Drew Westen says it's emotion that counts - and shows how Bill Clinton and George W Bush understood this, while John Kerry and Al Gore never got it. The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data," Westen says. Psychologist Drew Westen led the study, conducted at Emory University, and the team presented the results at the 2006 annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, while undergoing an fMRI bran scan, 30 men — half self-described as “strong” Republicans and half as “strong” Democrats — were tasked with assessing statements by both George W. For example, in a UNICEF document on children’s participation we read that, “[f]ostering children’s social, emotional and behavioural skills in and out of school has benefits for: academic achievement, self-esteem, personal responsibility, tolerance of difference, workplace effectiveness, classroom behaviour, and mental health” ( Children as Active Citizens, 2008).

For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more “dispassionate” notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists — and Democratic campaign strategists. What we hoped to learn was how, in real time, the brain negotiates conflicts between data and desire. For example, we were excited to learn about the power of computational simulations in shedding light on different sub-profiles of ideological actorsand the double-edged sword of confirmation bias.I thought it was important, if you had a lot of privileges as I had had, to go to a great university like Yale, to give something back to your country [video footage of a soldier, presumably Kerry, walking in the jungles of Vietnam]. So they cancel each other out, leaving those in the center to swing elections based on more rational considerations. That is, it is not that there is something that escapes ideology or is outside of it, rather, it is the totality of ideology itself that defies itself.

Drew Westen has offered a window of opportunity for democratic change compatible with the structures of a globalized world. They had no trouble seeing the contradictions for the opposition candidate, rating his inconsistencies close to a 4 on the four-point rating scale.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). Echoing the dazzling diversity of human ideologies, this theme issue seeks to reflect the multiplicity of theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the nature of the political brain. 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. When we gain a greater understanding of our brains, the field of neuroscience can better reflect, inform, and advance the needs of our society. Westen turns conventional political analyses on their head, suggesting that the question for Democratic politics isn't so much about moving to the right or the left but about moving the electorate.

The excesses of corporate and militaristic influences on democratic processes are demanding a paradigm swings in domestic and foreign policies.Our goal was to present them with reasoning tasks that would lead a “dispassionate” observer to an obvious logical conclusion, but would be in direct conflict with the conclusion a partisan Democrat or Republican would want to reach about his party’s candidate. We are, should, and must provide the best care for anybody who is willing to put their life in harm's way for our country.