Modulating the Neural Bases of Political Communications: Political Involvement and Perception of the Economic Situation.

POLITICAL communication; FUNCTIONAL magnetic resonance imaging; POLITICAL participation; REWARD (Psychology)

Worldwide political parties devote more than half of their budgets to communication campaigns. Yet research on political behavior is not unanimous as to the effect of political campaign communications on the electorate. Certain studies interpret the discrepancy by indicating that individual characteristics may modulate the way citizens perceive political campaigns. The current study is the first to resort to neuroimaging (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI) to explore to what extent two characteristics of the electorate, namely level of political involvement and perception of the economic context, affect the neural processing when exposed to political messages, notably corruption and positive practices. The data reveals that more politically sophisticated citizens experience greater activation of the brain regions linked to aversion and negative processing while viewing messages exposing corruption. Their reward circuit is not, moreover, activated more strongly when exposed to positive political actions. Interestingly, citizens with a better perception of the economic situation reveal stronger activation while exposed to positive political messages in brain regions linked to self-relevance and rewarding properties. The current analysis therefore represents the first neuroimaging study to reveal the psychological mechanisms by which individual characteristics of the electorate affect the processing of political communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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