February 20, 2018

Leftists are born unhappy

A reader has drawn to my attention a journal article from 2010 that suppports my contention that Leftists are born miseries. The author tries to put a leftist spin on it but the facts pretty well speak for themselves.  The abstract is below. I will add some comments at the foot of it

Political leanings vary with facial expression processing and psychosocial functioning 

Jacob M. Vigil

Abstract

Conservative, Republican sympathizers show heightened threat reactivity, but greater felt happiness than liberal, Democrat sympathizers. Recent evolutionary models interpret these findings in the context of broader perceptual and expressive proclivities for advertising cues of competency (Republicans) and trustworthiness (Democrats) to others, and in ways that facilitate the formation of distinct social networks, in coordination with individuals’ life histories.

Consistent with this perspective, I found that Republican sympathizers were more likely to report larger social networks and interpret ambiguous facial stimuli as expressing more threatening emotions as compared to Democrat sympathizers, who also reported greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction, and experiential hardships. The findings are discussed in the context of proximate and ultimate explanations of social cognition, relationship formation, and societal cohesion. Keywords evolution, group identity, neuroscience, political psychology, social cognition

SOURCE

So let us look at the findings and not the interpretations

Conservatives are happier.  That always comes out and Leftists hate it.  They claim that conservatives are maladjusted misfits but happy misfits is not a very persuasive notion.

"Threat reactivity"? A fancy way of saying conservatives are more cautious, which we already knew.

Conservatives have more friends.  "Laugh and the world laughs with you.  Cry and you cry alone"

Democrat sympathizers reported greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction, and experiential hardships.

My case rests:  Conservatives are the happy people. Leftists are the angry people.

These findings derive from a survey of students so are not authoritative by themselves but they do confirm what we see  in Leftist politics all the time.






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