Free Republic

Fierce individualists, Americans figure that we choose our own political beliefs — but actually it could come down to biology. Individuals who are more easily startled by threats are more likely than others to support protective policies, such as military spending, the Iraq War and the death penalty, finds a new study. ... The researchers measured levels of skin moisture as indicators of stress and anxiety for each participant as he or she looked at threatening images, including a large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face and an open wound with...

This piece operates at two levels: it engages with the debate in political theory over pluralism, but it does so through an analysis of the phenomenon we call ‘Coulterism’. Briefly, we regard Ann Coulter as indicative of a more general trend in the political styles and activities that dominate contemporary US politics. Moreover, we also suggest that this trend tends to be too easily dismissed by liberals – liberals who, we suggest, tend to systematically misunderstand it. Furthermore, we contend, no doubt controversially, that Coulter and her ilk in fact succeed in a political critique of mainstream political liberalism in...

Former President Bill Clinton (D) warned voters against electing former prisoner-of-war Senator McCain president. “POWs are not like us,” Clinton observed. “They’ve been held captive in barbaric conditions, tortured and humiliated by this country’s enemies. How can they ever be objective enough to deal with our country’s enemies as president?” Clinton argued that his evasion of military service saved him “from building up the prejudices against and hatreds for different cultures and political systems that could have compromised my ability to govern effectively. My judgment was untainted by any suffering and privation that could have biased my views. The same...

John McCain on Tuesday questioned Bill Clinton’s credentials to discuss the mental health of prisoners of war after the former president told an audience in Aspen that it’s just a matter of time before a former POW snaps and relives the nightmare of his imprisonment.

Former President Bill Clinton told an audience that POWs often suffer "anger" long after the incident - which some took as a swipe at Vietnam vet and presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

There is a news report starting to make the rounds amongst the MSM on a study that claims to have discovered why conservatives tend to be happier than liberals and it is just the sort of bilge that the MSM loves to promulgate. We may see more of it over the next several days because, while it is titled "Conservatives Happier Than Liberals," it is basically saying that the reason conservatives are happier is because they just don't care about other people. This purported research claims to pinpoint the reason conservatives are happier and it is because they have theirs...

STYLES make fights — or so goes the boxing cliché. In 2008, they make presidential campaigns, too. This is especially true for the two remaining Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Reporters covering the candidates have already resorted to traditional analysis of style — fashion choices, manner of speaking, even the way they laugh. Yet, according to design experts, the candidates have left a clear blueprint of their personal style — perhaps even a window into their souls — through the Web sites they have created to raise money, recruit volunteers and generally meet-and-greet online. On one thing, the experts...

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. - Sen. Barack Obama was criticized Friday by his two fellow presidential candidates for statements he made recently at a San Francisco fundraiser that could be viewed as derogatory toward rural America. "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said Sunday, according to the Huffington Post web site. "And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate...

There has been a disturbing increase in Global Warming Stress Syndrome (GWSS, pronounced gwiss) according to Dr. Ron N. Hyde, a clinical psychologist at the prestigious McKitrick Center for the Especially Disturbed. “Since April, there is been a 32.817% increase in public cases of GWSS,” he explained. “The rate now is almost double what it was this time last year.” He added the trend was very worrying to his colleagues. According to literature provided by the McKitrick Center, GWSS was at first a disease confined to academics, where it was thought to be controllable...

"I saw something." Kucinich, whose UFO run-in came to light last week in a passage from Shirley MacLaine's new book, went on to joke that he planned to move his campaign office to Roswell, N.M. Roswell is the place where legend holds a spacecraft crash-landed in 1947 and was recovered and moved for investigation to nearby Area 51, a secretive U.S. government airbase in Nevada. Kucinich went on to defend himself, saying many Americans have shared his experience. "You have to keep in mind that more — that Jimmy Carter saw a UFO and also that more people in this...

Source: Association for Psychological Science Date: September 26, 2007 Why Few People Are Devoid Of Racial Bias Science Daily — Why are some individuals not prejudiced? That is the question posed by a provocative new study appearing in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors investigate how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favor one's own group. Robert Livingston of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin conducted studies that examined white college students...

Excerpt: In addition to being especially submissive to established authority, Altemeyer's research revealed that those he calls right-wing authoritarians also show "general aggressiveness" towards others, when such behavior is "perceived to be sanctioned" by established authorities. Finally, these people are always highly compliant with the social conventions endorsed by society and established authorities. These basic traits, submissiveness to authority and conventionality, are the essence of those Altemeyer describes as right-wing authoritarians. If these traits are not present in some significant (albeit varying) degree, he does not consider the subject to be a right-wing authoritarian. However, these people can, and often...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama may joke about preparing for debates by riding bumper cars, but the 2008 campaign has been fairly civil so far -- and that's not necessarily good for U.S. voters. Conventional wisdom, and some research, has held that negative campaigning turns off voters and prompts them to stay away from the voting booth, but recent scholarship is reversing that notion, researchers say. "Democracy itself requires negativity," said John Geer, a Vanderbilt University professor who studies negative political campaigning. "We want the right to be critical of those in power." With the country highly...

Are liberals smarter than conservatives? It looks that way, according to a study published this week in Nature Neuroscience. In a rapid response test—you press a button if you're given one signal, but not if you're given a different signal—the authors found that conservatives were "more likely to make errors of commission," whereas "stronger liberalism was correlated with greater accuracy." They concluded that "a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change." Does this mean liberal brains are fitter? Apparently. "Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity,...

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity". As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction. All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality". Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public...

SAN FRANCISCO - Stung by reports implicating mental health specialists in prisoner abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the nation's largest group of psychologists is considering banning its members from interrogations of terror suspects. The American Psychological Association, which is holding its annual meeting in San Francisco, is scheduled to vote Sunday on two competing measures concerning its 148,000 members' participation in military interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. military detention centers. One measure would bar members from any involvement in interrogations at U.S. detention facilities where foreigners are held. The moratorium would not be backed by...

(From an article titled:Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature)Most suicide bombers are Muslim Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

Newsweek Writer Plays Psychologist--On GOP Only Posted by Lynn Davidson on June 23, 2007 - 18:45. Newsweek's June 19 edition had an interesting web-exclusive “Mind Matters” column by Wray Herbert called “Toothless is Beautiful,” which was about social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson's new book, “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me).” The book and the column concerned the “psychological process known as cognitive dissonance.” Sound like an unlikely candidate for bias? Keep reading.Cognitive dissonance is “the extreme emotional discomfort we feel when two important beliefs, attitudes or perceptions collide. Humans cannot tolerate dissonance for long, so they ease...

Dyslexia is a social fig leaf used by middle-class parents who fear their children will be labelled as low achievers, a professor has claimed. Julian Elliott, a leading educational psychologist at Durham University, says he has found no evidence to identify dyslexia as a medical condition after more than 30 years of research.

This is a quite big deal that most of us totally missed last night: John Edwards doesn't believe there's a "global war on terror," at least not in the simple-show-of-hands sense. This is something a lot of Democrats say privately -- and something mainstream pols everywhere else in the world say publicly -- but it contests a Bush administration premise in a way very few American politicians have been comfortable in the last five and a half years. His stance -- though it doesn't seem to have been all that deliberate -- matches the recent comments of a prominent British...

Traditional Masculinity Can Aid Recovery from Serious Injuries, MU Study Finds COLUMBIA, Mo. - For years, experts have said that the strong, silent male is not one to ask for help when he's hurt, and therefore at a disadvantage when it comes to getting better. But new research says this might not be completely accurate. This masculine identity often associated with men in the armed forces and other high-risk occupations may actually encourage and quicken a man's recovery from serious injuries, says a new exploratory study from the University of Missouri-Columbia. The study is the first to quantitatively confirm correlations...

I wanted to write something about the degenerative effects of incivility in politics in the wake of the comments and commentary today. Instead, a CQ reader sent me a link to a speech three years ago by Heritage Foundation president Dr. Edwin J. Fuelner. In speaking to the graduating class of Hillsdale College on May 8, 2004, Dr. Fuelner warned the young men and women that our democracy depends on the healthy exchange of ideas and arguments -- and that incivility degrades the social compact on which that debate depends: This is the real danger of incivility. Our free, self-governing...

What differentiates two candidates of color for a job? It's not always the résumé. In many cases, skin tone makes the difference, according to University of Georgia (UGA) doctoral student Matthew Harrison, who conducted the first study of the impact of skin tone in the workplace. Harrison conducted the study with 240 psychology undergraduates at UGA. Each participant received one of two résumés that varied by educational and work experience. Along with the résumés, the participants received one of six pictures of candidates, all black, who varied by skin tone and gender. They then were asked to rate the candidate...

Noted political psychologist Barbra Streisand says she has plumbed the depths of President Bush's psyche, and has come up with his deep-seated reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein. In her latest "Truth Alert," Dr. Streisand explores what she describes as the "psycho-social reasons relating to Bush’s decision to invade Iraq." Turns out, according to the oracle of Malibu, Bush has "a long-standing father and son competition based on feelings of jealousy and inadequacy." Posits Streisand: "Bush saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow and no longer be seen as the perpetual underachiever who consistently failed under the watchful eye...

I'm calling attention to this commercial site not to promote it, but just the opposite. Freepers as a whole are so witty and so, err, umm, "fond" of the latest NewAgey trendy fads, that I thought I would "get my LOLlies" by soliciting comments from you all. Have at it! I've been told this $70 doll has a deep slow voice that says, "Everything is going to be all right". LOL!! Here is the full "My Therapy Buddy" Photo Album page. The doll was unveiled this week on "American Inventor".

I love when science and politics intertwine. See, I’m a scientist first, and a political analyst second. So much of politics is based in the realms of opinion and propaganda that it makes my scientific disposition go haywire with frustration. Now, my preference tends to be the opposite of my opponents. People like Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, every “intelligent design” supporter on the planet, Senate Majority Leader and medical doctor Bill Frist and countless other prominent conservatives much prefer to shout propaganda, pseudo-rhetoric and outright lies before even looking at anything that could be considered a fact. I guess that’s...

An anonymous tipster sends some intriguing information about the "whiny kids grow up to be conservatives" study conducted by left-wing UC Berkeley prof Jack Block. Wondering where the nursery school kids who were the subjects of the study came from? Check this out: I know exactly which "nursery school" was used as the basis of this study. It is not mentioned anywhere in the text of the 16-page pdf you provided for downloading, but I know because -- well, because I know people who were some of the subjects of this study (and of other similar studies). And an extremely...

SCOOP: WHO ARE THE WHINY KIDS? By Michelle Malkin   ·   March 23, 2006 04:11 PM An anonymous tipster sends some intriguing information about the "whiny kids grow up to be conservatives" study conducted by left-wing UC Berkeley prof Jack Block. Wondering where the nursery school kids who were the subjects of the study came from? Check this out: I know exactly which "nursery school" was used as the basis of this study. It is not mentioned anywhere in the text of the 16-page pdf you provided for downloading, but I know because -- well, because I know people who were...

Michelle has kindly posted the infamous "whiny kids grow up to be conservative" paper in PDF format. Would you believe that the paper claims that conservative boys were "visibly deviant?" Yes, it does. Click here to download and read the entire document from Michelle's site. Much of it is pretty boring, mundane stuff, but there is a noticeable pattern of ascribing negative behaviors to conservatives and positive behaviors to liberals.Read this part of the report. The participants’ LIB/CON index scores at age 23 were correlated—for the genders separately— (1) with their CCQ item values gathered 20 years earlier, (2) with...

Whiny, insecure brats who cowered with fear of being bullied on the playground grow up to be conservatives, while smooth self-confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grow up to be liberals, according to a new study conducted in the sheltered confines of Berkeley, Calif., the very heart of rabid liberalism. From the 1960s onward, a husband-and-wife team at the University of California-Berkeley spent 20 years keeping an eye on children from their nursery school days to young adulthood. According to the Toronto Star, Berkeley professor Jack Block and his now late wife and fellow professor, Jeanne Block, began tracking more than...

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative. At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals. The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar...

Would you like to learn a little more about yourself and your fellow posters on Free Republic? If so, you might enjoy this Freeper Research Project. It began on another thread where people were testing themselves for “nerdiness”. Great fun was had by all. Along the way, Freeper patton posted a link to the Jung personality test. What an adventure! I took the test for the first time and found out I am an INFJ (I=44, N=75, F=25, J=25). Because we were sharing the results of our tests on that thread, I was pleasantly surprised to discover three other...

Muslim females are Xing out Valentine’s Day because it furthers vulgarity. Muslim males however may have several wives and several "temporary wives" they use as sex slaves. That of course is morality maximum. The "temporary wives" live with their parents and the male has no financial obligation to them whatsoever. That’s why they are sex slaves. Muslim females are so brainwashed in Islam that they yield to the masochistic, which adds another neurotic dimension to the killing cult. However, all this is typical of cults. Reason is not a top priority. Nor is morality. Therefore when other parts of the...

Source Republicanism Caused By Brain Disorder, Mutation Location: Karl Marx Treatment Center Posted: 1/31/2006, 12:06 pm * * * Scientists have finally identified a fatal brain disorder responsible for the behavior of Republicans, Conservatives, and other capitalist class enemies. After the Washington Post reported on a revolutionary study, in which progressive researchers scanned Republican brains for signs of deformation, we contacted the institute that conducted the study, the Karl Marx Treatment Center. The Center provided us with blood-chilling CAT images that show what happen s to a brain that is allowed to grow without the caring guidance of the...

Put a group of people together at a party and observe how they behave. Differently than when they are alone? Differently than when they are with family? What if they're in a stadium instead of at a party? What if they're all men? The field of social psychology has long been focused on how social environments affect the way people behave. But social psychologists are people, too, and as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, they have grown increasingly interested in examining what drives these sharp divides: red states vs. blue states; pro-Iraq war vs. anti-Iraq war; pro-same-sex...

Snip (A) study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger biases against blacks than liberals did. Snip Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said he disagreed with the study's conclusions but that it was difficult to offer a critique, as the research had not yet been published and he could not review the methodology. He also questioned whether the researchers themselves had implicit biases -- against Republicans -- noting that Nosek and Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji had given campaign contributions to Democrats. Nosek said that though the risk of bias among researchers was...

On the Monday "Science" page of the Washington Post, reporter Shankar Vedantam offers the liberal Post readership some comforting news: studies show conservative voters are motivated by racism. That's not in the first paragraph. It sneaks in about halfway through the article, and explains the headline "Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases." [T]hat study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did. "What automatic biases reveal is that while we have the feeling we are living up to our values, that feeling may not be right," said...

Put a group of people together at a party and observe how they behave. Differently than when they are alone? Differently than when they are with family? What if they're in a stadium instead of at a party? What if they're all men? The field of social psychology has long been focused on how social environments affect the way people behave. But social psychologists are people, too, and as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, they have grown increasingly interested in examining what drives these sharp divides: red states vs. blue states; pro-Iraq war vs. anti-Iraq war; pro-same-sex...

Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, January 30, 2006 ... "In my own family, for example, there are stark differences, not just of opinion but very profound differences in how we view the world," said Brenda Major, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, which had a conference last week that showcased several provocative psychological studies about the nature of political belief. ... Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners...

Put a group of people together at a party and observe how they behave. Differently than when they are alone? Differently than when they are with family? What if they're in a stadium instead of at a party? What if they're all men? The field of social psychology has long been focused on how social environments affect the way people behave. But social psychologists are people, too, and as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, they have grown increasingly interested in examining what drives these sharp divides: red states vs. blue states; pro-Iraq war vs. anti-Iraq war; pro-same-sex...

Study pegs Democratic presidents as brighter By RICHARD ORR Herald Correspondent It´s really not all that hard finding GWB´s brain. It´s right there in the files of the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pa., which has been publishing its research on each new president since 1973. The GWB study published in October 2004 took four months to complete and compared him to all the presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt through Bill Clinton. Based on the report´s findings, Democrats are smarter than Republicans -- quite a bit so, in fact. The three smartest Democrats were -- in order of intelligence -- Bill...

For a long time now, secularists have been trying to come up with reasons why people believe in God. If you take a strictly naturalistic view of the world, after all, it can be pretty difficult to understand how anyone would put their faith in an invisible supernatural being. And yet, generation after generation continues to hold to do just that. It’s a question that has puzzled and fascinated some of the most prominent minds of our time. Now there’s an intriguing new explanation for religious faith. Paul Bloom, a Yale professor of psychology and linguistics, argues in the Atlantic...

"In Aug., 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million tax-payer funded study.  It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed.  Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from 'mental rigidity,' 'dogmatism,' and 'uncertainty avoidance,' together with associated indicators for mental illness."  (B.K. Eakman, Chronicles, Oct. 2004, pp. 28-29)   As usual with leftists, the true meaning of their words is couched in deceptive code.  When the deceptions are peeled away we discover that ''dogmatism''...

The Problem with Psychoanalyzing Bush Like many people, I read Newsweek's mid-December, high-octane burn of Bush with more than a bit of wonder, and not a good "Christmasy" kind. Halfway through the article, encountering what must have been the twenty gigillionth unnamed source, I thought to myself, "This is what happens when a President plugs all the leaks. The stories don't stop -- they just become a reflection of the journalist's preconceived notions." This Newsweek piece was the latest in an ongoing series of attempts to psychoanalyze this President. Here is Newsweek's take on the essence of the Dubya: Bush...

BARBIE, that plastic icon of girlhood fantasy play, is routinely tortured by children, research has found. The methods of mutilation are varied and creative, ranging from scalping to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving, according to academics from the University of Bath. The findings were revealed as part of an in-depth look by psychologists and management academics into the role of brands among 7 to 11-year-old schoolchildren. The researchers had not intended to focus on Barbie, but they were taken aback by the rejection, hatred and violence she provoked when they asked the children about their feelings for the doll....

By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, December 10, 2005; Page A01 The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement. (you can see where this is headed)

The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement. These fixations preoccupied him every day. Articles in magazines about gays made him agitated. He confessed that his fears had left him socially isolated and unemployed for years: A recovering alcoholic, the man even avoided 12-step meetings out of fear he might encounter a gay person. "He had a fixed delusion about the world," said Sondra E. Solomon, a...

When the Firm Foundation Worship Center got the call that a family of nine escaping Hurricane Katrina had arrived in Westminster needing a house, church members jumped into action. "They came here with nothing," said Marge DiMaggio, the church's co-pastor. As quickly as possible, church members made a house on church property look like a home. When the Brown family left on Sunday, the DiMaggios were horrified to find the house in shambles. "Hurricane hits Firm Foundation," said Marge DiMaggio. While answering the call in September, church members' hearts were filled with compassion for the unknown family. "We brought our...

MSU professors link hunting with sexual violenceBy Page W. H. Brousseau IV Three female Michigan State University professors studied the magazine "Traditional Bowhunter," and concluded that hunting is a form of sexual violence with animals substituted for women. They describe hunting as, "erotic heterosexual predation, sadomasochism, restraint for aggressive sexual energy, and allied with the abuse of women." I think I need to take up bowhunting. The article entitled, "Animals, Women and Weapons: Blurred Sexual Boundaries in the Discourse of Sport Hunting" was published by the Society & Animals Forum. The genesis of the article was the 2003 video "Hunting...

Three female Michigan State University professors studied the magazine "Traditional Bowhunter," and concluded that hunting is a form of sexual violence with animals substituted for women. They describe hunting as, "erotic heterosexual predation, sadomasochism, restraint for aggressive sexual energy, and allied with the abuse of women." I think I need to take up bowhunting. The article entitled, "Animals, Women and Weapons: Blurred Sexual Boundaries in the Discourse of Sport Hunting" was published by the Society & Animals Forum. The genesis of the article was the 2003 video "Hunting for Bambi," which reached national attention that year when many news-outlets reported...