Intrinsic functional connectivity of blue and red brains: neurobiological evidence of different stress resilience between political attitudes

Abstract

Conservatives are more sensitive to threatening/anxious situations in perceptual and cognitive levels, experiencing emotional responses and stress, while liberals are more responsive to but tolerant of ambiguous and uncertain information. Interestingly, conservatives have greater psychological well-being and are more satisfied with their lives than liberals despite their psychological vulnerability to stress caused by threat and anxiety sensitivities. We investigated whether conservatives have greater resilience and self-regulation capacity, which are suggested to be psychological buffers that enhance psychological well-being, than liberals and moderates. We also explored associations between intrinsic functional brain organization and these psychological resources to expand our neurobiological understanding of self-regulatory processes in neuropolitics. We found that conservatives, compared to liberals and moderates, had greater psychological resilience and self-regulation capacity that were attributable to greater impulse control and causal reasoning. Stronger intrinsic connectivities between the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and precuneus and between the insula and frontal pole/OFC in conservatives were correlated with greater resilience and self-regulation capacity. These results suggest the neural underpinnings that may allow conservatives to manage the psychological stress and achieve greater life satisfaction. This study provides neuroscientific evidence for the different responses of liberals and conservatives to politically relevant social issues.

Figure 1

Resting-state functional connectivity differences between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives had stronger anticorrelations of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) with (A) the superior frontal gyrus (SFG)/dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), of the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) with (B, C) the precuneus, and of the right insula with (D) the left superior lateral occipital cortex (LOC) and (E) the left frontal pole/OFC, compared to liberals. In addition, (F) conservatives had stronger positive correlation between the left insula and the left occipital pole than liberals.

Figure 2

Group comparisons of global network metrics between groups. Although the area under the curve (AUC) of the normalized modularity (Q) was higher in liberals than conservatives at the trend level, there was no significant group difference in the network metrics when the correction for multiple comparisons was applied.