The most convincing data concern rare humans with damage restricted to the amygdala, either due to a type of encephalitis or a congenital disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease, or where the amygdala w...
THE DELAYED MATURATION of the frontal cortex suggests an obvious scenario, namely that early in adolescence the frontal cortex has fewer neurons, dendritic branches, and synapses than in adulthood, an...
Suppose a person harmed people two generations ago; are this person’s grandchildren obliged to help his victims’ grandchildren? Subjects viewed a biological grandchild as more obligated than one adopt...
Southern violence was explored in one of the all-time coolest psychology studies, involving the use of a word rare in science journals, conducted by Nisbett and Cohen. Undergraduate male subjects had...
So ecological duress can increase or decrease aggression. This raises the key issue of what global warming will do to our best and worst behaviors. There will definitely be some upsides. Some regions...
Secure-attachment 7Rs show more generosity than average. Thus 7R has something to do with generosity—but its effect is entirely context dependent.
Quizás estaba haciendo la pregunta equivocada: no debería ser por qué tendemos a desdeñar lo nuevo a medida que nos hacemos viejos, sino por qué, a medida que envejecemos, ansiamos lo familiar. Hay un...
Quería probar si existen ciertas ventanas temporales de maduración netamente definidas durante las cuales formamos nuestros gustos culturales (...) en concreto, si existe una edad determinada a la que...
Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45
Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropep...
Oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate mother-infant bond formation and monogamous pair-bonding, decrease anxiety and stress, enhance trust and social affiliation, and make people more cooperative and ge...
Norenzayan distinguishes between private and communal religiosity in surveying support for suicide bombers among Palestinians.17 In a refutation of Islam = terrorism idiocy, people’s personal religios...
Most broadly, the PFC chooses between conflicting options—Coke or Pepsi; blurting out what you really think or restraining yourself; pulling the trigger or not. And often the conflict being resolved i...
Moreover, when people are hungry, they become less charitable and more aggressive (e.g., choosing more severe punishment for an opponent in a game).fn7 There’s
Men with more masculine 2D:4D ratios tend toward higher levels of aggression and math scores; more assertive personalities; higher rates of ADHD and autism (diseases with strong male biases); and decr...
Memory can be dramatically disrupted if you force something that’s implicit into explicit channels. Here’s an example that will finally make reading this book worth your while—how to make neurobiology...
Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a large scale,
MAO-A variants show other important gene/environment interactions. For example, in one study the low-activity MAO-A variant predicts criminality, but only if coupled with high testosterone levels
Los humanos suelen sobrevalorar cualquier grupo del que formen parte y demonizar al grupo de fuera. Los grupos excluyentes suelen estar definidos por la edad, así que cuando tienes 15 años un deseo cl...
Logically, gambling shouldn’t evoke much anticipatory dopamine, given the astronomical odds against winning. But the behavioral engineering—the 24-7 activity and lack of time cues, the cheap alcohol p...