A behavior has occurred that is good, bad, or ambiguous. How have cultural factors stretching back to the origins of humans contributed to that behavior? And rustling cattle on a moonless night; or se...
When doing science (or perhaps when doing anything at all in a society as judgmental as our own), be very careful and very certain before pronouncing something to be a norm - because at that instant,...
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.
In general, major stressors make people of both genders more risk taking. But moderate stressors bias men toward, and women away from, risk taking. In the absence of stress, men tend toward more risk...
Contemporary studies show that the worst stress-related health typically occurs in middle management, with its killer combo of high work demands but little autonomy—responsibility without control.
Work by Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Boyce of UCSF, and others demonstrates something outrageous: By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a)...
With chronic stress the nucleus accumbens is depleted of dopamine, biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.
Why else evolve the fusiform? The shape of women’s faces changes subtly during their ovulatory cycle, and men prefer female faces at the time of ovulation.
When you get the news that everyone else disagrees with you, there is also activation of the (emotional) vmPFC, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the nucleus accumbens. This is a network mobilized du...
When a rat wins a fight, the number of testosterone receptors increases in the ventral tegmentum and accumbens, increasing sensitivity to the hormone’s feel-good effects.10
What does the frontal cortex do? Its list of expertise includes working memory, executive function (organizing knowledge strategically, and then initiating an action based on an executive decision), g...
Ultimately, forgiveness is usually about one thing—This is for me, not for you. Hatred is exhausting; forgiveness, or even just indifference, is freeing. To quote Booker T. Washington, I shall allow n...
Thus, we tend to think of Us as noble, loyal, and composed of distinctive individuals whose failings are due to circumstance. Thems, in contrast, seem disgusting, ridiculous, simple, homogeneous, undi...
Thus, shorter refractory periods mean a higher rate of action potentials. So is testosterone causing action potentials in these neurons? No. It’s causing them to fire at a faster rate if they are stim...
Thus, over the course of seconds sensory cues can shape your behavior unconsciously.
Thus, for our purposes, genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead they’re about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities. All embedded in the fabric of the other fac...
Thus political orientation about social issues reflects sensitivity to visceral disgust and strategies for coping with such disgust.
This is central to understanding the nature of motivation, as well as its failures (e.g., during depression, where there is inhibition of dopamine signaling thanks to stress, or in anxiety, where such...
The sensory cortex and visual cortex are far away from each other. How do those tactile neurons know (a) that there’s vacant property in the visual cortex; (b) that hooking up with those unoccupied ne...