by Debora MacKenzie Ever blushed in an inappropriate situation, like when the doctor is listening to your heart? It turns out that the same regions of your face that redden during sexual stimulation also heat up, slightly, during innocent social interactions. Amanda Hahn and colleagues at St Andrew's University in Fife, UK, used a heat-sensitive camera to map small changes of temperature in the faces of young heterosexual women while an experimenter touched them with an instrument they were told was measuring skin colour (it wasn't). Touching the palm or elbow had no effect, but contact with the cheek or top of the breastbone raised the temperature around the eyes, mouth and nose by 0.2 °C to 0.5 °C on average, and by a full degree in certain spots. An earlier study found this area heats up in sexually aroused men. The female subjects reported few or no feelings of arousal or embarrassment, but their facial temperature rose more when the experimenter was a young man. "What is surprising is the magnitude," says Hahn. She now hopes to determine whether we are aware of these subtle changes in others, and if they affect how we interact. Journal reference: Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0338 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16859 - Posted: 05.31.2012

By Laura Sanders As every kid knows, the very best toy is the one that someone else is playing with. A new study on covetous adults explains why other people’s possessions always seem better. Seeds of this desire are sown in the mirror neuron system, a part of the brain that is activated in a similar pattern whether a person is performing an action or merely watching someone else do it. “Mimetic desire” was first articulated by the French philosopher René Girard in the 1980s. Envy can spread among people like a disease, a force that explains much of human behavior, Girard proposed. Now, French neuroscientists have verified the phenomenon and even attempted to explain how it happens. “They really take a philosophical theory and make it an experiment,” says neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni of UCLA. Copying other people’s desires is a good way to learn about the environment, says study coauthor Mathias Pessiglione of INSERM in Paris. Eating the food that other people eat, for example, is a simple way to avoid food poisoning. But this adaptive feature can break down when desired objects are in short supply. Pessiglione and his team showed adults one of two videos: a piece of candy sitting on a surface, or a person’s hand reaching toward a different-colored piece of candy. Participants then rated the desirability of each candy they saw. As the mimetic desire theory predicts, people rated the about-to-get-grabbed candy as more desirable. The same effect held for clothes, tools and even toys, the team reports in the May 23 Journal of Neuroscience. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16829 - Posted: 05.23.2012

By Jeanna Bryner Getting up close and personal with a furry tarantula is probably the very last thing someone with a spider phobia would opt for, but the encounter may be the ticket to busting the brain's resistance to arachnids. A tried-and-true exposure therapy, this one lasting just hours, changed activity in the brain's fear regions just minutes after the session was complete, researchers found. "Before treatment, some of these participants wouldn't walk on grass for fear of spiders or would stay out of their home or dorm room for days if they thought a spider was present," said lead study author Katherina Hauner, postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in a statement. After a single therapy session lasting up to three hours, "they were able to walk right up and touch or hold a tarantula. And they could still touch it after six months," Hauner said. Spider phobia is a type of anxiety disorder called specific phobia, which also includes phobias of blood, needles, snakes, enclosed places and others. About 9.4 percent of the U.S. population has experienced a specific phobia at some point in their lifetime, Hauner said. Hauner told LiveScience she hopes people who have specific phobias, particularly of spiders, will realize that successful treatments are out there, and that their phobias can take just hours to cure (though some cases can take a couple weeks to cure, she noted). "It's still not easy. It involves being motivated to overcome your fear." © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16828 - Posted: 05.23.2012

By Daisy Yuhas Worrywarts, beware: all that fretting may be for naught. Anxiety has long been interpreted as a symptom of hyperawareness and sensitivity to danger, but a study published last December in Biological Psychology turns that logic on its head. Tahl Frenkel, a graduate student in psychology at Tel Aviv University, asked 17 students who had anxious per­sonalities and 22 students who were more mellow to identify when they detected fear in a series of increasingly frightened faces. As expected, the anxious group spoke up before their calmer counterparts. The twist, however, came from the volunteers’ brain activity, recorded with electrodes on each student’s scalp. The brains of anxious subjects barely responded to the images until the frightened face had reached a certain obvious threshold, at which point their brains leapt into action as though caught off guard. Meanwhile nonanxious respondents showed increasing brain activity earlier in the exercise, which built up subtly with each increasingly fearful face. Although their behavioral response was slower, their brain activity suggests that the mellow subjects picked up on subtle differences in the images more quickly. The result implies that worriers are less aware of potential danger—challeng­ing the common theory that anxious individuals are hypervigilant. Frenkel be­lieves that worrywarts’ low sensitivity to external warning signs causes them to be startled frequently by the seemingly sudden appearance of threats, which leaves them in a state of chronic stress. The brain activity in nonanxious subjects, Frenkel explains, may be evidence of an “early subconscious warning mechanism,” which keeps them cool, calm and collected. [For more on how to ease chronic worrying, see “Why We Worry,” by Victoria Stern; Scientific American Mind, November/December 2009.] © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 16823 - Posted: 05.22.2012

By Jason G. Goldman When is a yawn just a yawn? When is a yawn more than a yawn? Contagious yawning – the increase in likelihood that you will yawn after watching or hearing someone else yawn – has been of particular interest to researchers in fields as varied as primatology, developmental psychology, and psychopathology. At first, scientists thought that yawning was a mechanism designed to keep the brain cool. However, it turns out that there is a correlation between the susceptibility for contagious yawning and self-reported empathy. Humans who performed better at theory of mind tasks (a cognitive building block required for empathy) also yawn contagiously more often (PDF). And two conditions that have been associated with poorer performance on theory of mind tasks are also associated with reduced or absent contagious yawning: schizotypy and autism. In 2008, psychologist Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni and colleagues from the University of London showed, for the first time, that human yawns are contagious for domestic dogs. Dogs’ unique social skills in interacting with humans is probably the result of selection pressures during the domestication process. Therefore, they reasoned, it is possible that as a result of that process, dogs may have developed the capacity of empathy towards humans. And if so, it is further possible that they may yawn when they see and hear humans yawn. In one condition, the experimenter, who was a stranger to the dogs, attracted the dogs’ attention and then initiated a genuine yawn. The yawn was repeated for five minutes after re-establishing eye contact with the dog, which meant that the number of yawns varied between ten and nineteen per individual. In the control condition, the experimenter displayed a fake yawn, which mimicked the mouth opening and closing actions, but not the vocalization or other subtle muscular changes. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16818 - Posted: 05.19.2012

by Helen Thomson In 1848, 25-year-old railroad supervisor Phineas Gage was using a 3 foot 7 inch iron rod to pack blasting powder into a rock when he triggered an explosion that shot the rod straight through his left cheek and out of the top of his head. His survival and subsequent change in personality made him one of neuroscience's most famous case studies – one of the first to highlight that specific areas of the brain affect particular aspects of behaviour. Now, for the first time, researchers have reconstructed a model of the damage caused to the pathways that connected regions of Gage's brain. The result not only adds dimension to the historical case but also provides insights into conditions such as Alzheimer's disease that result in similar personality changes. Due to the absence of Gage's original brain tissue and lack of a recorded autopsy, estimating the extent of brain damage has been difficult. In 2001, researchers at Harvard University were the last to be given permission by the Warren Anatomical Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to scan Gage's skull. They used computed tomography – essentially a 3D X-ray – but the scans were lost after the researchers left the university. Through some "persistent cajoling" John Van Horn at the University of California, Los Angeles and colleagues recently unearthed the scans. "I just thought it's an absolute shame that this is one of the most valuable pieces of data in the history of neuroscience and it's lying in someone's desk drawer," says Van Horn. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 16813 - Posted: 05.19.2012

Jessica Hamzelou, contributor In his latest book The Moral Molecule, neuroeconomist Paul Zak describes oxytocin’s role in trust, bonding and even virtuous behaviour. New Scientist caught up with him about avoiding the term “the cuddle chemical” and trying not to make a bride faint on her wedding day. Why study moral behaviour? Before my mother was my mother she was a nun, so morality was something that was very present. We had very clear top-down guidance: “you do this and you go to heaven, you do that and you go to hell”. Even as a child I felt that that was incredibly harsh and wrong. The idea that there’s some perfect received wisdom to tell the difference between right and wrong just didn’t make any sense to me. I wanted to find a concrete, biological basis for good and bad behaviour in humans. It’s not my place to say whether God exists or not, but it seemed like there were all kinds of good people who weren’t raised Catholic like I was. And that seemed like a deep mystery about life: if there are 2000 religions, why do we see a large number of those having the same kind of prescriptions for what constitutes good behaviour and a good life? That was the deeper, personal reason that, in retrospect, drove ten years of hard labour in the lab and in the field. What got you interested in oxytocin? I had done work in the late 1990s showing that countries in which levels of interpersonal trust were high were richer countries, and countries that were poor were by and large low trust countries. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 16784 - Posted: 05.12.2012

by Zuberoa Marcos Yawn next to your dog, and she may do the same. Though it seems simple, this contagious behavior is actually quite remarkable: Only a few animals do it, and only dogs cross the species barrier. Now a new study finds that dogs yawn even when they only hear the sound of us yawning, the strongest evidence yet that canines may be able to empathize with us. Besides people and dogs, contagious yawning has been observed in gelada baboons, stump-tail macaques, and chimpanzees. Humans tend to yawn more with friends and acquaintances, suggesting that "catching" someone's yawn may be tied to feelings of empathy. Similarly, some studies have found that dogs tend to yawn more after watching familiar people yawning. But it is unclear whether the canine behavior is linked to empathy as it is in people. One clue might be if even the mere sound of a human yawn elicited yawning in dogs. To that end, scientists at the University of Porto in Portugal recruited 29 dogs, all of whom had lived for at least 6 months with their owners. To reduce anxiety, the study was performed in familiar rooms in the dogs' homes and in the presence of a known person but with no visual contact with their owners. The team, led by behavioral biologist Karine Silva, recorded yawning sounds of the dogs' owners and an unfamiliar woman as well as an artificial control sound consisting of a computer-reversed yawn. (To help induce natural yawning, volunteers listened to an audio loop of prerecorded yawns over headphones.) Each dog heard all of the sounds in two sessions, each carried out 7 days apart. During the sessions, the researchers measured the number of elicited yawns in dogs in response to sounds from known and unknown people. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BP6e: 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: 16761 - Posted: 05.08.2012

By Bruce Bower Feeling peppy may lead older adults to settle for less. In a new study, seniors in a good mood compared fewer options and made worse choices than did those in a bad mood or younger participants. “Positive emotions may have costs for older adults’ decision making,” says study coauthor Bettina von Helversen, a psychologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. A bright mood makes it harder to select a quality option from a series of choices, such as finding a bargain on a new computer offered at different prices by various online sites, say von Helversen and University of Basel colleague Rui Mata. Though the study looked at comparing prices on products, picking from a series of choices, what psychologists call sequential decision making, especially comes into play in situations such as choosing an apartment, hiring a caretaker or selecting a mate. Previous research has found that people’s moods generally become increasingly upbeat as they age. It’s this good mood, perhaps more than intellectual declines, that undermine seniors’ sequential decisions by promoting a limited search of available options, the researchers report in an upcoming Psychology and Aging. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: 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 Consciousness
Link ID: 16752 - Posted: 05.05.2012

By SINDYA N. BHANOO Studies have suggested that older adults are better off letting go of regrets, while younger adults, with more time left to make life changes, may benefit more from holding on to them. Now, German researchers are studying brain activity to understand the biological mechanism behind this phenomenon; they report their findings in the journal Science. Using functional M.R.I. scans, the researchers found that after facing a missed opportunity, young adults (average age 25) and depressed older adults (average age 65) had similar brain activity in a region called the ventral striatum, which is associated with feelings of regret. Healthy older individuals displayed a different brain pattern, suggesting that they were able to regulate their emotions more effectively. “It seems that we have a lifelong ability to use our brain to regulate our emotions, even when we are old,” said the study’s first author, Stefanie Brassen, a neuroscientist at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. She and her colleagues asked individuals to play a computer game designed to induce regret at a missed opportunity. Players could open boxes that contained either gold or a devil; if they reached the devil, the game ended and they lost all their loot. Players could decide at the end of each round whether they wanted to continue playing. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16699 - Posted: 04.24.2012

Jeannine Stamatakis We often feel rejected when faced with the popular clique at school or the office bully. Learning to protect yourself against such social assaults can prove quite difficult, but new research shows a common painkiller may reduce the impact of these upsetting interactions. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, may buffer against social pain. The lead investigator, psychologist C. Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky, hypothesized that the neural overlap between physical and emotional pain might enable a drug designed to alleviate physical pain to cushion emotional pain. In one experiment, DeWall and his team examined 62 healthy volunteers who took 1,000 milligrams of either acet­aminophen or a placebo daily for three weeks. In the evening the participants described to what extent they experienced social disappointment or felt upset during the day using a version of the Hurt Feelings Scale, a social pain measurement tool. Participants who took acet­­amin­o­phen reported fewer hurt feelings and more resilience to social pain than the subjects receiving the placebo. In a second experiment, the investigators looked at 25 healthy volunteers who ingested 2,000 milligrams of either acet­aminophen or a placebo every day over the course of three weeks. During the investigation, subjects played a computer game geared to evoke feelings of social rejection while lying in a functional MRI machine. The resulting brain scans revealed that the participants who received the drug exhibited reduced neural responses to social rejection in brain regions associated with interpreting emotional and physical pain. In contrast, the regions associated with physical pain became more active in the placebo subjects when they were rebuffed in the video game. Overall, these results indicate that acetaminophen may decrease self-reported social pain over time. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16697 - Posted: 04.24.2012

by John Bohannon A smile and a frown mean the same thing everywhere—or so say many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists, who for more than a century have argued that all humans express basic emotions the same way. But a new study of people's perceptions of computer-generated faces suggests that facial expressions may not be universal and that our culture strongly shapes the way we read and express emotions. The hypothesis that facial expressions convey the same meaning the world over goes all the way back to Charles Darwin. In his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the famed naturalist identified six basic emotional states: happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness. If facial expressions are just cultural traits, passed down through the generations by imitation, their meanings would have diverged by now, he argued. A smile would signal happiness for some and disgust for others. But that's not what he found, based on his correspondence with researchers around the world using photos of various facial expressions. So Darwin concluded that the common ancestors of all living humans had the same set of basic emotions, with corresponding facial expressions as part of our genetic inheritance. Smiles and frowns are biological, not cultural. Or are they? Rachael Jack, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, says that there is a fundamental flaw in the facial expression studies carried out since Darwin's time: Researchers have been using Darwin's six basic expressions as their starting point, and yet they were first identified by Western European scientists studying Western European subjects. The fact that non-Western subjects can recognize the emotions from photographs of those facial expressions has been taken as support for the universality hypothesis. But what if non-Western cultures have different basic emotions that underlie their expressions? Those expressions may be similar to those of Westerners, but with subtle differences that have gone undetected because no one has looked. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BP6e: 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: 16663 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By Michele Solis Your personality says a lot about you. To categorize people by their disposition, psychologists have long relied on questionnaires. Now, however, researchers may be closing in on a tangible view of character in the brain. According to a recent study in PLoS One, resting brain activity varies with a person’s scores on a well-established personality test. When awake but not engaged in a task, each subject displayed activity patterns distinct from those found in someone with different traits. Even at rest, the brain hums with neural activity. Re­search­ers think these resting-state patterns reflect how the brain typically operates when we interact with the world. “You can think of it as showing which connections in the brain are on speed dial and which ones aren’t,” says Michael Milham, a psychiatrist at the Child Mind Institute in New York City, who led the study. Using functional MRI, the researchers monitored the resting state of 39 healthy participants and looked for regions that tended to activate together. How tightly coord­inated the activity was between a pair of regions—completely in sync or only somewhat the same—correl­ated with scores from one of five personality domains: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agree­ableness and conscientiousness. For example, neuroti­cism was associated with areas related to self-evaluation and fear. Other results were more surprising, suggesting an unexpected role in personality for the visual cortex and cerebellum—areas better known for visual processing and movement, respectively. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 16654 - Posted: 04.16.2012

by Chris Mooney JOHN HIBBING used to be a traditional political scientist. He studied elections, ran opinion polls and researched why some politicians opt to retire rather than wait around to be defeated by challengers. "About as traditional as it gets," he says. Roughly a decade ago, though, Hibbing shifted to a new approach that is starting to revolutionise how we think about politics. He began to explore whether political preferences might be partly based in biology. The idea initially met with great scepticism from his peers. But Hibbing and his collaborators at the Political Physiology Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln now have a stack of scientific publications backing the idea. For example, when they measure the physical reactions of liberals and conservatives to aversive stimuli, they find major differences. Tough-on-crime, pro-military conservatives have a more pronounced startle reflex after hearing a sudden loud noise. They also show stronger skin responses when shown threatening images and look at them more rapidly and for longer. It is conventional to think about political ideology as a set of ideas people consciously hold about the way society should be ordered. A tacit assumption is that we come to these beliefs rationally, by reading and thinking about the issues. If we differ, it is because we reason to different conclusions. Hibbing's results suggest otherwise. "One of the things we're trying to get people to realise is that those who disagree with them politically really do experience the world in a different fashion," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16643 - Posted: 04.12.2012

By Laura Sanders Nerve cells from the brain’s emotion hub talk directly to a region that doles out attention, a study of monkeys shows. The connection, described in the April 11 Journal of Neuroscience, may help explain how people automatically focus on emotional events. “I’m really excited to see this in press,” says neurologist Helen Mayberg of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “This provides an anatomical explanation for why an emotionally salient event always bumps the board.” A clearer description of how emotions influence attention is important for understanding and treating psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression, both of which may involve perturbed attention systems. Although scientists knew that emotionally significant events quickly capture attention, it wasn’t clear how the process works. To find out, Basilis Zikopoulos and Helen Barbas, both of Boston University, started with a likely suspect — the amygdala. In humans, the amygdala is made up of two structures the shape and size of almonds, one on each side of the brain. Best known for its role in processing fear, the amygdala helps process other emotions, too, including pleasurable ones. The researchers injected dyes deep into the brains of 10 rhesus monkeys. The dyes traced individual neurons and their long, information-carrying tendrils called axons. This technique captured details that even the best human imaging techniques miss. “In humans, we just look at the major highways, so we don’t see the side streets,” Zikopoulos says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: 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 Consciousness
Link ID: 16637 - Posted: 04.12.2012

By Susan Milius Watching coworkers in paper masks swim among the office cubicles acting out fish personalities turns out to be pretty informative. Admittedly, “informative” didn’t seem to be the word on the tip of the tongue of Science News’ editor in chief when, in the grip of urgent editorial business, he charged up the stairs and happened upon writers neglecting their keyboards for make-believe group swims. After some hasty smoothing over, though, he joined in as a virtual predator, sending fish of all personality types scattering for shelter. Predators, information, group-ups and even games all have their place in studies of animal personality, including the mosquito fish research that inspired the office fish simulation. Even though fish dynamics over generations were mimicked by just a few terrestrial mammals between deadlines, the mix of personalities proved as important for animal welfare in cubicles as in real waterways. Differences in the ways individual fish act, once groaned about as the inevitable messiness of gathering data on real animals, have in recent years become their own topic of research. Geese, hissing cockroaches, cichlids, great tits, mallards, sparrows and European rabbits have all starred in such studies. Now that the idea of individual animals having a version of personality — or, more formally, “behavioral type” — has become unsurprising in scientific discourse, the next wave of research is looking at the consequences of the mix of personalities in a group. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16617 - Posted: 04.07.2012

By Maria Popova The secret of happiness is arguably humanity's longest-standing fixation, and its mechanisms are among the most consuming obsessions of modern science. In The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Cornell University psychology professor Shimon Edelman takes an unconventional -- and cautiously self-aware of its own unorthodoxy -- lens to the holy grail of human existence, blending hard science with literature and philosophy to reverse-engineer the brain's capacity for well-being. What emerges is a kind of conceptual toolbox that lets us peer into the computational underbelly of our minds and its central processes -- memory, perception, motivation and emotion, critical thinking, social cognition, and language -- to better understand not only how the mind works but also how we can optimize it for happiness. As it turns out, a fundamental truth about happiness lies in the very language of the Declaration of Independence, which encouraged its pursuit: The focus on the pursuit of happiness, endorsed by the Declaration of Independence, fits well with the idea of life as a journey -- a bright thread that runs through the literary cannon of the collective human culture. With the world at your feet, the turns that you should take along the way depend on what you are at the outset and on what you become as the journey lengthens. Accordingly, the present book is an attempt to understand, in a deeper sense than merely metaphorical, what it means to be human and how humans are shaped by the journey thorough this world, which the poet John Keats called 'the vale of soul-making' -- in particular, how it puts within the soul's reach 'a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence. © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16591 - Posted: 03.31.2012

By Bruce Bower Meeting the Almighty takes hallucinatory talent and training. And Hannah, a member of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, has got it down. She talks with God every day. Sometimes she imagines that God is walking beside her, although no vision of the Almighty appears. On other occasions, Hannah goes on what she calls “date nights” with God. She buys a sandwich, finds a secluded bench and imagines that the big guy is sitting next to her. In both cases, imagination occasionally gives way to a sense of truly hearing God speak. During these divine experiences, Hannah gets in touch with her unconscious mind, an undercurrent of thoughts and feelings she regards not as her own but as those of the Holy Spirit. “I recognize that it’s not me, but God inside me, that I’m having a conversation with,” Hannah told Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. “Which makes this relationship way more complicated … trying to imagine some real but not real figure outside of my own self.” Luhrmann spent more than four years interviewing evangelical Christians in Chicago and Palo Alto, Calif., for her 2012 book When God Talks Back. Her conversations with Vineyard members, including the young woman given the pseudonym Hannah, are part of an ongoing effort to try to understand how ordinary people can meet God through spiritual hallucinations. Researchers studying hallucinations often focus on people with schizophrenia and other psychotic ailments who experience incessant, unwanted and distressing hallucinations. But emotionally stable, well-functioning individuals can have unusual sensory experiences too. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: The Chemical Bases of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Link ID: 16574 - Posted: 03.26.2012

By DIANE ACKERMAN A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you. All relationships change the brain — but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self. Every great love affair begins with a scream. At birth, the brain starts blazing new neural pathways based on its odyssey in an alien world. An infant is steeped in bright, buzzing, bristling sensations, raw emotions and the curious feelings they unleash, weird objects, a flux of faces, shadowy images and dreams — but most of all a powerfully magnetic primary caregiver whose wizardry astounds. Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can’t show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn’t matter whose body is whose. Wordlessly, relying on the heart’s semaphores, the mother says all an infant needs to hear, communicating through eyes, face and voice. Thanks to advances in neuroimaging, we now have evidence that a baby’s first attachments imprint its brain. The patterns of a lifetime’s behaviors, thoughts, self-regard and choice of sweethearts all begin in this crucible. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16571 - Posted: 03.26.2012

By Scicurious “That’s not FAIR!” This is the line that rings through most houses with at least one kid. We all know when something’s not fair. That car that drove up the shoulder while you waited in traffic (rrrrr)? That’s a cheater, and that’s not fair. The person who cut in line at the grocery store instead of waiting? That’s not fair either. We get a sense of what is fair or unfair at a pretty young age, and we also understand that we are allowed, and indeed encouraged in some cases, to punish unfair behavior. But we don’t all punish unfair behavior the same way, especially when punishment may be detrimental to us. What is responsible for this difference? What mediates our reactions to what is unfair? The authors of this study think it might be serotonin, and that it may have as much to do with honesty as it does with a sense of what is fair. The basis for this paper was a game used in psychology testing, a very common game called the “Ultimatum game”. In this game, you play against one other player (or, often, against a computer). That other player has found some money, say $10. They want to divide the money with you, and you can choose whether you accept their offer, or reject the offer of splitting the money. For example, if they offer to split 50-50, you may take that offer and the $5, while if they offer to split 90-10, you may be insulted and reject it. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16562 - Posted: 03.22.2012