The cognitive capacities of near-term fetuses are even more remarkable. For example, fetuses can distinguish between two pairs of nonsense syllables (biba versus babi). How do you know? Get this—Mom s...
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...
The 2D:4D ratio is so variable, and the sex difference so small, that you can’t determine someone’s sex by knowing it. But it does tell you something about the extent of fetal testosterone exposure. S...
Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts testosterone levels.
Moving beyond mere correlation, if you lesion the amygdala in an animal, rates of aggression decline. The same occurs transiently when you temporarily silence the amygdala by injecting Novocain into i...
Males who do extreme amounts of exercise, such as professional soccer players and runners who cover more than 40 or 50 miles a week, have less LHRH, LH, and testosterone in their circulation, smaller...
Let’s incorporate behavior. If someone has extensive frontocortical damage, how predictable is it that you’d note something odd about them, behaviorally, after a five-minute conversation? Something li...
Culture leaves long-lasting residues—Shiites and Sunnis slaughter each other over a succession issue fourteen centuries old; across thirty-three countries population density in the year 1500 significa...
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....
When the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest.
These capacities evolved so recently that our brains are, if you will, winging it and improvising on the fly when dealing with metaphor. As a result, we are actually pretty lousy at distinguishing bet...
Testosterone’s actions are contingent and amplifying, exacerbating preexisting tendencies toward aggression rather than creating aggression out of thin air.
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...
Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.
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...
These are crucially different. For example, how much do genes have to do with people’s scores averaging 100 on this thing called an IQ test? Then how much do genes have to do with one person scoring h...
The strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by its emergence in kids. By age three to four, kids already group people by race and gender, have more negative views of such Thems, and perceive other-race faces...