(Reuters) - A prominent lawyer and leader of the Mississippi Tea Party, who was arrested in connection with photos posted online of U.S. Senator Thad Cochran's bedridden wife, died on Friday of an apparent suicide, the man's attorney said.
BY LETITIA STEIN AND COLLEEN JENKINS
Mark Mayfield, 58, was a founding member of the state's Tea Party and had served as its vice chairman, the organization said.
"This is a terrible tragedy that shouldn't have happened," Mayfield's lawyer and brother-in-law, John Reeves, told Reuters.
Mayfield was one of three men accused in May of conspiring with a blogger to illicitly take photos of Cochran's wife, who has dementia, in her nursing home for use in a political video against the six-term incumbent.
Mayfield was charged with conspiracy to photograph someone without permission, an allegation met with shock and some skepticism in the legal community where he was highly regarded.
Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant was among those who expressed sadness on Friday, calling Mayfield a long-time friend.
"A good number of us just simply refused to believe that he had anything to do, at least on any criminal level, with what happened with the nursing home scandal," said attorney Matt Eichelberger, who blogs about progressive politics in the state.
Mayfield's death comes after state Senator Chris McDaniel, who had the backing of conservative Tea Party groups, lost a bitterly contested primary runoff against Cochran on Tuesday for the Republican Senate nomination.
McDaniel, who has denied any connection to the photo conspiracy, has accused Cochran's camp of slandering him by insinuating his involvement.
Mayfield, a lifelong resident of Mississippi who practiced real estate law, bowed out of politics after his arrest, said Merrida Coxwell, another attorney who represented him.
Coxwell said he last spoke with Mayfield on Wednesday, when they discussed the criminal case but not the results of Tuesday's election. He said he had urged Mayfield to be patient.
"I don't know what was on his mind," Coxwell said. "I guess just being charged, for a man of Mark's kind sensibilities, was too much."
Fat Bastardo's Op Ed:
The Tea Party is not happy with the GOP and they have not been pleased with the Republicans for a long time. Draw your own conclusions.
What Mark Mayfield was accused of doing sounds pretty sleazy but it's a petty crime at best. Draw your own conclusions.
Some Tea Party candidates are a threat to the GOP. Draw your own conclusions.
Did Mayfield maybe know too much?
I will ask you to connect the dots.
"We report evidence that individual-level variation in people's physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations."
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Mar. 5, 2012
"...[P]olitical conservatism is promoted when people rely on low-effort thinking. When effortful, deliberate responding is disrupted or disengaged, thought processes become quick and efficient; these conditions promote conservative ideology… low-effort thought might promote political conservatism because its concepts are easier to process, and processing fluency increases attitude endorsement.
"
"In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI [magnetic resonance imaging]. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala... 
"...[R]eminders of physical purity influence specific moral judgments regarding behaviors in the sexual domain as well as broad political attitudes...
"In the present study, we examine whether gaze cue effects [the ability to follow the direction of another individual’s eye movements or gaze] are moderated by political temperament, given that those on the political right tend to be more supportive of individualism—and less likely to be influenced by others—than those on the left. We find standard gaze cuing effects across all subjects, but systematic differences in these effects by political temperament. Liberals exhibit a very large gaze cuing effect while conservatives show no such effect at various SOAs [stimulus onset asynchrony]...
"Independent sample t-tests revealed group differences in the averaged threat interpretation scores of the 10 facial stimuli. Republican sympathizers were more likely to interpret the faces as signaling a threatening expression as compared to Democrat sympathizers. Group differences were also found for dominance perceptions, whereby Republican sympathizers were more likely to perceive the faces as expressing dominant emotions than were Democrat sympathizers...
"Our findings suggest that conservatives are sensitive to avoidance motivation [motivation through negative stimuli], which produces 'inhibition' responses manifested in greater rigidity... Based on the studies' findings, we would not expect differences between liberals and conservatives in responding to positive stimuli or incentives (i.e., approach cues), but we would expect greater inhibitory reactions by conservatives in response to negative, avoidant cues. Self-regulation appears to provide a useful perspective for understanding how one's political views may affect categorization processes and, more broadly, the association between political conservatism and rigidity."
"The conservatism dimension, which corresponds to the liberal-to-conservative criterion, was associated with activity in the right DLPFC [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex]...
"Political liberalism and conservatism differ in provide versus protect orientations, specifically providing for group members' welfare (political Left) and protecting the group from harm (political Right). These reflect the fundamental psychological distinction between approach and avoidance motivation. Conservatism is avoidance based; it is focused on preventing negative outcomes (e.g., societal losses) and seeks to regulate society via inhibition (restraints) in the interests of social order. Liberalism is approach based; it is focused on advancing positive outcomes (e.g., societal gains) and seeks to regulate society via activation (interventions) in the interests of social justice."
"The present research attempts to characterize how the transmission of political orientations develops over the life course... [G]enetic influences on political attitudes are absent prior to young adulthood. During childhood and adolescence, individual differences in political attitudes are accounted for by a variety of environmental influences... However, at the point of early adulthood (in the early 20s), for those who left their parental home, there is evidence of a sizeable genetic influence on political attitudes which remains stable throughout adult life."
"In this study, the relations among political ideology, exploratory behavior, and the formation of attitudes toward novel stimuli were explored. Participants played a computer game that required learning whether these stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes. Learning was dependent on participants’ decisions to sample novel stimuli... Political ideology correlated with exploration during the game, with conservatives sampling fewer targets than liberals. Moreover, more conservative individuals exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry, such that they learned negative stimuli better than positive... Relative to liberals, politically conservative individuals pursued a more avoidant strategy to the game…
"In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats."
"We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs. economic) dimensions of ideology. In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized... A special advantage of our final two studies is that they show personality differences between liberals and conservatives not only on self-report trait measures but also on unobtrusive, nonverbal measures of interaction style and behavioral residue.”
"Our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation. Stronger conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with less neurocognitive sensitivity to response conflicts. At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal."
"Conservatives slept somewhat more soundly, with fewer remembered dreams. Liberals were more restless in their sleep and had a more active and varied dream life. In contrast to a previous study, liberals reported a somewhat greater proportion of bad dreams and nightmares. Consistent with earlier research, the dreams of conservatives were more mundane, whereas the dreams of liberals were more bizarre...