In another study subjects waited an unknown length of time to receive a shock.12 This lack of predictability and control was so aversive that many chose to receive a stronger shock immediately. And
If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to complete pictures.
If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just r...
If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so fru...
If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an in...
I once received a lesson in kids’ private world of rule making from my then-four-year-old son. We had gone to a public bathroom together; we stood side by side at two urinals, and I finished a bit ear...
How does this work? Rodents produce pheromonal odors with individual signatures, derived from genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This is a super variable gene cluster that produc...
Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
Furthermore, as shown with neuroimaging, when contemplating mouthwash versus soap, those who had just spoken a lie activated parts of the sensorimotor cortex related to the mouth (i.e., the subjects w...
For starters, circulating oxytocin levels are elevated in couples when they’ve first hooked up. Furthermore, the higher the levels, the more physical affection, the more behaviors are synchronized, th...
Finally, for the same criminal conviction, the more stereotypically Af-rican a black individual’s facial features, the longer the sentence.15 In contrast, juries view black (but not white) male defend...
Everything in physiology follows the rule that too much can be as bad as too little. There are optimal points of allostatic balance. For example, while a moderate amount of exercise generally increase...
El patrón de la apertura a la experiencia ya había sido estudiado. (...) Una característica era la juventud asociada al proceso creativo. Algunas profesiones se construyen exclusivamente sobre los ava...
By ages four through six, kids in cultures from around the world respond negatively when they are the ones being shortchanged. It isn’t until ages eight through ten that kids respond negatively to som...
Beginning in the early 1980s, various researchers, including myself, showed that this glucocorticoid neurotoxicity was not just a pharmacological effect, but was relevant to normal brain aging in the...
As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it—cognitively distorting how t...
Archaeologists do something impressive, reflecting disciplinary humility. When archaeologists excavate a site, they recognize that future archaeologists will be horrified at their primitive techniques...
Another study that winds up in half the textbooks makes the same point, if more subtly. The subjects of the experiment were children reared in two different orphanages in Germany after World War II. B...
And their brains? Decreased total brain size, gray matter, white matter, frontal cortical metabolism, connectivity between regions, sizes of individual brain regions. Except for the amygdala. Which is...
A critical realization roared through the research community: the physiological stress-response can be modulated by psychological factors. Two identical stressors with the same extent of allostatic di...