This addition produces a two-by-two matrix: parenting is authoritative (high demand, high responsiveness), authoritarian (high demand, low responsiveness), permissive (low demand, high responsiveness)...
The subject of one experiment is a rat that receives mild electric shocks (roughly equivalent to the static shock you might get from scuffing your foot on a carpet). Over a series of these, the rat de...
The picture is complicated further—AIS individuals raised female have higher-than-expected rates of being gay, and of having an other-than-female or neither-female-nor-male-sex/gender self-identificat...
The impact of social relationships on life expectancy appears to be at least as large as that of variables such as cigarette smoking, hypertension, obesity, and level of physical activity.
The final misconception is that evolution is just a theory. I will boldly assume that readers who have gotten this far believe in evolution. Opponents inevitably bring up that irritating canard that e...
The childhood capacity for empathy progresses from feeling someone’s pain because you are them, to feeling for the other person, to feeling as them.
The candidate gene approaches show that the effect of a single gene on a behavior is typically tiny. In other words, having the warrior gene variant of MAO probably has less effect on your behavior th...
Testosterone also increases confidence and optimism, while decreasing fear and anxiety.5 This explains the winner effect in lab animals, where winning a fight increases an animal’s willingness to part...
Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts testosterone levels.
Stress and glucocorticoids have inverted-U effects here as well. Moderate, transient stress (or exposure to the equivalent glucocorticoid levels) increases spine number in the hippocampus; sustained s...
Starting with a 1979 study, low levels of serotonin in the brain were shown to be associated with elevated levels of human aggression, with end points ranging from psychological measures of hostility...
Something roughly akin to love is needed for proper biological development, and its absence is among the most aching, distorting stressors that we can suffer.
Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.
So testosterone does subtle things to behavior. Nonetheless, this doesn’t tell us much because everything can be interpreted every which way. Testosterone increases anxiety—you feel threatened and bec...
So oxytocin is central to female mammals nursing, wanting to nurse their child, and remembering which one is their child.
Second, nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation. If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the...
Roughly half a million people died in the Roman Colosseum to supply audiences of tens of thousands the pleasure of watching captives raped, dismembered, tortured, eaten by animals.
Remarkably, studies have examined brains of transgender individuals, concentrating on brain regions that, on the average, differ in size between men and women. And consistently, regardless of the desi...
Remapping occurs regularly throughout the brain in the absence of injury. My favorite examples concern musicians, who have larger auditory cortical representation of musical sounds than do nonmusician...
Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it. The researchers then studied subjects from sixty-seven countries, considering the prevalence i...