He is also the co-founder, alongside Joel Weinberger, of Implicit Strategies, a market research firm that measures consumers' unconscious responses to advertising and brands.
The President and his close advisors were so incensed and concerned about its impact, as it captured popular opinion at the time about his leadership style, that they sent out a thirty-plus-page email of talking points to friendly journalists to use when he was interviewed on television and radio.
[8] In January 2006 a group of scientists led by Westen announced at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in Palm Springs, California the results of a study in which functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that self-described Democrats and Republicans responded to negative remarks about their political candidate of choice in systematically biased ways.
Similarly, areas of the brain responsible for reasoning (notably the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex[9][clarification needed]) did not respond during the time subjects were coming to these conclusions, whereas circuits involved in processing negative emotion (e.g., the insular gyrus), conflict monitoring and resolution (the anterior cingulate), and what the researchers presumed to be unconscious emotion regulation (neural activity in the ventromedial and orbital prefrontal cortex) showed increased activity as compared to the subjects’ responses to politically neutral statements associated with politically neutral people (such as Tom Hanks).
When this occurred, areas of the brain involved in reward (notably dopamine-rich regions such as the striatum / nucleus accumbens) showed increased activity, essentially reinforcing both their positive feelings toward their favored candidate and defensive reasoning.