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By Theodor Schaarschmidt A 51-year-old man I will call “Mr. Pinocchio” had a strange problem. When he tried to tell a lie, he often passed out and had convulsions. In essence, he became a kind of Pinocchio, the fictional puppet whose nose grew with every fib. For the patient, the consequences were all too real: he was a high-ranking official in the European Economic Community (since replaced by the European Union), and his negotiating partners could tell immediately when he was bending the truth. His condition, a symptom of a rare form of epilepsy, was not only dangerous, it was bad for his career. Doctors at the University Hospitals of Strasbourg in France discovered that the root of the problem was a tumor about the size of a walnut. The tumor was probably increasing the excitability of a brain region involved in emotions; when Mr. Pinocchio lied, this excitability caused a structure called the amygdala to trigger seizures. Once the tumor was removed, the fits stopped, and he was able to resume his duties. The doctors, who described the case in 1993, dubbed the condition the “Pinocchio syndrome.” Mr. Pinocchio’s plight demonstrates the far-reaching consequences of even minor changes in the structure of the brain. But perhaps just as important, it shows that lying is a major component of the human behavioral repertoire; without it, we would have a hard time coping. When people speak unvarnished truth all the time—as can happen when Parkinson’s disease or certain injuries to the brain’s frontal lobe disrupt people’s ability to lie—they tend to be judged tactless and hurtful. In everyday life, we tell little white lies all the time, if only out of politeness: Your homemade pie is awesome (it’s awful). No, Grandma, you’re not interrupting anything (she is). A little bit of pretense seems to smooth out human relationships without doing lasting harm. © 2020 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 27006 - Posted: 01.29.2020

By Jane E. Brody My husband and I were psychological opposites. I’ve always seen the glass as half-full; to him it was half-empty. That difference, research findings suggest, is likely why I pursue good health habits with a vengeance while he was far less inclined to follow the health-promoting lifestyle I advocated. I’m no cockeyed optimist, but I’ve long believed that how I eat and exercise, as well as how I view the world, can benefit my mental and physical well-being. An increasing number of recent long-term studies have linked greater optimism to a lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease and other chronic ailments and to fostering “exceptional longevity,” a category one team of researchers used for people who live to 85 and beyond. Admittedly, the relationship between optimism and better health and a longer life is still only a correlation that doesn’t prove cause and effect. But there is also now biological evidence to suggest that optimism can have a direct impact on health, which should encourage both the medical profession and individuals to do more to foster optimism as a potential health benefit. According to Dr. Alan Rozanski, one of the field’s primary researchers, “It’s never too early and it’s never too late to foster optimism. From teenagers to people in their 90s, all have better outcomes if they’re optimistic.” Dr. Rozanski is a cardiologist at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital in New York who became interested in optimism while working in a cardiac rehabilitation program early in his career. In an interview, he explained, “Many heart-attack patients who had long been sedentary would come into the gym and say ‘I can’t do that!’ But I would put them on the treadmill, start off slowly and gradually build them up. Their attitude improved, they became more confident. One woman in her 70s said her heart attack may have been the best thing that had happened to her because it transformed what she thought she could do.” © 2020 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26995 - Posted: 01.27.2020

By Laura Sanders A parasite common in cats can eliminate infected mice’s fear of felines — a brain hijack that leads to a potentially fatal attraction. But this cat-related boldness (SN: 9/18/13) isn’t the whole story. Once in the brain, the single-celled parasite Toxoplasma gondii makes mice reckless in all sorts of dangerous scenarios, researchers write January 14 in Cell Reports. Infected mice spent more time in areas that were out in the open, exposed places that uninfected mice usually avoid. Infected mice also prodded an experimenter’s hand inside a cage — an intrusion that drove uninfected mice to the other side of the cage. T. gondii–infected mice were even unfazed by an anesthetized rat, a mouse predator, the researchers from the University of Geneva and colleagues found. And infected mice spent more time than uninfected mice exploring the scents of foxes and relatively harmless guinea pigs. The extent of mice’s infections, measured by the load of parasite cysts in the brain, seemed to track with the behavior changes, the researchers report. Toxoplasma gondiiToxoplasma gondii, tweaked to glow green, was isolated from the brain of an infected mouse.Pierre-Mehdi Hammoudi, Damien Jacot The parasite needs to get into the guts of cats to sexually reproduce. Other animals can become infected by ingesting T. gondii through direct or indirect contact with cat feces. The parasite can then spread throughout the body and ultimately form cysts in the brain. People can become infected with T. gondii, though usually not as severely as mice. Some studies have hinted, however, at links between the parasite and human behaviors such as inattention and suicide, as well as mental disorders such as schizophrenia. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2020

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26963 - Posted: 01.15.2020

Nell Greenfieldboyce Parrots can perform impressive feats of intelligence, and a new study suggests that some of these "feathered apes" may also practice acts of kindness. African grey parrots voluntarily helped a partner get a food reward by giving the other bird a valuable metal token that could be exchanged for a walnut, according to a newly published report in the journal Current Biology. "This was really surprising that they did this so spontaneously and so readily," says Désirée Brucks, a biologist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland who is interested in the evolution of altruism. Children as young as 1 seem highly motivated to help others, and scientists used to think this kind of prosocial behavior was uniquely human. More recent research has explored "helping" behavior in other species, everything from nonhuman primates to rats and bats. To see whether intelligent birds might help out a feathered pal, Brucks and Auguste von Bayern of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany tested African grey parrots. They used parrots that had previously been trained to understand that specific tokens, in the form of small metal rings, could be traded for a food treat through an exchange window. In their experiment, this exchange window was covered up and closed on one bird's cage, making it impossible for that bird to trade. The bird had a pile of tokens in its cage but no way to use them. Meanwhile, its neighbor in an adjacent cage had an open exchange window — but no tokens for food. © 2020 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26948 - Posted: 01.10.2020

By Catherine Matacic Falling in love is never easy. But do it in a foreign language, and complications pile up quickly, from your first fumbling attempts at deep expression to the inevitable quarrel to the family visit punctuated by remarks that mean so much more than you realize. Now, a study of two dozen terms related to emotion in nearly 2500 languages suggests those misunderstandings aren’t all in your head. Instead, emotional concepts like love, shame, and anger vary in meaning from culture to culture, even when we translate them into the same words. “I wish I had thought of this,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “It’s a very, very well-reasoned, clever approach.” People have argued about emotions since the ancient Greeks. Aristotle suggested they were essential to virtue. The stoics called them antithetical to reason. And in his “forgotten” masterpiece, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin wrote that they likely had a single origin. He thought every culture the world over shared six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Since then, psychologists have looked for traces of these emotions in scores of languages. And although one common experiment, which asks participants to identify emotions from photographs of facial expressions, has led to many claims of universality, critics say an overreliance on concepts from Western, industrialized societies dooms such attempts from the start. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 26907 - Posted: 12.21.2019

By David Brooks This has been a golden age for brain research. We now have amazing brain scans that show which networks in the brain ramp up during different activities. But this emphasis on the brain has subtly fed the illusion that thinking happens only from the neck up. It’s fed the illusion that the advanced parts of our thinking are the “rational” parts up top that try to control the more “primitive” parts down below. So it’s interesting how many scientists are now focusing on the thinking that happens not in your brain but in your gut. You have neurons spread through your innards, and there’s increasing attention on the vagus nerve, which emerges from the brain stem and wanders across the heart, lungs, kidney and gut. The vagus nerve is one of the pathways through which the body and brain talk to each other in an unconscious conversation. Much of this conversation is about how we are relating to others. Human thinking is not primarily about individual calculation, but about social engagement and cooperation. One of the leaders in this field is Stephen W. Porges of Indiana University. When you enter a new situation, Porges argues, your body reacts. Your heart rate may go up. Your blood pressure may change. Signals go up to the brain, which records the “autonomic state” you are in. Maybe you walk into a social situation that feels welcoming. Green light. Your brain and body get prepared for a friendly conversation. But maybe the person in front of you feels threatening. Yellow light. You go into fight-or-flight mode. Your body instantly changes. Your ear, for example, adjusts to hear high and low frequencies — a scream or a growl — rather than midrange frequencies, human speech. Or maybe the threat feels like a matter of life and death. Red light. Your brain and body begin to shut down. According to Porges’s “Polyvagal Theory,” the concept of safety is fundamental to our mental state. People who have experienced trauma have bodies that are highly reactive to perceived threat. They don’t like public places with loud noises. They live in fight-or-flight mode, stressed and anxious. Or, if they feel trapped and constrained, they go numb. Their voice and tone go flat. Physical reactions shape our way of seeing and being. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26869 - Posted: 12.04.2019

Correspondent Lesley Stahl Who among us hasn't wished we could read someone else's mind, know exactly what they're thinking? Well that's impossible, of course, since our thoughts are, more than anything else, our own. Private, personal, unreachable. Or at least that's what we've always, well, thought. Advances in neuroscience have shown that, on a physical level, our thoughts are actually a vast network of neurons firing all across our brains. So if that brain activity could be identified and analyzed, could our thoughts be decoded? Could our minds be read? Well, a team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has spent more than a decade trying to do just that. We started our reporting on their work 10 years ago, and what they've discovered since, has drawn us back. In Carnegie Mellon's scanner room, two floors underground, a steady stream of research subjects come to have their brains and thoughts "read" in this MRI machine. It's a type of scanning called functional MRI, FMRI. That looks at what's happening inside the brain as a person thinks. Marcel Just: It's like being an astronomer when the first telescope is discovered, or being a biologist when the first microscope is-- is developed. Neuroscientist Marcel Just says this technology has made it possible for the first time to see the physical makeup of our thoughts. When we first visited Dr. Just's lab ten years ago, he and his team had conducted a study. They put people in the scanner and asked them to think about ten objects, five of them tools like screwdriver and hammer and five of them dwellings like igloo and castle, while measuring activity levels throughout their brains. The idea was to crunch the data and try to identify distinctive patterns of activity for each object. Lesley Stahl: You had them think about a screwdriver. Marcel Just: Uh-huh. Lesley Stahl: And the computer found the place in the brain where that person was thinking "screwdriver?" Marcel Just: Screwdriver isn't one place in the brain. It's many places in the brain. When you think of a screwdriver, you think about how you hold it, how you twist it, what it looks like… Lesley Stahl: And each of those functions are in different places? Marcel Just: Correct. He showed us that by dividing the brain into thousands of tiny cubes and analyzing the amount of activity in each one, his team was able to identify unique patterns for each object. © 2019 CBS Interactive Inc.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 26853 - Posted: 11.26.2019

By Eva Frederick Yellow is usually the color of happy, joyful emotions. But according to a new study, not all people associate the sunshiney shade with good vibes. To find out what factors might play a role, researchers tested a new hypothesis: What if people’s physical surroundings affect their feelings about certain colors? For instance, if someone lived in cold and rainy Finland, would they feel differently about the color yellow from someone who lived near the Sahara Desert? The researchers looked at color-emotion data from an ongoing international survey of 6625 people in 55 countries. The survey asks participants to rate 12 colors on how closely they are associated with feelings including joy, pride, fear, and shame. Yellow is not so fun in the sun The darker the shade in the below map, the higher the likelihood of people associating the color yellow with joyful emotions. Overall, people were more likely to associate yellow with joy when they lived in rainier countries that lay farther from the equator, researchers report in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 26675 - Posted: 10.07.2019

By Olga Perepelkina, Kristina Astakhova We all remember “the dress.” An illusion like this shows that even a phenomenon as basic as color perception can be ambiguous. Emotions are much more complex entities than colors and thus can lead to even more confusion. Our perception of emotional expressions is related not only to the physical properties of a face, but also to a bunch of other factors affecting both the percipient (for example, a person's past experience, cultural background, or individual expectations) and the situation itself (the context). To test that idea, researchers at Neurodata Lab created a short test and asked more than 1,400 people from 29 countries to have a look at four pairs of photographs, or eight in total. The first image in each pair showed a woman with a certain facial expression. The second was identical to the first, except that it had an object added to it: a mascara brush, a book and glasses, a toothpick or a guitar. These objects added context. People then had to look at every image and indicate if the facial expressions looked emotional to them. Responses differed significantly between the photos with an added object and those without one. On average, people responded that the faces were “emotional” in most images without any additional context (in 3.52 out of four). After an object was added, subjects frequently changed their opinions and instead responded that emotions were present in only one about photo out of four (to be precise, it was 1.2 out of four). Emotional perception depends on context in the broadest sense of this word. The way we express ourselves nonverbally is affected by an array of factors, such as individual differences in age, gender, society or culture, and differences in various situational factors. © 2019 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26612 - Posted: 09.15.2019

Maanvi Singh The notion that you can smile your way to happiness is an enduring one. Back in the 1800s, Charles Darwin was among the first to come up with what modern scientists further developed into the "facial feedback hypothesis." That's the idea that smiling can make you happier and frowning can make you sadder or angrier — that changing your facial expression can intensify or even transform your mood. Dick Van Dyke sang about the phenomenon — and so did Nat King Cole. And it is still taught in psychology classes today. But researchers are now finding that this phenomenon may be more complicated than they once thought. A recent study that reviewed around 50 years of data, including the results of nearly 300 experiments testing the facial feedback theory, has found that if smiling boosts happiness, it's only by a tiny bit. "I know when I'm sad and people tell me to smile, it just makes me more angry." Nick Coles, social psychology researcher, University of Tennessee, Knoxville After crunching all the numbers, the researchers say their results suggest that if 100 people smiled — all else equal among them — only about seven might expect to feel happier than if they hadn't smiled. The study also looked at the effects of a number of other facial expressions, including scowling and frowning, and tried to more generally understand the extent to which positive facial expressions create positive emotions and negative facial expressions create negative emotions. In each case, "the effects were extremely tiny," says Nick Coles, a social psychology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who led the study. The results, published in the June issue of Psychological Bulletin, add to a debate that has been ongoing "for at least 100 years — since the dawn of psychology," Coles says. © 2019 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26370 - Posted: 07.01.2019

By Kevin Arceneaux, Bert N. Bakker, Claire Gothreau, and Gijs Schumacher Science is supposed to be self-correcting. Ugly facts kill beautiful theories, to paraphrase the 19th-century biologist Thomas Huxley. But, as we learned recently, policies at the top scientific journals don’t make this easy. Our story starts in 2008, when a group of researchers published an article (here it is without a paywall) that found political conservatives have stronger physiological reactions to threatening images than liberals do. The article was published in Science, which is one of the most prestigious general science journals around. It’s the kind of journal that can make a career in academia. It was a path-breaking and provocative study. For decades, political scientists and psychologists have tried to understand the psychological roots of ideological differences. The piece published in Science offered some clues as to why liberals and conservatives differ in their worldviews. Perhaps it has to do with how the brain is wired, the researchers suggested—specifically, perhaps it’s because conservatives’ brains are more attuned to threats than liberals’. It was an exciting finding, it helped usher in a new wave of psychophysiological work in the study of politics, and it generated extensive coverage in popular media. In 2018, 10 years after the publication of the study, the findings were featured on an episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast. Fast forward to 2014. All four of us were studying the physiological basis of political attitudes, two of us in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Bakker and Schumacher at the University of Amsterdam), and two of us in Philadelphia (Arceneaux and Gothreau at Temple University). We had raised funds to create labs with expensive equipment for measuring physiological reactions, because we were excited by the possibilities that the 2008 research opened for us. © 2019 The Slate Group LLC.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26348 - Posted: 06.24.2019

Ian Sample Science editor In a project that has all the makings of a Roald Dahl classic, scientists have hit on an answer to the mystery of how man’s best friend got its puppy dog eyes. The sad, imploring expression held such power over humans during 33,000 years of canine domestication that the preference for dogs that could pull off the look steered the evolution of their facial muscles, researchers have said. The result is that dogs gradually acquired a new forehead muscle named the levator anguli oculi medialis, or LAOM, and have used it to deploy the doleful look to devastating effect ever since. “They are very powerful animals in how they capture our hearts,” said Prof Bridget Waller, the director of the Centre for Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Portsmouth. “We pay a lot of attention to faces, they are meaningful to us, and this expression makes dogs look juvenile and sad. It induces a nurturing response. It’s a cute factor.” Puppy dog eyes are achieved by the LAOM raising the inner eyebrows, in some cases quite dramatically. The movement makes the eyes look larger and the face more babyish. Humans use different muscles to produce a similar expression when they are sad, which may explain why it brings out the caregiver in people. To investigate how the look developed in dogs, the UK-US research team acquired wolf and dog cadavers from taxidermists and US state organisations and dissected their heads to compare the facial muscles. No animals were killed for the research. © 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26335 - Posted: 06.18.2019

Nicole Karlis There is no way Leonardo da Vinci could have predicted that the Mona Lisa would remain one of the most widely-debated works of art in modern day — thanks in no small part to her intriguing expression. Indeed, as one of the most famous paintings in the world, Mona Lisa's facial expression continues to beguile both commoners and academics. A 2017 study published in the journal Scientific Reports (part of the network of Nature's journals) proclaimed that Mona Lisa’s smile did indeed depict genuine happiness, according to the study's subjects who compared it with subtly manipulated facial expressions. Now, a new study published in the neuroscience journal Cortex says that her smile is non-genuine. In other words, she's faking it. The three neuroscience and cognition researchers who penned the article fixated on the asymmetry of Mona Lisa’s smile. Some historical theories suggest the facial asymmetry is due to the loss of the subject's anterior teeth, while others have speculated it could have been related to Bell’s Palsy. The Cortex article's authors note that as the upper part of her face does not appear to be active, it is possible to interpret her smile as “non-genuine.” This would relate to theories of emotion neuropsychology, which is the characterization of the behavioral modifications that follow a neurological condition. © 2018 Salon Media Group, Inc

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Link ID: 26300 - Posted: 06.05.2019

Nicholas A. Christakis What is our conscience, and where does it come from? In her highly readable Conscience, the philosopher Patricia Churchland argues that “we would have no moral stance on anything unless we were social”. That we have a conscience at all relates to how evolution has shaped our neurobiology for social living. Thus, we judge what is right or wrong using feelings that urge us in a general direction and judgement that shapes these urges into actions. Such judgement typically reflects “some standard of a group to which the individual feels attached”. This idea of conscience as a neurobiological capacity for internalizing social norms contrasts with strictly philosophical accounts of how and why we tell right from wrong. There is a strand of thought in evolutionary biology (advanced, for instance, by the theorist Bret Weinstein) that the capacity for moral debate itself has a social function, binding groups regardless of the topics contested or their abstract moral ‘rightness’. Moreover, many of our moral rules — such as the idea that we should not betray our friends or abandon our children — have clearly been shaped by natural selection to optimize our capacity to live in groups. Other rules, for instance regarding the correctness of reciprocity, are similar: we feel quite intensely and innately that if someone gives us a gift of food, we should reciprocate on a future occasion. © 2019 Springer Nature Publishing AG

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 26276 - Posted: 05.29.2019

Carolyn Wilke Here’s a downer: Pessimism seems contagious among ravens. But positivity? Not so much. When ravens saw fellow birds’ responses to a disliked food, but not the food itself, their interest in their own food options waned, researchers report May 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study suggests that the birds pick up on and even share negative emotions, the researchers say. Ravens are “very good problem solvers … but this paper’s really highlighting their social intelligence as well,” says Andrew Gallup, a psychologist at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Utica, N.Y., who was not involved in the study. The work paints a richer picture of how the birds’ brains work, he says. Known for their smarts, ravens act in ways that suggest a capacity for empathy, such as by appearing to console a distressed comrade. Thomas Bugnyar, a cognitive ethologist at the University of Vienna, and his colleagues wanted to look into one building block of empathy — whether animals share emotions. To be able to feel for others, an animal needs to be able to feel like others, he says. But sizing up an animal’s mood is tricky. Scientists generally rely on behavioral or physiological cues to clue into a creature’s emotional state. More challenging is assessing how one animal’s mood might influence another’s: Similar actions appearing to stem from kindred emotions may just be mimicry. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2019

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26259 - Posted: 05.22.2019

By DAN HURLEY MAY 15, 2019 The piercing, high-pitched noises were first heard by a couple of recently arrived United States Embassy officials in Havana in late 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected president. They heard the noises in their homes, in the city’s leafy western suburbs. If they moved to a different room, or walked outside, the noise stopped. The two officials said they believed that the sound was man-made, a form of harassment. Around the same time, they began to develop a variety of symptoms: headaches, fatigue, dizziness, mental fog, hearing loss, nausea. On Dec. 30, 2016, the Embassy’s chargé d’affaires, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, and his security chief, Anthony Spotti, were told what the men were experiencing. By then, a third Embassy worker who lived nearby also heard the sounds and began developing symptoms. DeLaurentis eventually sent the three for evaluation by an otolaryngologist at the University of Miami, who told them they had damage to their inner ears’ vestibular organs. Similar reports of sickness after hearing noises began trickling in from other diplomats in Havana. One of them, a foreign-service officer, told me he was awakened one morning in March by a screeching noise. “It paralyzed me,” he said. “When the sound occurred, I could not move. I couldn’t get up until it stopped.” In the days that followed, he felt extreme fatigue, heard a ringing in his ears, found himself making many mistakes at work and became sensitive to loud sounds and bright light. That month, DeLaurentis called a meeting of his senior staff to tell them what was going on. He insisted that they tell no one else — not even their families — which had the perverse effect of heightening the staff members’ anxiety rather than calming it. Within days, DeLaurentis felt compelled to call an open meeting of the American staff. More than 60 people crammed into the Embassy’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — an inner sanctum for confidential communications. They were told about the noises and the symptoms and were offered the opportunity to be tested if they had concerns. Nearly all of those present, as well as some family members, soon asked to be evaluated.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26244 - Posted: 05.17.2019

Chauncey DeVega Human behavior is a function of both nature and nurture. This, of course, extends to politics. Hence, researchers have shown that, on average, the brains of conservative authoritarians as compared to liberals are quite different from one another. For example, conservative authoritarians are more fear-centered, tend to fixate on negativity, default to order and hierarchy, and are averse to new stimuli. By comparison, liberals are more tolerant of ambiguity and are more open to new experiences. The brains of liberals also seek out novelty. However, there is an important qualifier: the social dynamics of a given society at a specific time also have a profound impact on how nature and nurture interact and the types of human behavior which results. Ultimately, human beings are much more than the sum of their parts — though biology may, in fact, play a very outsize role in human behavior. In the United States and Europe, the relationship between nature, nurture and politics is particularly important in light of our shared authoritarian moment. How are right-wing authoritarian leaders such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are able to use fear to stir up racism, nativism, bigotry, and even violence among their supporters? © 2018 Salon Media Group, Inc

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26225 - Posted: 05.10.2019

By Kate Murphy Let’s say you’re walking down the street and coming toward you is someone pushing a baby in a stroller. The baby looks right at you and bursts into a big, gummy grin. What do you do? If you’re like most people, you reflexively smile back and your insides just melt. The baby might react by smiling even more broadly and maybe kicking its feet with delight, which will only deepen your smile and add to the warm feeling spreading in your chest. But what if you couldn’t smile naturally, with the usual crinkles around your eyes and creases in your cheeks? There’s convincing scientific evidence that the same kind of mutual engagement and interplay — with infants, or anyone else — would be difficult to achieve. Experts say mirroring another person’s facial expressions is essential for not only recognizing emotion, but also feeling it. That’s why anything that disrupts one’s ability to emote is cause for concern, particularly in an age when Botox and other cosmetic procedures that paralyze, stretch, plump or otherwise alter the face are commonplace. Permanently pouty lips and smooth brows might be good for selfies, but research suggests they flatten your affect, disconnecting you from your feelings and the feelings of others. “People these days are constantly rearranging their facial appearance in ways that prevent engaging in facial mimicry, having no idea how much we use our faces to coordinate and manage social interactions,” said Paula Niedenthal, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has published several studies on facial mimicry and its emotional and social importance. Following the example of celebrities like the Kardashians, the use of Botox injections is up more than 800 percent since 2000, and the use of soft tissue fillers is up 300 percent. Plus, there has been the advent of so-called “mini-facelifts” whereby people can take a more incremental approach to cosmetic surgery, getting their eyes, foreheads, chins or cheeks done à la carte. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26158 - Posted: 04.20.2019

By Veronique Greenwood The sun bears were making faces at each other. And that was a bit of a surprise. Comparative psychologists have been studying the facial expressions of primates like orangutans and gorillas for years. They have evolved in complex societies and thus need to be able to convey their joy, anger, and other emotions to their companions. But nobody had thought to look at creatures like sun bears, who live mostly solitary lives. Marina Davila-Ross, a primatologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, and her colleagues learned that a handful of the Southeast Asian bears, which primarily live alone in the wild, were in a rehabilitation center near the orangutan center in Malaysia where Dr. Davila-Ross was doing research. Curious about whether facial communication was more common in the animal kingdom that people thought, they deployed cameras to capture hours of footage of the bears interacting with each other. In a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports, they say that sun bears do use facial expressions to communicate, suggesting that the capacity to do so may be widespread, and that social creatures do not have a monopoly on expressing themselves this way. Sun bears are exceedingly solitary. A female’s one or two cubs will live with her for about two years, and then set off for lives on their own. Adults seem to rarely meet, except for mating. At the center, bears that cannot be released back into the wild live in enclosures in groups of five or six. For the bears, it was an unnatural setup — but it was perfect for the scientists. In their footage of 22 bears going about their daily lives, the scientists zeroed in on moments when the animals were playing, batting at each other and grappling good-humoredly. They watched for moments where the playing bears were looking into each other’s faces, and then they looked for certain facial expressions, like opening one’s mouth wide and showing teeth. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26067 - Posted: 03.23.2019

Terry Gross When Frans de Waal started studying nonhuman primates, in the Netherlands more than 40 years ago, he was told not to consider the emotions of the animals he was observing. "Thoughts and feelings — the mental processes basically — were off limits," he says. "We were told not to talk about them, because they were considered by many scientists as 'inner states' and you only were allowed to talk about 'outer states.' " But over the course of his career, de Waal became convinced that primates and other animals express emotions similar to human emotions. He's now the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, where his office window looks out on a colony of chimps. "I am now at the point that I think emotions are more like organs," he says. "All my organs are present in a rat's body, and the same way, I think, all my emotions are probably present in the rat." De Waal writes about primate empathy, rivalry, bonding, sex and murder in his new book, Mama's Last Hug. The title of the book was inspired by a tender interaction between a dying 59-year-old chimp named Mama and de Waal's mentor, Jan van Hooff, who had known Mama for more than 40 years. "People were surprised [by] how humanlike the expression of Mama was and how humanlike her gestures were," de Waal says of the interaction. "I thought, 'Well, everyone knows that chimps are our closest relative, so why wouldn't the way they express their emotions be extremely similar to ours?' But people were surprised by that." © 2019 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26054 - Posted: 03.20.2019