ArticleCurrent biology : CB2011
Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 89 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
89 citing papers in PubMed, 465 citations in OpenAlex.
- Political Orientation as Psychological Defense or Basic Disposition? A Social Neuroscience Examination.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Trial
- Economic threat heightens conflict detection: sLORETA evidence.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2020Trial
- Trial
- The automatic conservative: ideology-based attentional asymmetries in the processing of valenced information.PloS one · 2011Trial
- Aberrant multivariate mapping between behavioral profiles and cortical morphological brain networks in children with autism spectrum disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- The Amygdala and Politics.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- Transforming Psychological Jurisprudence: Beyond Passivity and Determinism.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2026Article
- Neural correlates of belief change in political and non-political domains among left-wing individuals confronted with counterarguments.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Serotonin-dopamine polarity and social polarization.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Fight, Flight, or Vote Right? A Systematic Review of Threat Sensitivity in Political Conservatism.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Effects of focal brain damage on political behaviour across different political ideologies.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Cognitive-Affective Dynamics of Political Attitude Polarization: EEG-Based Behavioral Evidence from a COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate Task.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Computational complexity as a potential limitation on brain-behaviour mapping.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Review
- Persuasiveness of Public Health Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Message Framing, Threat Appraisal, and Source Credibility Effects.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Article
- Article
- Chilean Supreme Court ruling on the protection of brain activity: neurorights, personal data protection, and neurodata.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Moral foundations elicit shared and dissociable cortical activation modulated by political ideology.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- The politicized pandemic: Ideological polarization and the behavioral response to COVID-19.European economic review · 2023Article
- Ideological values are parametrically associated with empathy neural response to vicarious suffering.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Neuroanatomical correlates of system-justifying ideologies: a pre-registered voxel-based morphometry study on right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
29 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring and recognition of emotional faces by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.