Propagandists and marketers agree: emotions may be more reliable when making choices

Here's yet another "study" that purports to show "gut reactions" are "better" than logical analysis in decision making. (Recent discussions of this are here, here, here.)

It's about how sales and marketing people and propagandists have learned to take advantage of your emotions for their own benefit.

Of course, that's not how it's presented....

Note the bait-and-switch technique going on in the research report: "reliability" is what the study seems to promise, but the fine print says that what you actually get is consistency.

Admittedly, "reliability" and "consistency" are nearly synonymous in terms of outcomes that marketing people want. But they may not be synonymous at all in terms of what decision-makers (i. e. you) want.

Trust Your Heart: Emotions May Be More Reliable When Making Choices (2/23/09)

"We investigated the following question: To what extent does relying on one's feelings versus deliberative thinking affect the consistency of one's preferences?" write the authors. To get at the question, the authors designed experiments where participants studied and chose among 8-10 products, sometimes relying upon their emotional reactions and sometimes calling upon cognitive skills. Their conclusion: "Emotional processing leads to greater preference consistency than cognitive processing."

Beware of marketing people who presume to advise you about, well, almost anything. But especially about either research conclusions or products they want to sell you.

Note the basic – and rather flagrantly expressed – dishonesty.

On one hand, the objective summary that the researchers offer of their study is: "Emotional processing leads to greater preference consistency than cognitive processing." In other words, the benefit attributed to reliance on emotion for decision making is consistency.

This isn't all that surprising: when people just go with their "gut feelings", the result is more likely to be the same each time the same decision is presented than if the actual specifics of the situation, which may vary from case to case, are analyzed.

This is also the outcome that marketers naturally prefer: predictable, consistent responses to marketing pitches.

But on the other hand, and this is the dishonest part, the authors also write "Indeed, our results suggest that the heart can very well serve as a more reliable compass to greater long-term happiness than pure reason."

This is a specious claim: where in their study did the researchers actually measure the happiness that experimental subjects experience as a result of their choices, as opposed to the consistency of the choices?

In other words, the unspoken idea they're pushing is actually this: you will enjoy more happiness if you allow your decisions to be determined according to how marketing has manipulated your emotions. (E. g.: Just go ask your doc for that Viagra prescription and have more fun in bed! And don't worry about whether your real problem in bed is something Viagra doesn't fix.)

If you think there may be some logic to that, just ask yourself whether letting yourself be manipulated by the greed of others is a good path to your happiness.

The sad truth of human behavior, despite illusions that humans are "rational" creatures, is that emotions are quite often much stronger motivators than reason. And they are generally a lot easier to control and manipulate than rational thinking about facts and logic.

As a result of that, people who stand to profit or otherwise benefit from the actions or beliefs they are able to persuade others to embrace have made a concerted effort, first of all, to persuade people that decisions are best made on an emotional basis.

What's their alternative, if facts and logic do not support whatever such people are advocating? They can always simply lie or engage in misdirection, and that's often done too, of course. But lies can occasionally be exposed, and in extreme cases can even be subject to prosecution (for fraud).

Think I'm making all this up? I suggest reading about one of the masters of propaganda techniques in the 20th century: Edward Bernays. He was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, and literally wrote the book: Propaganda.

Here's how that book begins:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized…

I'll try to summarize some of the history and thinking of Bernays when time permits, but here are some things to read for now, if you're interested:

Stunt Man – book review of a biography on Bernays

Karl Rove & the Spectre of Freud’s Nephew – an essay on Bernays by Stephen Bender

Tags: marketing, propaganda

Emotions and politics

We've been having a little discussion about how "gut feelings" influence decisions: here, here, here.

"Gut feelings" are obviously related to emotions, but not entirely. As mentioned here, they can also be based on "implicit memory".

Alongside of this, we've also been discussing a particular type of decision making – where the domain is politics. In that case, the emotions involved are often related to fears of death and mortality. Posts in that vein: here, here, here, here.

I have another, broader post on political psychology coming up, but as a lead-in, I just thought I'd wrap up where we've been so far with decision-making, emotions, and fear specifically.

In order to do that, let's look at one more article published last October, just before the U. S. elections. It's an interview in Scientific American with Sheldon Solomon, a psychology professor at Skidmore College. Solomon's thing is an idea called "terror management theory" (TMT), which is derived from cultural anthropology.

Here's the article, with Solomon's elevator talk on TMT:

Fear, Death and Politics: What Your Mortality Has to Do with the Upcoming Election (10/23/08)

Terror management theory (TMT) is derived from cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s efforts to explain the motivational underpinnings of human behavior. According to TMT, one defining characteristic of human beings is self-awareness: we’re alive and we know it. Although self-awareness gives rise to unbridled awe and joy, it can also lead to the potentially overwhelming dread engendered by the realization that death is inevitable, that it can occur for reasons that can never be anticipated or controlled, and that humans are corporeal creatures—breathing pieces of defecating meat no more significant or enduring than porcupines or peaches.

TMT posits that humans ingeniously, but quite unconsciously, solved this existential dilemma by developing cultural worldviews: humanly constructed beliefs about reality shared by individuals in a group that serve to “manage” the potentially paralyzing terror resulting from the awareness of death. All cultures provide a sense of meaning by offering an account of the origin of the universe, a blueprint for acceptable conduct on Earth, and a promise of immortality (symbolically, by creation of large monuments, great works of art or science, amassing great fortunes, having children; and literally, through the various kinds of afterlives that are a central feature of organized religions) to those who live up to culturally prescribed standards.

Thus, although cultures vary considerably, they share in common the same defensive psychological function: to provide meaning and value and in so doing bestow psychological equanimity in the face of death.

So how's that related to politics? Well, as noted in other posts on this topic, thinking about death seems to raise people's awareness of and commitment to ideals and values of the tribe they affiliate with, and reject values and worldviews of other tribes:

A large body of evidence shows that momentarily making death salient, typically by asking people to think about themselves dying, intensifies people’s strivings to protect and bolster aspects of their worldviews, and to bolster their self-esteem. The most common finding is that MS [mortality salience] increases positive reactions to those who share cherished aspects of one’s cultural worldview, and negative reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are merely different.

Some of the evidence Solomon is referring to was uncovered by Solomon himself, along with colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski. For one account, see this 2004 press release, which we referenced here. (There's also a Scientific American article about it, but that requires a few shekels to view.)

Solomon thinks that these considerations definitely influenced the 2004 U. S. presidential election:

Based on these experiments, and other research demonstrating a positive relation between government-issued terror warnings and poll data on Americans’ opinions of President Bush from 2001 to 2004, I believe the outcome of the 2004 presidential election was influenced by repeated reminders of death by President Bush’s campaign, which was carefully crafted to emphasize the war on terrorism and domestic security. ... The effort was aided by the release of a video by Osama bin Laden the weekend before the election. This finding is not to suggest that all support for President Bush was necessarily a defensive reaction to concerns about death, or that the strategic use of fear to advance political agendas, which has a long history in American politics, is confined to the Republican party.

Other accounts of the research of Solomon and colleagues: here, here.

The 2008 U. S. presidential election was a much different story. MS was a lot lower, being replaced by a quite rational dread of growing economic chaos. So, again, there was a strong emotional fear factor, though not directly related to mortality, and it quite likely influenced the election results. Sometimes fear is rational.

Perhaps political scientists could do more work to understand the variety of fear-based appeals that campaigns use, and the conditions under which they are especially effective.

Tags: political science, political psychology

Hobgoblins, devils, and politics

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.     -- H. L. Mencken

Political Attitudes Are Predicted By Physiological Traits, Research Finds (9/18/08)

Alford and his colleagues studied a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs. Those individuals with "measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq War," the authors wrote. ...

In a later session, they were attached to physiological measuring equipment and shown three threatening images (a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face and an open wound with maggots in it) interspersed among a sequence of 33 images. Similarly, participants also viewed three nonthreatening images (a bunny, a bowl of fruit and a happy child) placed within a series of other images. A second test used auditory stimuli to measure involuntary responses to a startling noise.

The researchers noted a correlation between those who reacted strongly to the stimuli and those who expressed support for "socially protective policies," which tend to be held by people "particularly concerned with protecting the interests of the participants' group, defined as the United States in mid-2007, from threats." These positions include support for military spending, warrantless searches, the death penalty, the Patriot Act, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer and Biblical truth, and opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights and pornography.

It's this election season's well-timed release of a poli-psy research study connecting political behavior with behavior in general. And why shouldn't a particular type of individual behavior have something in common with other types?

Perhaps the main resistance to such a connection comes from the optimistic notion that ideological choices are somehow more "rational" and carefully thought out than other types of choices – like preferences for particular fragrances, colors, or ice cream flavors.

Or, at least, that political opinions are based on real-life experience rather than on whatever it is that shapes physiological responses.

We've been over similar ground a few times before. See here, here.

So what to make of this study? Political scientists generally accept that there are personality factors that correlate with political beliefs. Personality factors usually have both genetic and developmental roots. The genetic roots will also usually be expressed in various physiological attributes of an individual.

Just as genetic factors affect personality and behavior and physiology, it isn't unreasonable to suppose that personality and behavioral tendencies affect political beliefs. (Causation may well go in the other way, too, from beliefs to personality and behavior.) So it's not unreasonable that physiological attributes may also correlate with beliefs.

As far as this research is concerned – it's interesting, but quite a bit more data and research will be needed for a persuasive case.

Here's the actual abstract of the study:

Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

Unsurprisingly, given what time of the year it is, this research has received its share of media attention. For example:

Ideology in Your DNA? Not Quite (9/19/08)

The study had its limitations — the sample size was small and all of the subjects were white Nebraskans — but it’s still a small step toward a greater understanding our ever-increasing ideological divide, even if the answer doesn’t lie in our genes.

That political beliefs per se are not in our genes is obvious. What's in our DNA got there over the last 3 or 4 billion years, and the part that's specifically human, over the last 200,000 or so years. Contemporary ideologies were not around for most of that time. But what was around was a world that was usually hazardous to an organism's existence, so consequently a whole panoply of predispositions evolved to efficiently deal with threats. Of course, all individuals of a given species don't have exactly the same predispositions, because different strategies can be effective even in similar situations.

However, there is research that shows, based on twin studies, the probable existence of some genetic factors that correlate with political belief. For example:

Political Views May Be Genetically Influenced, Twin Study Shows (2/6/08)

Research by Rice University professor of political science John Alford indicates that what is on one's mind about politics may be influenced by how people are wired genetically.

Alford, who has researched this topic for a number of years, and his team analyzed data from political opinions of more than 12,000 twins in the United States and supplemented it with findings from twins in Australia. Alford found that identical twins were more likely to agree on political issues than were fraternal twins.

On the issue of property taxes, for example, an astounding four-fifths of identical twins shared the same opinion, while only two-thirds of fraternal twins agreed.

Not coincidentally, Alford is a co-author of the Science paper we're discussing. He also makes a good common-sense case for the role of genetics in understanding political opinion and behavior:

Alford believes that political scientists are too quick to dismiss genetics; rather, he believes genetics should be studied and taught along with social-environment influences.

"It has been proven that genetics plays a role in a myriad of different human interaction and makeup," said Alford. "Why should we exclude political beliefs and attitudes?"

Even more to the point, there are studies that show that the emotion of fear – fear of death, specifically – influences political opinion. In particular, the opinions that people express can be influenced by whether or not thoughts of death are on their minds. For example:

Fear of death may factor into who we vote for (12/21/05)

Authors of a study published in the latest issue of Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy believe that voting behavior should be the result of rational choice based on an informed understanding of the issues. But using research based on the 2004 presidential election, they found that people may vote with their hearts, rather than their heads. Their findings demonstrated that registered voters in a psychologically benign state of mind preferred Senator Kerry to President Bush, but Bush was more popular than Kerry after voters received a subtle reminder of death.

(Another news report on this: here.)

Again, it shouldn't be all that surprising that having a fear of death in their minds could affect people's political opinions. After all, a fear of death certainly affects religious opinions. Death, speculation about an individual's fate after it occurs, and the fear of it, are central features of most religions. Religions generally compete among themselves to tell self-promotional stories about the favorable rewards that will accrue after death to true believers of the religion. And those religions which promise the most attractive rewards generally are the most successful.

Speculations about the evolutionary and social origins of religious belief generally assign an important role in those origins to human concerns and fears of death, and the way religious beliefs are constructed to help cope with those fears.

So if fear, and the ways that an individual typically deals with it, play a big role in religious opinion, why not in political opinion also? Of course, this would also explain well-known correlations between the religious and political beliefs of people. Religion and politics consist of ideologies with a lot of overlap.

As long as we're speculating, we may as well go all in and take note of important similarities between government and religion. In particular, government and religion are both social institutions created to deal with fears inherent in social living. Religion is primarily concerned with the fear of death itself, in any form, and secondarily with behavior of others or oneself that might threaten an individual's welfare. The latter concern is the province of "morality".

[Added 6/16/09: Here's Bertrand Russell's take on this: "Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes." - from Why I Am Not a Christian]

Government has these same two concerns, but generally in reverse order – except for extremes such as homicidal behavior and warfare. Government usually deals with less dire threats, but most political philosophers agree that one of its primary functions is to allay fears of the Hobbesian "war of all against all".

So government and religion are twin institutions that developed from the same seed – fear. Sometimes they are even Siamese twins, in theocracies and states with theocratic elements.

Let's go back now to the psychology of fear, and the question of how much role genetics may play in the experience of fear, physiological signs of fear, and hence a possible connection with political attitudes.

This is quite an interesting question in itself, and there is recent research that's relevant:

Mice Missing 'Fear' Gene Slow To Protect Offspring (9/15/08)

First, he discovered a gene that controls innate fear in animals. Now Rutgers geneticist Gleb Shumyatsky has shown that the same gene promotes "helicopter mom" behavior in mice. The gene, known as stathmin or oncoprotein 18, motivates female animals to protect newborn pups and interact cautiously with unknown peers.

This "fear gene" is highly concentrated in the amygdala, a key region of the brain that deals with fear and anxiety. Shumyatsky's newest finding could enhance our understanding of human anxiety, including partpartum depression and borderline personality disorders.

Here's a blog post on the research and here's the research abstract:

Stathmin reveals dissociable roles of the basolateral amygdala in parental and social behaviors

Innate parental behaviors and adult social interactions are essential for survival of the individual along with the species as a whole. Because these behaviors require threat assessment of the environment, it is plausible that they are regulated by the amygdala-associated neural circuitry of fear. However, the amygdala is not a single anatomic and functional unit, and nuclei of the amygdala have multiple inter- and intra-connections. This poses a question as to the exact role of different amygdala nuclei in these behaviors and the mechanisms involved. The basolateral complex of the amygdala nuclei (BLA) is particularly interesting in this regard: although the BLA role in forming memories for learned fear is established, the BLA role in innate behaviors is not well understood. We recently demonstrated that mice without an inhibitor of microtubules, stathmin, a gene enriched in BLA-associated circuitry, have deficiency in innate and learned fear. Here we show that the deficiency in fear processing in stathmin−/− females leads to improper threat assessment, which in turn affects innate parental care and adult social interactions.

Below are some blog commentaries on the political attitudes paper of Hibbing, Oxley, et al. It's interesting that these bloggers have expertise in biology, psychology, and neuroscience, but none seem to have a professional political science perspective (as some of the paper's co-authors do).

Some of these blog posts correctly point out methodological reasons why the study cannot be construed to "prove" a hypothesis. However, that does not seem to have been the intention of the researchers who did the study. I think they were more interested in finding plausible evidence for the hypothesis, as a first step to pursuing their ideas in more depth.

• The Biology of Politics: Is It For Real?
  
• Conservatives Are Neurotic and Liberals Are Antisocial
  
• Conservatives have more fear
  
• A spider on your face won't stop me from criticizing this article
  
• Political attitudes linked to startle reflexes
  
• Does anxiety lead to religiosity and conservative politics?
  

Additional news reports:

• Some Political Views May be Related to Physiology (9/18/08) – NSF press release
  
• Left, Right; Obama, McCain: It may not be what you think (9/18/08) – University of Nebraska press release
  
• The Politics of Fear (9/18/08) – ScienceNOW
  
• Politics in the body? (9/18/08) – The Scientist
  
• Are you a born conservative (or liberal)? (9/19/08) – Los Angeles Times
  
• Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals, Say Scientists (9/18/08) – Wired
  
• Spiders, Maggots, Politics (9/18/08) – Newsweek
  
• Conservatives Have Stronger Startle Reflexes? (9/18/08) – National Geographic
  
• Political conservatives more jumpy: study (9/19/08) – ABC (Australia)
  
• Study: calm people are liberal, skittish are conservative (9/19/08) – Cosmos Magazine
  
• Political views 'all in the mind' (9/18/08) – BBC
  
• Voting Republican may be a survival response (9/18/08) – New Scientist
  
• Are you more likely to be politically left or right if you scare easily? (9//18/08) – Scientific American
  

D. R. Oxley, K. B. Smith, J. R. Alford, M. V. Hibbing, J. L. Miller, M. Scalora, P. K. Hatemi, J. R. Hibbing (2008). Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits Science, 321 (5896), 1667-1670 DOI: 10.1126/science.1157627

Tags: political science, political psychology

Emotions and the insula

I've been meaning for some time to write more about a brain region known as the insula. Looks like now is as good a time as any.

This is a big topic. We had one previous, tentative discussion here. It dealt with involvement of the insula in the "feeling" of fairness and how moral/ethical decisions are made.

Let's start with a review of what the insula actually is, anatomically. It is a part of the brain's cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, which in humans ranges from 2 to 4 mm in thickness. Although part of the cortex, the insula is located fairly deep within the brain, in an especially deep fold (or "sulcus") of the cortex, between the temporal lobe and the inferior parietal cortex.

Since the insula is adjacent to the temporal lobe on each side of the brain, it is made up of two separate parts, on the right and left sides of the brain. It is found that one side or the other, often the part on the right side, may be more important than the other in particular circumstances. Sometimes the critical area is even smaller, such as the anterior or posterior region of the insula on one side.

A good reason for considering the insula is that it seems to be deeply involved in mediating various emotions in humans. However, the evidence is somewhat indirect.

One important clue is that when a part of the brain including the insula is damaged due to disease or trauma, significant changes in emotions of the affected individual are observed. For example, smokers who experience damage to the insula suddenly cease to feel pleasure from smoking, and they are able to quickly give up the habit. (See here.)

Another clue is that fMRI brain scans show significantly increased activity in the insula when experimental subjects feel strong emotions. There are many example of this. In fact, the relationship seems so predictable that activity in the insula as revealed in fMRI scans is taken to be a marker for emotional experience.

However, there's a lot more we would like to know about exactly how the insula is involved with emotion. For instance, is there anything special about neurons found in the insula, some genes expressed in those neurons more than in neurons elsewhere? Or is the insula's role simply a matter of how it is connected to other parts of the brain? Are there particular hormones or neurotransmitters that are important for processing of emotions in the insula?

In order to even think about such questions, we need to look more closely at what is known about emotions themselves, from classical psychological studies.

To begin with, psychologists distinguish between different "levels" of emotion, not in the sense of intensity, but in the degree to which a particular emotion is more or less "fundamental" and related to basic instinctual needs or aversions. Fundametal emotions are such things as hunger, lust, craving, and fear. It is easily imagined that most animals with a developed central nervous system have such emotions.

Other emotions are a little more abstract, such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, anxiety, joy, surprise, delight, pleasure, and amusement. One supposes that substantially fewer animal species experience such "higher" emotions.

And then there are emotions which are pretty much limited to complex social animals that have a rich social life – for example, group loyalty, a sense of fairness or unfairness, altruism, trust, pride, shame, envy, jealousy, greed, grief, etc.

A whole lot more could be (and has been) said about such a categorization of emotions or alternative categorizations, but this will serve to provide an idea of what is meant by "emotion".

There are very good reasons for studying emotions per se. Here are some of them:

• Emotions play a large role in making moral and ethical judgments. The sense of "fairness" and empathy, as well as various other emotions (especially social ones), come in here. This was discussed here.
  
• Another special case of emotional involvement with decision making is found in politics. For instance, our attitudes towards particular candidates have a lot to do with our emotional reactions to the candidates as people – e. g., whether or not they give us a feeling of trust or security or empathy. (Some discussion here.)
  
• Emotions play a significant role in economics. For instance, choices made about investments depend a lot on whether one has emotions of fear (in troubled times) or greed (when the economy seems to be doing well).
  
• Emotions play a large role in decision making in general. Everyone understands the importance of "gut feelings" here. The emotions a person typically has in certain situations have a large effect on the decisions the person makes in such situations.
  
• Critiques of artificial intelligence and certain forms of cognitive psychology assert that intelligent behavior is not simply a matter of algorithmically applying rules and heuristics to known facts. The idea is that computers in their present form are not capable of fully human intelligent behavior because they are not embodied in the way humans are, and in particular they lack emotions. Such critiques have been posed by many philosophers and cognitive scientists, such as Hubert Dreyfus, and George Lakoff. The latter is a representative of the viewpoint known as "embodied philosophy".
  

We're not going to address all those issues right away. They just serve to remind us of things where more knowledge of the insula and emotions might help our understanding.

As an example of very recently reported research on the insula and emotions, we have this:

Why An Exciting Book Is Just As Thrilling As A Hair-raising Movie (8/12/08)

We all know, however, that reading a book describing the same scene can be similarly gripping. This week, in a paper published in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, Mbemba Jabbi, Jojanneke Bastiaansen and Christian Keysers show us why.

At the NeuroImaging Center of the University Medical Center Groningen of the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), Jabbi and colleagues compared what happens in our brains when we view the facial expressions of other people with the brain activity as we read about emotional experiences. ...

"Our striking result," said Keysers, "is that in all three cases, the same location of the anterior insula lit up. The anterior insula is the part of the brain that is the heart of our feeling of disgust. Patients who have damage to the insula, because of a brain infection for instance, lose this capacity to feel disgusted. If you give them sour milk, they would drink it happily and say it tastes like soda."

Prof. Keysers continued, "What this means is that whether we see a movie or read a story, the same thing happens: we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted– and that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through."

To summarize: the question was about similarities (and differences) in brain response to the emotion of disgust, which may be stimulated in three different ways: actual experience (tasting something very unpleasant), observation of facial expressions of others experiencing disgust, and subjective imagination of disgust.

It was already known that fMRI scans showed activity in the insula and an adjacent region (the frontal operculum) – collectively termed the IFO – as a result of experiencing or observing the emotion of disgust. The research showed that very similar activity occurred as a result of imagining disgust.

Further reading:

Why real and imagined disgust have the same effect (8/13/08) – New Scientist article about the research

Emotional Thrills From A Movie (or a Book) – blog post on this research

A Common Anterior Insula Representation of Disgust Observation, Experience and Imagination Shows Divergent Functional Connectivity Pathways – August 2008 research article in PLoS ONE

Tags: insula, insular cortex, emotion