formulation should not, but often does, obscure their vision. After several years at the University of Michigan, he then moved to Harvard University, where he was associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Chief Psychologist at the Cambridge Hospital. At Harvard University and at Emory, Westen's work has focused on alternative ways of assessing and classifying personality disorders and developing and refining the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure as a tool for researchers and clinicians to help further the understanding of personality and its disorders. He is unusual among academic clinical psychologists in being both an active researcher and a practicing clinician for 20 years, who has written on what can be learned from both science and practice. This is reflected in over a decade's work on how to revise the diagnostic manual in psychiatry so that it is useful both to clinicians and researchers. Much of Westen's theoretical work has attempted to bridge perspectives, particularly cognitive, psychodynamic, and evolutionary. He has published over 200 research papers in the scientific literature. Political bias study 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. Specifically, when Republican test subjects were shown self-contradictory quotes by George W. Bush and when Democratic test subjects were shown self-contradictory quotes by John Kerry, both groups tended to explain away the apparent contradictions in a manner biased to favor their candidate of choice. Similarly, areas of the brain responsible for reasoning (notably the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) did not respond during the time subjects were coming to these conclusions, whereas circuits involved in processing negative emotion (e.g., the insular gurus), 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). Subjects were then presented with information that exonerated their candidate of choice. 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