In a healthy environment, increased threat sensitivity, poor emotion control and enhanced fear memory in MAOA-L [i.e., the warrior variant] men might only manifest as variation in temperament within a...
If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation. The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decre...
Greene calls the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality is shown by the fact that most intergroup conflicts on our planet ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose right is righter.
Freud was fascinated with depression and focused on the issue that we began with—why is it that most of us can have occasional terrible experiences, feel depressed, and then recover, while a few of us...
Finally, for the same criminal conviction, the more stereotypically African a black individual’s facial features, the longer the sentence.15 In contrast, juries view black (but not white) male defenda...
Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality—it must be a drag being right-wing. But despite that, in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists.42 Why? Perhaps it’s having simpler answers,...
Eyes often have an implicit censorious power.22 Post a large picture of a pair of eyes at a bus stop (versus a picture of flowers), and people become more likely to clean up litter. Post a picture of...
El problema no era su trabajo, que me parecía magnífico, sino su gusto musical. (...) Del walkman salía a todo volumen una música horrenda de cualquiera de esos grupos que los veinteañeros suelen escu...
Diallo, a West African immigrant in New York, matched a description of a rapist. Four white officers questioned him, and when the unarmed Diallo started to pull out his wallet, they decided it was a g...
Cognitive therapists, like Aaron Beck of the University of Pennsylvania, even consider depression to be primarily a disorder of thought, rather than emotion, in that sufferers tend to see the world in...
Cab drivers use spatial maps for a living, and one renowned study showed enlargement of that part of the hippocampus in London taxi drivers. Moreover, a follow-up study imaged the hippocampus in peopl...
By using two elephants to do the job, damage will occur just because of how large, lumbering, and unsubtle elephants are. They squash the flowers in the process of entering the playground, they strew...
Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films. This
Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable.
Back to mutations. Can there be mutations in DNA stretches constituting promoters? Yes,
As you study the trait in more environments, the heritability score will decrease. This is recognized by Bouchard: These conclusions [derived from a behavior genetics study] can be generalized, of cou...
As work continued, an important qualifier emerged. Low serotonin didn’t predict premeditated, instrumental violence. It predicted impulsive aggression, as well as cognitive impulsivity (e.g., steep te...
As emphasized in chapter 10, people become more prosocial when reputation rides on it, and personality profiles also show that highly charitable people tend to be particularly dependent on external ap...
As adults, these kids are mostly what you’d expect. Low IQ and poor cognitive skills. Problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic. Anxiety and depression galore. The longer the inst...
A powerful example of this is seen in the first war of Indian independence, also known as the Sepoy Mutiny, of 1857. Indian soldiers—sepoys—serving in the British East India Company’s army rebelled wh...