neutral control targets, such as Hanks, but Democrats responded to Kerry as Republicans responded to Bush.

While reasoning about apparent contradictions for their own candidate, partisans showed activations throughout the orbital frontal cortex, indicating emotional processing and presumably emotion regulation strategies. There also were activations in areas of the brain associated with the experience of unpleasant emotions, the processing of emotion and conflict, and judgments of forgiveness and moral accountability.

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning (as well as conscious efforts to suppress emotion). The finding suggests that the emotion-driven processes that lead to biased judgments likely occur outside of awareness, and are distinct from normal reasoning processes when emotion is not so heavily engaged, says Westen.

The investigators hypothesize that emotionally biased reasoning leads to the "stamping in" or reinforcement of a defensive belief, associating the participant's "revisionist" account of the data with positive emotion or relief and elimination of distress. "The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data," Westen says."   
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060131092225.htm


This phenomena of strong partisans negating conflicting information can be, and should be capable of being, translated into the philosophical literature of epistemology. Not in terms of the nature or structure of belief but rather in terms of belief and acceptance as textures of belief that play a role in our practical reasoning. What this study points towards is the role of emotions within belief and acceptance in practical reasoning and in this case, for political partisanship such that one remains committed to the political party/candidate one has already decided on.

If acceptance is considered to be the voluntary act of holding a proposition but without any commitment to hold it as truth, thereby allowing the dismissal of propositions, then the contradictory information that was presented to these partisans can be explained in relation to their beliefs, which are distinguished by involuntary and dispositional characteristics, about their political affiliations and loyalty to their parties. The use of emotions, both negative and positive, are then much like regulators of content and what propositions are acceptable and which are not in relation to their prior understanding of things.