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Maggot infestations, rotting carcasses, unidentifiable gunk in the kitchen sink – how much your brain responds to disgusting images could predict whether you are liberal or conservative.

In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Current Biology, an international team of scientists led by Virginia Tech reports that the strength of a person’s reaction to repulsive images can forecast their political ideology.

“Disgusting images generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation even when those neural responses don’t correspond with an individual’s conscious reaction to the images,” said Read Montague, a Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute professor who led the study.
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Thanksgiving dinner is the time when many of us say the wrong thing to friends and relatives we haven’t seen for a long time. Are you easily embarrassed? People who AREN’T (certain politicians and actors, for instance) have a smaller region in one part of the brain than the rest of us.
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