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...
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...
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 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...
Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Willpower takes metabolic power, thanks to the glucose demands of the frontal cortex. This was the finding that when people are hungry, they become less generous in economic games.
When it comes to the bread and butter of human misery, try a major depression. It can be life-threatening, it can destroy lives, demolish the families of sufferers. And it is dizzyingly common—the psy...
The fetal brain generates far more neurons than are found in the adult.
Someone’s hand being poked with a needle, and subjects have an isomorphic sensorimotor response—hands tense in empathy. Among both whites and blacks, the response is blunted for other-race hands; the...
Math performance in Asian American women, built around the stereotypes of Asians being good at math, and women not. Half the subjects were primed to think of themselves as Asian before a math test; th...
Growing strong from adversity is mostly a luxury for those who are better off.
Genes and fetal environment are relevant. But most important, recall the logic of collapsing different types of trauma into a single category. What counts is the sheer number of times a child is bludg...