Politics and the Life Sciences : the Journal of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences

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This research letter introduces readers to health intelligence by conceptualizing critical components and providing a primer for research within political science broadly considered. Accordingly, a brief review of the literature is provided, concluding with possible future research agendas. The aim is to elaborate on the importance of public health intelligence to national security studies, and to political science more generally.

In recent decades, political psychologists have given a lot of attention to the role of emotions in politics. While there have been several different research programs, the dominant paradigm has been set by affective intelligence theory (AIT), developed by George Marcus, Russell Neuman, and Michael Mackuen. AIT has helped explain many puzzles in understanding how emotions influence political decisions, as any good paradigm should. At the same time, I argue it has also had the effect of limiting broader research into the range of discrete emotions, especially contempt...

Three North Carolina Medicaid surveys conducted from 2000 to 2012 reported increasing numbers of Hispanic children enrolled in Medicaid and much lower trust in providers expressed by their adult caregiver respondents compared with responses for non-Hispanic Black and White children. To verify and explain this apparent trust chasm, we used bivariate and regression analyses. The variables employed included trust (dependent variable); child's race/ethnicity, age, and sex; satisfaction and health status scales; two utilization measures; respondent's age, sex, and education; geographical region; and population density of county of residence...

The advent of COVID-19 vaccination meant a moment of hope after months of crisis communication. However, the context of disinformation on social media threatened the success of this public health campaign. This study examines how heads of government and fact-checking organizations in four countries managed communications on Twitter about the vaccination. Specifically, we conduct a content analysis of their discourses through the observation of propaganda mechanisms. The research draws on a corpus of words related to the pandemic and vaccines in France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States ( n = 2,800)...

In the past decade, international actors have launched "brain projects" or "brain initiatives." One of the emerging technologies enabled by these publicly funded programs is brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which are devices that allow communication between the brain and external devices like a prosthetic arm or a keyboard. BCIs are poised to have significant impacts on public health, society, and national security. This research presents the first analytical framework that attempts to predict the dissemination of neurotechnologies to both the commercial and military sectors in the United States and China...

Immigration has become a focal debate in politics across the world. Recent research suggests that anti-immigration attitudes may have deep psychological roots in implicit disease avoidance motivations. A key implication of this theory is that individual differences in disease avoidance should be related to opposition to immigration across a wide variety of cultural and political contexts. However, existing evidence on the topic has come almost entirely from the United States and Canada. In this article, we test the disease avoidance hypothesis using nationally representative samples from Norway, Sweden, Turkey, and Mexico, as well as two diverse samples from the United States...

In 2008, the Chinese government created the Thousand Talents Program (TTP) to recruit overseas expertise to build up China's science and technology knowledge and innovation base. Ten years later, in 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced a new "China Initiative" that aimed to counter the transfer by U.S.-based scientists involved in the TTP of knowledge and intellectual property that could support China's military and economic might and pose threats to U.S. national security. This initiative launched a number of investigations into major U...

Taking insights from the fields of psychology and biology, a growing body of scholarship considers the psychophysiological foundations of political attitudes. Subconscious emotional reactions to threat, for example, have been shown to predict socially conservative attitudes toward out-groups. However, many of these studies fail to consider different sources of perceived threat. Using a combination of survey and physiological data, I distinguish between fear of others and fear of authority, finding that threat sensitivity predicts divergent political attitudes depending on the strength of each...

In this article, we examine whether there is genetic overlap between personality traits and political participation, interest, and efficacy. We make several contributions to the literature. First, we use new data from a large sample of twins from Denmark to examine the link between genes, the Big Five traits, and political behavior. Previous research in this area has not examined the Danish context. Second, because our measures have some overlap with those used in previous studies, we are able to examine whether previous findings replicate in a different sample...

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Sleep research presents an important frontier of discovery for political science. While sleep has largely been neglected by political scientists, human psychology is inextricably linked with sleep and so political cognition must be as well. Existing work shows that sleep is linked to political participation and ideology, and that contentious politics can disrupt sleep. I propose three directions for future research-on participatory democracy, on ideology, and on how context shapes sleep-politics links. I also note that sleep research intersects with the study of political institutions, of war and conflict, of elite decision-making, and of normative theory...

Scholars and journalists connect pandemics to a rise in support for radical political movements. In this study, we draw on this insight to investigate the relationship between the 1918-1919 Spanish influenza pandemic and political extremism-here, the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan-in the United States. Specifically, we ask whether U.S. states and cities with higher death rates from the Spanish flu also had stronger Ku Klux Klan organizations in the early 1920s. Our results do not provide evidence of such a connection; in fact, the data suggest greater Klan membership where the pandemic was less severe...

U.S. states are often the primary decision makers during a public health crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic led to several different reopening processes across states based on their unique characteristics. We analyze whether states' reopening policy decisions were driven by their public health preparedness, resources, COVID-19 impact, or state politics and political culture. To do so, we summarized state characteristics and compared them across three categories of reopening scores in a bivariate analysis using the chi-square or Fisher exact test for the categorical variables and a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the continuous variables...

The stark divide between the political right and left is rooted in conflicting beliefs, values, and personality-and, recent research suggests, perhaps even lower-level physiological differences between individuals. In this registered report, we investigated a novel domain of ideological differences in physiological processes: interoceptive sensitivity-that is, a person's attunement to their own internal bodily states and signals (e.g., physiological arousal, pain, and respiration). We conducted two studies testing the hypothesis that greater interoceptive sensitivity would be associated with greater conservatism: one laboratory study in the Netherlands using a physiological heartbeat detection task and one large-scale online study in the United States employing an innovative webcam-based measure of interoceptive sensitivity...

This is a registered report for a study of racial and ethnic variation in the relationship between negativity bias and political attitudes. Pioneering work on the psychological and biological roots of political orientation has suggested that political conservatism is driven in large part by enhanced negativity bias. This work has been criticized on several theoretical fronts, and recent replication attempts have failed. To dig deeper into the contours of when (and among whom) negativity bias predicts conservatism, we investigate a surprisingly overlooked factor in existing literature: race and ethnicity...

People vary in climate change skepticism and in their views on disaster cause and prevention. For example, the United States boasts higher rates of climate skepticism than other countries, especially among Republicans. Research into the individual differences that shape variation in climate-related beliefs represents an important opportunity for those seeking ways to mitigate climate change and climate-related disasters (e.g., floods). In this registered report, we proposed a study examining how individual difference in physical formidability, worldview, and affect relate to attitudes about disaster and climate change...

While the effects of climate change will impact most Americans, they will likely have a disproportionate influence on the socioeconomic well-being of marginalized communities. Few researchers, however, have investigated public support for policies aimed at ameliorating climate-related disparities. Fewer still have considered how political and (critically) pre-political psychological dispositions might shape environmental justice concern (EJC) and subsequently influence policy support-both of which, I argue, could present roadblocks for effective climate communication and policy action...

The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the importance of high-quality data for empirical health research and evidence-based political decision-making. To leverage the full potential of these data, a better understanding of the determinants and conditions under which people are willing to share their health data is critical. Building on the privacy theory of contextual integrity, the privacy calculus, and previous findings regarding different data types and recipients, we argue that established social norms shape the acceptance of novel practices of data collection and use...

We introduce the Special Issue on Life Science in Politics: Methodological Innovations and Political Issues. This issue of Politics and the Life Sciences is focused on the use of life science theory and methods to study political phenomena and the exploration of the intersection of science and political attitudes. This issue is the third in a series of special issues funded by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences that adheres to the Open Science Framework for registered reports. Pre-analysis plans are peer reviewed and given in-principle acceptance before data are collected and/or analyzed, and the articles are published contingent upon the preregistration of the study being followed as proposed...