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, 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...
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...
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...
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
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.
Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource. Frontal neurons are expensive cells, and expensive cells are vulnerable cells. Consistent
With chronic stress the nucleus accumbens is depleted of dopamine, biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.
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)...
Call the game the Wall Street Game, and people become less cooperative. Calling it the Community Game does the opposite. Similarly,
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...
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...
The fetal brain generates far more neurons than are found in the adult.
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...
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...
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...
A final depressing point about inequality and violence. As we’ve seen, a rat being shocked activates a stress response. But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less o...
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...
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...
Ask subjects to estimate the likelihood of the same events again. Adults incorporate the feedback into the new estimates. Adolescents update their estimates as adults do for good news, but feedback ab...
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