By Kathleen McAuliffe No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 53-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire. Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others. The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom. But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.” Copyright © 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: 16535 - Posted: 03.19.2012

By Scicurious I just came back from an 11 mile run. The wind wasn’t awful like it usually is, the sun was out, and I was at peace with the world, and right now, I still am. Later, I know my knees will be yelling at me and my body will want nothing more than to lie down. But right now? Right now I feel FANTASTIC. What I am in the happy, zen-like, yet curiously energetic throes of is what is popularly known as the “runner’s high”. The runner’s high is a state of bliss achieved by athletes (not just runners) during and immediately following prolonged and intense exercise. It can be an extremely powerful, emotional experience. Many athletes will say they get it (and indeed, some would say we MUST get it, because otherwise why would we keep running 26.2 miles at a stretch?), but what IS it exactly? For some people it’s highly emotional, for some it’s peaceful, and for some it’s a burst of energy. And there are plenty of other people who don’t appear to get it at all. What causes it? Why do some people get it and others don’t? Well, the short answer is that we don’t know. As I was coming back from my run, blissful and emotive enough that the sight of a small puppy could make me weepy with joy, I began to wonder myself…what is up with me? As I re-hydrated and and began to sift through the literature, I found…well, not much. But what I did find suggests two competing hypothesis: the endogenous opioid hypothesis and the cannabinoid hypothesis. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 16508 - Posted: 03.13.2012

by Jane J. Lee Like a football player who just scored a touchdown, male white-flippered penguins (Eudyptula minor albosignata) perform triumph displays after defeating an opponent. Now, researchers in New Zealand have found that those victory dances, complete with a braying, donkeylike call and flipper waving, make it less likely that nearby penguins will challenge the winner. "Scientists have spent a lot of time studying antagonistic interactions, but quite often, they turn the camera off after the fight, so they miss a lot," says Tom Sherratt, an evolutionary ecologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, who was not involved in the current study. Researchers have investigated the effects of triumph displays on the loser, but because this is a fairly recent field of study, the new research is probably the first published account of its effects on nearby birds, he added. Explanations for the function of triumph displays include browbeating an opponent so that he doesn't forget who beat him and signaling to an audience not to mess with you. Researchers at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, wanted to know whether penguins near a fight picked up on those signals. So they studied the effects of triumph displays on nesting white-flippered penguins in a colony at Flea Bay in New Zealand. These penguins were ideal study subjects because they're really aggressive and squabble frequently, says Joseph Waas, a behavioral ecologist and a co-author on the study. Only about 5% to 10% of their aggressive encounters lead to a full-fledged fight, complete with slashing bill hooks and flipper bashing, he says. But it's not unusual to see male penguins that are missing an eye. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 16498 - Posted: 03.10.2012

By PATRICIA PEARSON A friend recently told me about a new app for the treatment of phobias. You stare at pictures of dental drills, snakes or airplane interiors, depending on your affliction, and these totems of menace — interspersed with reassuring images of teddy bears — gradually cease to provoke you. Does it work? We can’t know. My friend has a phobia of stuffed animals. It’s something, he says, about the soulless glass eyes. We were talking on the phone, but I could picture him shuddering. I, meanwhile, feel fine about snakes, jets and needles, but am haunted by heights and clusters. I haven’t seen apps for those, at least not yet. Of all the manifestations of anxiety, specific phobias are by far the most idiosyncratic. About 6 percent of Americans have an acute fear of animals like rats and birds. But after that, the sources of terror are myriad. Why objects bunched tightly together should send me into states of high alarm, I cannot say. My daughter once festooned a sock puppet with googly eyes from the craft store, and when I encountered it in the house, I reared like a spooked horse. Being a conscientious mother, I managed to conceal my sense of horror, but she has since witnessed my reaction to stands of mushrooms in the woods, and to dandelion buds in the grass. There is something — some hint of unchecked growth, of aggressive profusion — that I spy in certain geometric arrangements. Could it pertain to disgust, a burgeoning field of research? Might the underlying fear be one of chaos, or of the rapidly multiplying cells in cancer? © 2012 The New York Times Company

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: 16470 - Posted: 03.05.2012

By Maia Szalavitz Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can hurt just as much. Indeed, according to converging evidence reported in a new review in Current Directions in Psychological Science, physical and social pain are processed in some of the same regions of the brain. Naomi Eisenberger, co-director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at UCLA, published the first brain-imaging paper revealing the overlap in 2003. She had been studying participants’ reactions to being rejected by other players (actually just a computer opponent) in a video game. “The first time we noticed the similarity, I was analyzing data next to a colleague of mine who was analyzing data on physical pain in irritable bowel syndrome,” she says. “We noticed similarities in the way that the neural data looked.” Physical pain has two components, Eisenberger explains: sensory and emotional. The sensory part of physical pain is mapped in the brain depending on which part of the body is hurt, but the emotional component — how distressing your brain determines the pain to be — is registered in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). That’s also where the sting of social pain is processed. “The affective component, which tells you more how much the pain is bothering [you], how much suffering it is causing — that experience seems to be more localized to the dACC and the anterior insula,” Eisenberger says. © 2012 Time Inc.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 16452 - Posted: 03.01.2012

Giovanni Frazzetto From rage and grief to exquisite tendresse, emotion is laid bare in theatre. Few art forms electrify or illuminate as powerfully as stage acting. But how have theatrical greats such as John Gielgud or Vanessa Redgrave cast their spell? Acting may be one of the most ancient arts, but science is only just beginning to get to grips with it. Science started to seep into theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the Russian actor and theatre director Constantin Stanislavski. Founder of the influential Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavski turned to physiologist Ivan Pavlov's research on conditioned reflexes to improve his acting method. The aim was to create performance that united psychological experience and physical action. Our brains recreate the emotions of actors such as Geraldine James when we watch them perform. Stanislavski sought a way to consciously trigger an actor's emotional expression. Science had begun to discover that neural pathways underlie complex behaviour and emotions, which can be conditioned in response to a changing environment. By practising key physical actions pertinent to the character and the play, Stanislavski realized, the actor could learn, by reflex, how to express the psychological experience of the emotion — with help from the imagination. A particular posture or movement would trigger a particular emotion. So by working hard on small actions such as clenching the fists and tensing the neck muscles, the actor could trigger anger, or they could awaken feelings of despair by shuffling, drooping and bowing the shoulders. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16440 - Posted: 02.27.2012

By Hannah Tepper At the end of his second year of Harvard graduate school, neuroscientist and bestselling author Richard Davidson did something his colleagues suspected would mark the end of his academic career: He skipped town and went to India and Sri Lanka for three months to “study meditation.” In the ’70s, just as today, people tended to lump meditation into the new-age category, along with things like astrology, crystals, tantra and herbal “remedies.” But contrary to what his skeptics presumed, not only did Davidson return to resume his studies at Harvard, his trip also marked the beginning of Davidson’s most spectacular body of work: neuroscientific research indicating that meditation (and other strictly mental activity) changes the neuroplasticity of the brain. Thirty years later, Davidson is still researching and writing about the intersection of neuroscience and emotion — he currently teaches psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his new book, written with Sharon Begley, “The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live, and How You Can Change Them,” Davidson lays out a fascinating theory that parses out emotional style into six dimensions, giving readers a better understanding of where they stand on this emotional plane and how emotional styles affect the qualities of their everyday lives. Last week Salon spoke over the phone with Davidson about how Botox injections disrupt our ability to emote, the connection between happiness and health, and why emotion has been unfairly and historically underappreciated. © 2012 Salon Media Group,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16435 - Posted: 02.27.2012

By Sandra G. Boodman, Of all the adjustments forced on Rose Anderson and her family, among the hardest was dealing with the crying jags. Around 9 p.m. on Aug. 4, 2004, while Anderson and her family were crossing the street from a New Jersey beach boardwalk to their hotel, a drunk driver barreled into her husband, Richard. He was flung 26 feet before slamming headfirst onto the pavement. A 47-year-old manager for the New York City government, Richard underwent emergency brain surgery and spent three weeks in a coma, followed by nearly two months in the hospital. He suffered a severe traumatic brain injury that left him with permanent cognitive and speech problems and robbed him of his sense of smell and taste. “They were preparing me for a lifetime of therapies,” recalled Rose of the weeks her husband spent at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in East Orange, N.J. But no one prepared the Andersons for Richard’s unpredictable and uncontrollable weeping, which began weeks after the accident and seemed to worsen with time. “He would cry with almost anyone,” his wife recalled. Thoughts of his dogs, his family or even happy occasions could trigger tears. His teenage daughters found the incidents, which occurred several times a week, almost unbearable. “As things got better, this shined brighter,” said Richard Anderson, who describes himself as a “very chauvinistic kind of guy” who was mortified by his inability to control his emotions. “It was very upsetting to me to have tears just rolling down my face.” © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

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: 16410 - Posted: 02.21.2012

By Alan Boyle When Occupy Wall Street and similar protests played out over the past year, the phenomenon looked familiar to Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal: He's seen similar moral outrage over economic inequity expressed by monkeys and chimps. And he thinks we could learn a lesson or two from our fellow primates. "The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated," he told reporters today, on the final day of this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, Canada. "Inequity is not good for your health, basically." Based on primate studies, that goes for the haves as well as the have-nots. Far from being a uniquely human quality, a sense of fairness is something biologists have seen in studies of primates as well as crows and dogs. Even elephants may have an appreciation of inequity, although de Waal said he and his colleagues haven't done such a study with that species because "you don't want to piss off an elephant." One of the classic studies involves capuchin monkeys who were given treats when they exchanged tokens with their human handlers. Two types of treats were offered: cucumber slices (meh...) and grapes (yum!). If one monkey saw that another monkey was consistently getting grapes while she was getting only cucumber slices, she'd quickly start protesting — by flinging the cucumber back at the handler and angrily jumping onto the cage walls. © 2012 msnbc.com

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: 16409 - Posted: 02.21.2012

I am a neuroscientist, doing research and living in The Bronx. I study the brain systems of love and relationships, which are curiously related to brain systems of hunger and thirst. Valentine's Day is special for me. I live in a small town area in the Bronx called City Island. City Island resembles an old New England shipbuilding village, has many fish restaurants, boats and a nice place for exercise and personal training. As I walk through my neighborhood these days to get to the exercise place, I am charmed by exuberant shiny red hearts streaming down a front-steps railing. At another house a large Valentine heart hangs over a Christmas wreath, as if to seamlessly spread joy and gifts from one holiday to another. A flower basket of shiny red hearts hangs on another door as a reminder that the month of May and flowers will come. Romantic love knows no season, but it's great to celebrate it in the middle of winter when some of us crave a little warmth, temperature-wise and relationship-wise. What is love? How about a simpler question -- Is romantic love an emotion? I bet you would say it is. I thought so before I started my research, but now I have a different answer for the question. But also, I constantly ask, how can research on the brain physiology of love be relevant to my neighbors on City Island behind the doors with hearts, and the doors without? I love my work. There is no greater fascination for me than how the brain organizes behavior. Physiology of mind. What a concept! Even the cells of the brain have a raw beauty and instant fascination for me. It may be their complexity and likeness to trees, stars and planets. Scientists label brain cells to study them with shiny fluorescent colors of green and blue -- even red. When I look through the microscope at the brain, I see a universe in each square millimeter of tissue. For me, it is this brain-universe that underlies behavior, even romantic behavior and feelings. © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

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: 16381 - Posted: 02.16.2012

By JOHN TIERNEY Do you make decisions quickly based on incomplete information? Do you lose your temper quickly? Are you easily bored? Do you thrive in conditions that seem chaotic to others, or do you like everything well organized? Those are the kinds of questions used to measure novelty-seeking, a personality trait long associated with trouble. As researchers analyzed its genetic roots and relations to the brain’s dopamine system, they linked this trait with problems like attention deficit disorder, compulsive spending and gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal behavior. Now, though, after extensively tracking novelty-seekers, researchers are seeing the upside. In the right combination with other traits, it’s a crucial predictor of well-being. “Novelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age,” says C. Robert Cloninger, the psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring this trait. The problems with novelty-seeking showed up in his early research in the 1990s; the advantages have become apparent after he and his colleagues tested and tracked thousands of people in the United States, Israel and Finland. “It can lead to antisocial behavior,” he says, “but if you combine this adventurousness and curiosity with persistence and a sense that it’s not all about you, then you get the kind of creativity that benefits society as a whole.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16380 - Posted: 02.14.2012

By Carolyn Butler, This Valentine’s Day, as our collective thoughts shift to tender cards, heart-shaped chocolates, overpriced bouquets and other extravagant gestures of love, I can’t help but wonder what really attracts us to one mate over another. Is it hot sex? Fairy-tale romance? Destiny? Or are we merely at the beck and call of our hormones and brain circuitry? Online dating sites trumpet their knack at identifying “chemistry,” but it turns out that basic biology may play at least as strong a role in love as do socialization, environment, fate and other factors. “We like to feel independent and free of the brain systems that regulate the mating habits and regimens of animals, but the fact is that we’re not,” says neuroendocrinologist Tom Sherman, an associate professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine. “The latest research indicates that some of our very complex behaviors — like love, courtship and pair bonding — are still regulated, to some degree, by a fairly simple set of neurochemicals.” Indeed, researchers have now identified three brain systems that are at work in mating and reproduction: lust, which is primarily mediated by the sex hormone testosterone; romantic love, which is primarily mediated by dopamine, a neurotransmitter that drives the brain’s reward and pleasure centers, and is characterized by craving and focused attention for just one person at a time; and attachment, which is primarily mediated by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin and is associated with the bonding and security you often feel with a long-term partner. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

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: 16375 - Posted: 02.14.2012

By Sarah Estes Graham and Jesse Graham Disability advocates were seeing red after two elderly women with medical conditions were allegedly strip-searched by TSA agents at New York’s JFK airport last December. You’d have to have a pretty thick skin not to empathize with an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman having her colostomy bag frisked. But the notion of one passenger being an unlikely terrorist also belies a discomfiting flipside: another passenger being a more likely candidate. For the last few decades, social scientists have been teasing out the mental and physiological systems involved in profiling and social bias. Taken at face value, the biases look like simple prejudice, like assuming that black people are criminals, or that people from the Middle East are terrorists. But research on social cognition is revealing much more subtle and unconscious mechanisms behind these social biases. Case in point: objects can ‘grab’ properties from nearby objects, in a phenomenon scientists call illusory conjunction. For instance, a red circle next to a white triangle might make the triangle seem red. This same effect can also apply to social targets: a neutral face can ‘grab’ the emotion of the angry person next to it, causing the neutral person to be remembered as angry. In a recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers at Arizona State demonstrated that male faces are more likely than female faces to “grab” the anger from an adjacent face, while female faces are more likely to “grab” happiness. Using both photos of actual people and artificial images morphed to appear angry or happy, the scientists presented students with side-by-side images of faces (either male or female, happy or angry), along with two numbers they had to add in order to distract their conscious minds. © 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: 16362 - Posted: 02.09.2012

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature Gorillas bare their teeth in a playful "grin" to reassure one another during play, scientists have discovered. This "flash of teeth" seems to let their playmate know that they do not intend to harm them. The researchers, from the University of Portsmouth, study the facial expressions of primates to uncover the evolutionary origins of human smiling and laughter. They published their findings in the American Journal of Primatology. Lead researcher Dr Bridget Waller explained that non-human primates have two expressions "that shed light on our smiling". Their "playface", she explained, appears to be a foundation of human laughter. Dr Waller told BBC Nature: "[During play, gorillas] open their mouths and cover their teeth as if to say, 'I could bite you but I'm not going to'." Another expression the primates use, where they reveal both rows of "sparkly white teeth" is believed to show one of the origins of human smiling. Smiling signal This is not a playful expression, Dr Waller said. "It's a greeting; a subordinate display." BBC © 2012

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: 16328 - Posted: 02.02.2012

By JAMES GORMAN Disgust is the Cinderella of emotions. While fear, sadness and anger, its nasty, flashy sisters, have drawn the rapt attention of psychologists, poor disgust has been hidden away in a corner, left to muck around in the ashes. No longer. Disgust is having its moment in the light as researchers find that it does more than cause that sick feeling in the stomach. It protects human beings from disease and parasites, and affects almost every aspect of human relations, from romance to politics. In several new books and a steady stream of research papers, scientists are exploring the evolution of disgust and its role in attitudes toward food, sexuality and other people. Paul Rozin, a psychologist who is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer of modern disgust research, began researching it with a few collaborators in the 1980s, when disgust was far from the mainstream. “It was always the other emotion,” he said. “Now it’s hot.” It still won’t wear glass slippers, which may be just as well, given the stuff it has to walk through. Nonetheless, its reach takes disgust beyond the realms of rot and excrement. © 2012 The New York Times Company

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: 16293 - Posted: 01.24.2012

By JOSEPH LEDOUX You are taking a walk in the woods ― pleasant, invigorating, the sun shining through the leaves. Suddenly, a rattlesnake appears at your feet. You experience something at that moment. You freeze, your heart rate shoots up and you begin to sweat ― a quick, automatic sequence of physical reactions. That reaction is fear. A week later, you are taking the same walk again. Sunshine, pleasure, but no rattlesnake. Still, you are worried that you will encounter one. The experience of walking through the woods is fraught with worry. You are anxious. This simple distinction between anxiety and fear is an important one in the task of defining and treating of anxiety disorders, which affect many millions of people and account for more visits to mental health professionals each year than any of the other broad categories of psychiatric disorders. Scientists generally define fear as a negative emotional state triggered by the presence of a stimulus (the snake) that has the potential to cause harm, and anxiety as a negative emotional state in which the threat is not present but anticipated. We sometimes confuse the two: When someone says he is afraid he will fail an exam or get caught stealing or cheating, he should, by the definitions above, be saying he is anxious instead. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16285 - Posted: 01.23.2012

By Andrew Newberg Researchers have pinpointed differences between the brains of believers and nonbelievers, but the neural picture is not yet complete. Several studies have revealed that people who practice meditation or have prayed for many years exhibit increased activity and have more brain tissue in their frontal lobes, regions associated with attention and reward, as compared with people who do not meditate or pray. A more recent study revealed that people who have had “born again” experiences have a smaller hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in emotions and memory, than atheists do. These findings, however, are difficult to interpret because they do not clarify whether having larger frontal lobes or a smaller hippocampus causes a person to become more religious or whether being pious triggers changes in these brain regions. Various experiments have also tried to elucidate whether believing in God causes similar brain changes as believing in something else. The results, so far, show that thinking about God may activate the same parts of the brain as thinking about an airplane, a friend or a lamppost. For instance, one study showed that when religious people prayed to God, they used some of the same areas of the brain as when they talked to an average Joe. In other words, in the religious person’s brain, God is just as real as any object or person. © 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: 16261 - Posted: 01.17.2012

By Christoph W. Korn Ask a bride before walking down the aisle “How likely are you to get divorced?” and most will respond “Not a chance!” Tell her that the average divorce rate is close to 50 percent, and ask again. Would she change her mind? Unlikely. Even law students who have learned everything about the legal aspects of divorce, including its likelihood, state that their own chances of getting divorced are basically nil. How can we explain this? Psychologists have documented human optimism for decades. They have learned that people generally overestimate their likelihood of experiencing positive events, such as winning the lottery, and underestimate their likelihood of experiencing negative events, such as being involved in an accident or suffering from cancer. Informing people about their statistical likelihood of experiencing negative events, such as divorce, is surprisingly ineffective at altering their optimistic predictions, and highlighting previously unknown risk factors for diseases fails to engender realistic perceptions of medical vulnerability. How can people maintain their rose-colored views of the future in the face of reality? Which neural processes are involved in people’s optimistic predictions? To answer these questions we have investigated optimism by using a recent, burgeoning approach in neuroscience: Describing neural activity related to complex behavior with the simple concept of “prediction errors.” Prediction errors are the brain’s way of keeping track of how well it is doing at predicting what is going to happen in the future. © 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: 16247 - Posted: 01.14.2012

By Jason Castro If you have never watched bees carefully, you are missing out. Look closely as they gently curl and uncoil their mouthparts around food, and you will sense that they are not just eating but enjoying their meal. Watch a bit more, and the hesitant flicks and sags of their antennae seem to convey some kind of emotion. Do those twitches signal annoyance? Or something like enthusiasm? Whether bees really experience any of these emotions is an open scientific question. It is also an important one, with implications for how we should treat not just bees but the great majority of animals. Recently studies by Melissa Bateson and her colleagues at Newcastle University in England have rekindled the debate over these issues by showing that honeybees may experience something akin to moods. Using simple behavioral tests, Bate­son’s team showed that honeybees under stress tend to be pessimistic. Other tests have demonstrated that monkeys, dogs and starlings all tend to react similarly under duress and likewise see the proverbial glass as half empty. Although this finding does not—and cannot—prove that bees experience humanlike emotions, it does give pause. We should take seriously the possibility that insects, too, have emotions. First, a little bit about bees. They are members of the diverse group of animals lacking backbones—indeed, more than 95 percent of all animal species are invertebrates. Despite the varied and often nuanced behaviors they can exhibit, invertebrates are sometimes regarded as life’s second string, a mindless and unfeeling band of alien critters. If that seems somewhat melodramatic, just consider our willingness to boil some of them alive. © 2011 Scientific American,

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: 16194 - Posted: 12.27.2011

Virginia Gewin Rats, often anthropomorphized as greedy and selfish, may not be the callous, cartoon villains they are sometimes made out to be. A paper published today in Science demonstrates that the rodents will liberate trapped cage-mates — even when they have nothing to gain1. There is a growing body of research showing that animals respond to the emotions of others. But it wasn't certain whether rats could suppress their own distress in order to aid another rat. Lead author Peggy Mason, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, thinks her work is a significant step towards settling this question. “This finding is the big kahuna — evidence that empathy motivates one individual to help another,” she says. Following a two-week introduction period, pairs of rats were put inside an arena. One was trapped inside a central restrainer, while the other roamed free in the larger space. By day six or seven, on average, the roaming rat learned to free the trapped rat. The free rats seldom opened empty containers or those containing a toy rat. Although fewer in number, all the female rats tested became door openers; whereas 30% of males never became door openers. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16129 - Posted: 12.10.2011