The authors first replicated this effect, showing that watching a short film clip of something physically disgusting made subjects more morally judgmental—unless they had washed their hands after watc...
In other words, pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals.27
Another gene/environment interaction pertains to depression, a disease involving serotonin abnormalities.33 A gene called 5HTT codes for a transporter that removes serotonin from the synapse; having a...
A recent study adds an important twist to this story. There are the kids with problems with impulse control—I’m absolutely going to hold out for two marshmallow—who then instantly eat that first one....
Religious wars, which are, to cite a quote generally attributed to Napoleon, people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend,
Pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals.
Increasing cognitive loadfn8 should make people more conservative. This is precisely the case. The time pressure of snap judgments is a version of increased cognitive load. Likewise, people become mor...
Women prefer the smell of moderately related over unrelated men. And in a study of 160 years of data concerning every couple in Iceland (which is a mecca for human geneticists, given its genetic and s...
Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order...
What the data show: the fewer social relationships a person has, the shorter his or her life expectancy, and the worse the impact of various infectious diseases. Relationships that are medically prote...
We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context.
This leads to a thoroughly fascinating finding—social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals.
This brings up a key concept, namely the inverted U. The complete absence of stress is aversively boring. Moderate, transient stress is wonderful—various aspects of brain function are enhanced; glucoc...
There is often an inverse relationship between levels of intragroup and intergroup aggression. In other words, groups with highly hostile interactions with neighbors tend to have minimal internal conf...
The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.
The single genetic variant identified that most powerfully predicted height explained all of 0.4 percent—four tenths of one percent—of the variation in height, and all those hundreds of variants put t...
The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so.
The artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky once defined free will as internal forces I do not understand.26 People intuitively believe in free will, not just because we have this terrible human...
Stick recording electrodes into numerous species’ amygdalaefn9 and see when neurons there have action potentials; this turns out to be when the animal is being aggressive.fn10 In a related approach, d...
So dopamine is more about anticipation of reward than about reward itself.