The Political Brain The Role Of Emotion In Deciding The Fate Of The Nation

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The role of conscious free will, for Libet, is limited to the act of saying no; it cannot initiate a voluntary act (Libet, 1999).

Its intended audience includes readers interested in politics, psychology, leadership, neuroscience, marketing, and law. Next, partisans were asked to consider the discrepancy, and then to rate the extent to which the person's words and deeds were contradictory.

Although many of the statements and quotations were edited or fictionalized, we maximized their believability by embedding them in actual quotes or descriptions of actual events. He shows how it can be done through examples of what candidates have said—or could have said—in debates, speeches, and ads.

Bush delivered this barbed one-liner with an affable style that stood in stark juxtaposition to Gore's nonverbal dismissiveness of Bush's arguments (and, by extension, of his intellect). That’s why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt — and only one Republican has failed in that quest.This book is likely to be of particular interest to the 50 million Democratic voters who can't figure out why their party has lost so many elections despite polls showing that the average voter agrees with Democratic positions on most policy issues, from protection of the earth to fairness to middle-class taxpayers who want nothing more than a better life for their children. Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg.

The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning—the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — was quiescent.

Kennedy, looking presidential, coming up to a podium] that I went to Washington and met President Kennedy at the Boy's Nation Program [video of the young Clinton and the youthful President Kennedy shaking hands]. It is at this point, in this second ingathering toward lowered intensity, in the stop-beat of action, that the fear, and its situation, and the reality of that situation, become a content of experience. Then the ad introduced two related themes, using words associatively linked to military strength (service and fighting), which created two distracting subplots: one about a lifetime of service (not the same thing as being heroic in the face of attack), the other about fighting for things that matter (intended, I suspect, to smuggle in a populist theme under the banner of strength). Gore's statement, "Your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the congressional plan that he's modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries," may well have been accurate, and in rational terms, Gore had given Bush a beating.

Westen shows, through a whistle-stop journey through the evolution of the passionate brain and a bravura tour through fifty years of American presidential and national elections, why campaigns succeed and fail.For several years he was Chief Psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. A more radical position, the one of psychoanalysis, would be to conceive of the subject as a fundamental negativity and to think of the human being starting from a zero-level of subjectivity.