Skin Conductance Response in Partisan Politics

Political scientist Gregg Murray, Ph.D. recently published a post on Psychology Today regarding electrophysiological cues in highly political individuals. In it, he discusses the inherent biases of those identifying with a certain political party, and underlying physical evidence quantified using electrodermal activity. Murray cites a study performed by Petersen, Giessing and Nielsen in which partisan subjects were hooked up to BIOPAC EDA equipment to measure skin conductance response. Such cues that elicited responses ranged from highly politicized topics such as gun control to simply images of the opposing party’s logo. In Murray’s article SS57LA EDA Leads for disposable EDA electrodes are shown, and BIOPAC offers these as well as various options for EDA recording, including the reusable SS3LA Finger Transducer and TSD203 Finger Transducer, as well as the BioNomadix EDA Lead for wireless recording.

You can read the entire news story and find a link to the paper here.