People with certain kinds of brain damage may make better investment decisions. That is the conclusion of a new study offering some compelling evidence that mixing emotion with investing can lead to bad outcomes.

By linking brain science to investment behavior, researchers concluded that people with an impaired ability to experience emotions could actually make better financial decisions than other people under certain circumstances. The research is part of a fast-growing interdisciplinary field called "neuroeconomics" that explores the role biology plays in economic decision making, by combining insights from cognitive neuroscience, psychology and economics.

The study was published last month in the journal Psychological Science, and was conducted by a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the University of Iowa.

....The emotionally impaired players were more willing to take gambles that had high payoffs because they lacked fear.

…."It's possible that people who are high-risk takers or good investors may have what you call a functional psychopathy," says Antoine Bechara, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, and a co-author of the study. "They don't react emotionally to things. Good investors can learn to control their emotions in certain ways to become like those people."

…. if brain chemistry could explain phenomena such as depression or attention deficit disorder, it might also help explain more mundane psychological functions, such as how people reach financial decisions. ~ JANE SPENCER, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL July 21, 2005

Try substituting political decisions instead of economic decisions. The article didn’t make any connection, but what the article leaves out is obvious.

…’impaired ability to experience emotions’, ‘emotionally impaired’ people who lack fear, and ‘functional psychopathy’ limiting emotional reaction of those making decisions.

Why limit the article to just financial or economic decisions; Why not state the obvious and proclaim that what some are calling good political decisions are nothing but the result of emotionless psychopathic behavior. We see this behavior around us every day, every minute. Economics has become political as much as the weather/environment has become political. Even god is a republican, emotionless and fearless while eternally instilling fear is others. Endtimes, anyone?