Political opinion could play an important role in the physiology of the individual , according to a study published today in the journal Science .
Its author, Douglas Oxley, worked with 46 volunteers who asked their views on a variety of political issues, including foreign aid, immigration policies, and gun control. Two months later, Oxley and his team showed volunteers a series of images that included some scary scenes interspersed with images of daily life as they measured the electrical conductance of the volunteers' skin, a property used in polygraph tests. The scientists also subjected them to a series of sudden noises and monitored the volunteers' eye response, as the loudest blinks are also a sign of a heightened state of fear.
Results indicated that subjects with lower physical sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control . In contrast, those individuals who showed more intense physiological "fear" reactions to the same stimuli were overwhelmingly in favor of favoring defense spending, the death penalty, patriotism, and the Iraq war .
