Amazingly, prison sentences for murderers have now been lessened in at least two cases because it was argued that the criminal, having the warrior gene variant of MAO-A, was inevitably fated to be unc...
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...
A major depression, these findings suggest, can be the outcome of particularly severe lessons in uncontrollability for those of us who are already vulnerable. This may explain an array of findings tha...
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 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,...
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...
If you’re stressed like a normal mammal in an acute physical crisis, the stress response is lifesaving. But if instead you chronically activate the stress response for reasons of psychological stress,...
If some octopus moved in next door, I would feel hostile superiority because I have a spine and it didn’t, but that animosity might melt into a sense of kinship when I discovered that the octopus, lik...
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.
Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our coll...
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...
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...
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...
This is thought to reflect the killer combination that these folks are often burdened with, namely, high work demands but little autonomy—responsibility without control.
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 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...