THE POLITICAL BRAIN
The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
By DREW WESTEN

Review from Public Affairs Books:

The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, shows that the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on "the issues," they lose.

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.

In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Elections are decided in the marketplace of emotions, a marketplace filled with values, images, analogies, moral sentiments, and moving oratory, in which logic plays only a supporting role.

Newsweek: The Roots of Fear
The evolutionary primacy of the brain's fear circuitry makes it more powerful than reasoning circuits.

Through surveys of voters, lab experiments that simulate voting and, now, brain-imaging studies that pinpoint which regions switch on when people weigh political decisions, a new generation of political psychologists and campaign strategists is refining the understanding of the power of fear. The result is new insights into how voters respond to having their anxieties stoked; how playing to fears and anxieties can affect voters' views on issues seemingly unrelated to those that incite fear; how fear is wielded most effectively as a scalpel rather than a cudgel, and how the power of fear can be squared with the political truism that the candidate who best projects hope tends to win.