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You’d think that should make your grin spread just as widely.

Does this hot hunk’s picture bring a smile to your face?

Yup. Me too. Amongst other physical reactions. But the smiling part, if it did induce one to spread across your face, probably means your political views tend to land on the liberal side. You’d think any guy looking at a picture of another guy’s naked ass might be a liberal anyway, but there are gay conservatives too. They’re just usually extremely closeted and don’t smile much. Then again if you stumbled upon this blog, just realized it’s intended for ‘the gays’ and that photo pisses you off, there’s no doubt that you are a conservative. But it’s nice that you decided to read my blog – just for the articles – anyway.

Smiling brightly or a face turned red in anger, those two images reflect the members of our country’s two political parties these days even better than the elephant and donkey. Democrats have a lot to smile about. Hell, democrats have a lot to laugh about these days. Republicans, not so much. But is it that the democrats have a sitting president who seems destined for a second term that makes them so happy? Is it that the best candidate the republicans can come up with doesn’t even please them that makes them so quick to anger? And how in the hell do you describe Ron Paul’s supporters then? How do you even begin to explain Ron Paul?

Yup. Smells like science to me.

According to a recent study done at the University of Nebraska, and published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, liberals are more likely to respond to positive things, and negative things are what get conservatives all excited. Further, the findings showed that it is not just your imagination that the talking heads on Fox News all seem to be blathering idiots, so full of anger that they foam at the mouth when a photo of President Obama comes on screen. Participants in the study who were conservative displayed more distaste than liberals for politicians they disliked. Conversely, liberals felt more positive than conservatives about politicians they liked. So our current presidential election, from the right side, really is all about hate. Mitt for Brains doesn’t make them happy, but then that doesn’t matter because they are wired to be more geared to hating Obama than liking whoever their party decides to put up to lose to him.

A view to thrill: round 2 of this beautiful hunk . . . but it’s only for liberals to enjoy.

Though previous research had already shown that, compared to liberals, conservatives display heightened responses to threatening images, the University’s researchers wanted to delve more fully into this phenomenon. They showed participants, who were either right or left leaning, a series of images that were alternately disgusting – such as photos of spiders on faces and open wounds – and appealing images such as pictures of smiling children and cute bunnies. The results were that conservative participants reacted most strongly to negative images, and liberal participants most strongly to positive photographs.

Then they showed the group pictures of well-known politicians, like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George Bush The Sequel. And again, the conservatives reacted with the highest degree of emotion when the picture was of a politician they disapproved of. And liberals were more happy about those they liked than they were negative about the Bush. Responses were determined by monitoring electrical conductance of the skin, a popular method of measuring psychological and physiological arousal.

The second half of the study looked at preferences among the participants for visual stimuli, measured by determining where a participant cast his gaze when presented with a collage of various images. The researchers found that participants who self-identified as liberal tended to focus more quickly on positive images, while subjects who identified as conservative tended to fixate more quickly on negative images. The good news then is that Rick Santorum’s recent television ad that portrays a devastated country thanks to the re-election of President Obama is not negative campaigning. He’s just giving his supporters what they want to see: extremely disturbing and negative images of a post-apocalyptic America.

The researches concluded their paper with a non-scientific statement suggesting tolerance needs to be shown by both sides:

“Rather than believing those with political views opposing ours are lazily uninformed or wilfully obtuse, political tolerance could be enhanced and cultural conflict diminished if it is widely recognized that at least part of our political differences spring from subconscious physiological and cognitive variations that lead people to experience the world in fundamentally different ways and therefore to believe that fundamentally different political policies are appropriate.”

Huh. And here I thought the right wing nutters were just plain batshit crazy. My bad. But in the interest of science, I’m willing to set our differences aside and take another look from a different viewpoint.

The non-judgemental, bipartisanship view.

Don’t know about you, but that still makes me smile.

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