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–Bobby Azarian, cognitive neuroscientist and blogger for Psychology Today, joins David to discuss how Donald trump continues to hold on to his base’s support

 

 

reason that this is relates to the

unwavering support so this effect is is

amplified in conservatives because

conservatives have this hypersensitivity

to threat generally speaking so by that

I mean they tend to focus on threat more

and they tend to have this exaggerated

fear response to threatening messages so

we know this from a number of different

studies for example one study took

sir motives and liberals and had them

sit in front of a computer screen where

they showed a bunch of different images

some of the images were threatening

somewhere neutrals some are positive and

they track their eye movements and what

they found is that conservatives fixated

on the threatening images longer and

they oriented toward the threatening

images more quickly then liberals so

yeah we call that being hyper-vigilant

for threat and a couple other studies

showed that conservatives tend to have a

larger amygdala and a more reactive

amygdala in response to threat yes oh

the amygdala is a brain structure that

is involved in processing threat and

it’s also associated with the fear

response

so when Donald Trump is saying these

scary messages their brains are engaged

even more strongly his messages are more

salient because they’re in a way tuned

into threat and I’m not really trying to

pick on conservatives here that’s what

the studies show also you know someone

could interpret that differently and you

could see it as Republicans or

conservatives might also be better

equipped to respond to a threat in the

case that you know something does happen

because they’re they’re hyper vigilant

absolutely fascinating stuff we’ve been

speaking with cognitive neuroscientist

Bobby Azarian who also blogs for

Psychology Today you can follow him on

twitter at bobby Azarian and check out