Links for Keyword: Aggression

Follow us on Facebook or subscribe to our mailing list, to receive news updates. Learn more.

Links 121 - 140 of 386

When the Right to Bear Arms Includes the Mentally Ill

By MICHAEL LUO and MIKE McINTIRE Last April, workers at Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut called the police to report that a psychiatric patient named Mark Russo had threatened to shoot his mother if officers tried to take the 18 rifles and shotguns he kept at her house. Mr. Russo, who was off his medication for paranoid schizophrenia, also talked about the recent elementary school massacre in Newtown and told a nurse that he “could take a chair and kill you or bash your head in between the eyes,” court records show. The police seized the firearms, as well as seven high-capacity magazines, but Mr. Russo, 55, was eventually allowed to return to the trailer in Middletown where he lives alone. In an interview there recently, he denied that he had schizophrenia but said he was taking his medication now — though only “the smallest dose,” because he is forced to. His hospitalization, he explained, stemmed from a misunderstanding: Seeking a message from God on whether to dissociate himself from his family, he had stabbed a basketball and waited for it to reinflate itself. When it did, he told relatives they would not be seeing him again, prompting them to call the police. As for his guns, Mr. Russo is scheduled to get them back in the spring, as mandated by Connecticut law. “I don’t think they ever should have been taken out of my house,” he said. “I plan to get all my guns and ammo and knives back in April.” The Russo case highlights a central, unresolved issue in the debate over balancing public safety and the Second Amendment right to bear arms: just how powerless law enforcement can be when it comes to keeping firearms out of the hands of people who are mentally ill. Connecticut’s law giving the police broad leeway to seize and hold guns for up to a year is actually relatively strict. Most states simply adhere to the federal standard, banning gun possession only after someone is involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility or designated as mentally ill or incompetent after a court proceeding or other formal legal process. Relatively few with mental health issues, even serious ones, reach this point. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: 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: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 19064 - Posted: 12.23.2013

Neuroscience Is Getting Its Day in Court, Whether It’s Ready or Not

By Greg Miller John McCluskey killed a vacationing couple in eastern New Mexico in 2010, set their camper trailer on fire with their bodies inside, and took off with their truck. In sentencing hearings held after his conviction, McCluskey’s lawyers argued that he should be spared the death penalty because abnormalities in his brain had made him impulsive and unable to control his behavior. Last week, a jury declared it had been unable to reach the unanimous decision required to sentence him to death. It’s not known if the brain scans and other scientific evidence played a role in McCluskey escaping the death penalty. And it’s not the first time such evidence has been introduced when the death penalty was on the line. In fact, neuroscience is making increasingly regular courtroom appearances. “It’s amazing the extent to which judges, attorneys, and juries are taking this in stride,” said Owen Jones, a legal scholar at Vanderbilt University who observed a few hours of testimony in McCluskey’s case. “Just a few generations ago, this was beyond the realm of science fiction,” Jones said. But now, “you watch the jurors and they reflect no outward manifestation of what an extraordinary thing it is to look inside another person’s brain.” ‘It’s amazing the extent to which judges, attorneys, and juries are taking this in stride.’ Nita Farahany, a bioethicist at Duke University has been tracking the rise of legal cases involving neuroscience evidence in the U.S. The number of judicial opinions mentioning neuroscience evidence tripled between 2005 and 2011, from roughly 100 to more than 300. “It’s more prevalent than my numbers show,” Farahany said. That’s because most cases involving neuroscience evidence do not result in a written judicial opinion, and those that don’t are exceedingly difficult to find. © 2013 Condé Nast.

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: 19045 - Posted: 12.17.2013

Chameleon colours predict outcome of lizard duel

by Chelsea Whyte For chameleons, war paint isn't just an accessory, it is a battle flag. The brightness of the colours these lizards display and how rapidly they change are good indicators of which animal will win in a fight. Chameleons are famous for changing colour to hide from predators by blending into their surroundings, but they also use colour for social communication. One of the most diversely coloured species is the veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus), which lives in parts of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. "At their brightest, they have vertical yellow stripes, blue-green bellies, black speckles that provide contrast and make their stripes stand out, and orange around the corner of their mouths," says Russell Ligon, a behavioural ecologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. To see if individual variations in these colours and patterns influenced the outcome of a fight, Ligon and his colleague Kevin McGraw staged a round-robin tournament in which 10 male veiled chameleons were pitted against each other. Using a high-speed camera, they were able to capture the brightness and colour changes from 28 points on each animal, taking into account how the colours would look to a chameleon's eye – which sees both visible and ultraviolet light. They found that males with the brightest side stripes were more likely to instigate a fight, whereas those with brighter heads that changed colour most rapidly were more likely to win. This suggests that different colours and patterns may signal different aspects of competitive behaviour – how motivated the chameleon is versus its strength. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: 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: 19023 - Posted: 12.11.2013

In a Bird’s Nest, an Animal Behavior Puzzle

By JAMES GORMAN Sometimes the scientists who study animal behavior solve puzzles and other times they uncover new ones. The war between mockingbirds and cowbirds is a case in point. Cowbirds are brood parasites, meaning they lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species, thus unloading the messy and demanding business of chick-rearing. They also peck holes in the eggs of the host birds, destroying as many as they can. Mockingbirds are a favorite target of this plan, and it seems to make perfect sense for them to viciously attack cowbirds when they catch them in the nest. But when Ros Gloag, then a doctoral student at Oxford, and her colleagues in Argentina looked closely at the war between chalk-browed mockingbirds and shiny cowbirds, they found something unexpected, as they reported in the November issue of Animal Behaviour. They stationed small video cameras near the nests of 40 pairs of chalk-browed mockingbirds. Over two breeding seasons they recorded more than 200 attacks on intruding cowbirds. They were surprised to find that these attacks, which their videos show to be quite vicious, did not stop the cowbirds from laying eggs. The cowbirds would hunker down and let the much large mockingbirds deliver hammer blows to the head, but in matter of seconds they would lay an egg and flee. How could such a failed strategy persist in evolution? © 2013 The New York Times Company

Birds might bluff about intent to attack

Philip Ball Some animals, like some people, are more aggressive than others: it is just the way they are. But research suggests that for birds at least, it is not always easy to tell which is which. Some birds are inclined to give out exaggerated signs of their aggressiveness, others to underplay it. It is rather like the menacing biker who turns out to be a pussycat, or the geek who will break a bottle over your head. But the analogy with humans goes only so far, because many birds announce their aggression about mating and territory not by appearance but through song and gesture. For example, behavioural ecologist Michael Beecher and his colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle have observed how the song sparrow (Melospiza melodia) indicates its intention to attack a dummy bird (see video above) or a loudspeaker playing bird songs by either vocalizing distinctive ‘soft songs’ or waving its wings (see video below), both of which are perceived as threatening1. Violent tendencies Both aggressive signalling and the ensuing violent behaviour vary from one bird to another, in a way that correlates with other personality traits such as boldness2. But these attributes also vary for a single individual at different times: birds can have particularly grouchy or placid days. Nonetheless, the degree of aggression implied by the precursory signals generally reflects the actual behaviour, in what evolutionary biologists call an honest signal. But it's not always honest. Earlier this year, Beecher's team showed1 that there is some variability in aggressive signalling that does not match behaviour: a bird might act stroppy but not follow through with an attack. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 19002 - Posted: 12.05.2013

The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath

One afternoon in October 2005, neuroscientist James Fallon was looking at brain scans of serial killers. As part of a research project at UC Irvine, he was sifting through thousands of PET scans to find anatomical patterns in the brain that correlated with psychopathic tendencies in the real world. “I was looking at many scans, scans of murderers mixed in with schizophrenics, depressives and other, normal brains,” he says. “Out of serendipity, I was also doing a study on Alzheimer’s and as part of that, had brain scans from me and everyone in my family right on my desk.” “I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological,” he says, noting that it showed low activity in certain areas of the frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality and self-control. Knowing that it belonged to a member of his family, Fallon checked his lab’s PET machine for an error (it was working perfectly fine) and then decided he simply had to break the blinding that prevented him from knowing whose brain was pictured. When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own. Many of us would hide this discovery and never tell a soul, out of fear or embarrassment of being labeled a psychopath. Perhaps because boldness and disinhibition are noted psychopathic tendencies, Fallon has gone all in towards the opposite direction, telling the world about his finding in a TED Talk, an NPR interview and now a new book published last month, The Psychopath Inside. In it, Fallon seeks to reconcile how he—a happily married family man—could demonstrate the same anatomical patterns that marked the minds of serial killers. “I’ve never killed anybody, or raped anyone,” he says. “So the first thing I thought was that maybe my hypothesis was wrong, and that these brain areas are not reflective of psychopathy or murderous behavior.”

Related chapters from BN: 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 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18964 - Posted: 11.25.2013

A Cold War Fought by Women

By JOHN TIERNEY How aggressive is the human female? When the anthropologist Sarah B. Hrdy surveyed the research literature three decades ago, she concluded that “the competitive component in the nature of women remains anecdotal, intuitively sensed, but not confirmed by science.” Science has come a long way since then, as Dr. Hrdy notes in her introduction to a recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society devoted entirely to the topic of female aggression. She credits the “stunning” amount of new evidence partly to better research techniques and partly to the entry of so many women into scientific fields once dominated by men. The existence of female competition may seem obvious to anyone who has been in a high-school cafeteria or a singles bar, but analyzing it has been difficult because it tends be more subtle and indirect (and a lot less violent) than the male variety. Now that researchers have been looking more closely, they say that this “intrasexual competition” is the most important factor explaining the pressures that young women feel to meet standards of sexual conduct and physical appearance. The old doubts about female competitiveness derived partly from an evolutionary analysis of the reproductive odds in ancient polygynous societies in which some men were left single because dominant males had multiple wives. So men had to compete to have a chance of reproducing, whereas virtually all women were assured of it. But even in those societies, women were not passive trophies for victorious males. They had their own incentives to compete with one another for more desirable partners and more resources for their children. And now that most people live in monogamous societies, most women face the same odds as men. In fact, they face tougher odds in some places, like the many college campuses with more women than men. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Are We Hard-Wired for War?

By DAVID P. BARASH WAR is in the air. Sad to say, there’s nothing new about this. Nor is there anything new about the claim that war has always been with us, and always will be. What is new, it seems, is the degree to which this claim is wrapped in the apparent acquiescence of science, especially the findings of evolutionary biology with respect to a war-prone “human nature.” This year, an article in The National Interest titled “What Our Primate Relatives Say About War” answered the question “Why war?” with “Because we are human.” In recent years, a piece in New Scientist asserted that warfare has “played an integral part in our evolution” and an article in the journal Science claimed that “death in warfare is so common in hunter-gatherer societies that it was an important evolutionary pressure on early Homo sapiens.” The emerging popular consensus about our biological predisposition to warfare is troubling. It is not just scientifically weak; it is also morally unfortunate, as it fosters an unjustifiably limited vision of human potential. Although there is considerable reason to think that at least some of our hominin ancestors engaged in warlike activities, there is also comparable evidence that others did not. While it is plausible that Homo sapiens owed much of its rapid brain evolution to natural selection’s favoring individuals that were smart enough to defeat their human rivals in violent competition, it is also plausible that we became highly intelligent because selection favored those of our ancestors who were especially adroit at communicating and cooperating. Conflict avoidance, reconciliation and cooperative problem solving could also have been altogether “biological” and positively selected for. © 2013 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: 18718 - Posted: 09.30.2013

To Avoid Fights, Mice Sing to the Clouds

by Megan Gannon, Live Science Deep in the cloud forests of Central America, two species of singing mice put on a high-pitched opera to mark their territory and stave off clashes, researchers discovered. Alston's singing mouse (Scotinomys teguina) and the Chiriqui singing mouse (S. xerampelinus) have overlapping lifestyles in the cloud forests of Costa Rica and Panama. But the tawny cousins seem to establish geographic boundaries so they can avoid competing with each other. "A long-standing question in biology is why some animals are found in particular places and not others," study researcher Bret Pasch, a postdoctoral fellow at the the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. "What factors govern the distribution of species across space?" As it turns out, a little communication between individuals affects the spread of both species as a whole. Both species of singing mice produce vocalizations that are barely audible to humans. As video footage of the mouse-y opera from the foggy forest floor shows, the creatures throw their heads back and belt out songs in the form of rapidly repeated notes, known as trills. The Alston's mouse in the clip even looks likes it's taking a bow after its solo. © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC

Did Antidepressant Play a Role in Navy Yard Massacre?

By John Horgan Once again, antidepressants have been linked to an episode of horrific violence. The New York Times reports that Aaron Alexis, who allegedly shot 12 people to death at a Navy facility in Washington, D.C., earlier this week, received a prescription for the antidepressant trazodone in August. When I first researched antidepressants almost 20 years ago, I encountered claims that they sometimes triggered violent episodes—for example, a 1989 incident in which a Kentucky man taking fluoxetine (brand name Prozac) shot to death eight co-workers and then himself. I dismissed the claims, reasoning that, because people prescribed psychiatric drugs are disturbed to begin with, it is not surprising that a tiny fraction hurt themselves and/or others. By 2004, however, in part because of lawsuits that forced pharmaceutical companies to disclose data on adverse effects, the FDA ordered antidepressant manufacturers to include a warning that antidepressants “increased the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults in short-term studies of major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders.” Alexis, who was 34, was reportedly seeking treatment for insomnia when he received his prescription for trazodone. Originally marketed as an antidepressant after its approval by the FDA in 1981, trazodone is also prescribed for anxiety and insomnia. Trazodone was a precursor of the extremely popular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs); like the SSRIs, trazodone boosts levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. © 2013 Scientific American

The Day When Neurons Go on Trial

By JIM DWYER Here are law students on a Tuesday morning in 2013, hearing that researchers hope over the next decade or so to map the wiring of the human brain, seeing how individual cells link to bigger circuits. A decade is a sprint, less time than since 9/11, to use one benchmark. The scientists want to lift the hood and get a look at the human mind. The students, in a seminar at Fordham University School of Law taught by Prof. Deborah W. Denno, wonder what that will mean for the law. Over and over, they put questions to a guest speaker, Joshua R. Sanes, director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard, about the implications for society if and when brain science can identify with confidence a propensity for violence, or for lying. He bats it right back at them. “You tell me,” Dr. Sanes said. “It’s a huge issue. I wish I had something smart to say.” Last year, President Obama announced that the federal government would create a Brain Initiative to speed up the development of tools that can track how the brain works and how it breaks. It is not hard to imagine the benefits, beginning with more carefully targeted treatments for people afflicted with psychiatric ailments. “There has not been a brand new type of drug for antidepression or autism or schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or O.C.D. in something like 25 years,” Dr. Sanes said. “This is where we have to make a long-term investment and come up with some new types of help because what we are doing isn’t working.” Work on animals has shown in broad strokes how information gets into the head and processed, but current imaging tools cannot keep up with the brain’s processing speed, or are not powerful enough to follow the molecular transactions involved in passing information and creating thought. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Does Media Violence Lead to the Real Thing?

By VASILIS K. POZIOS, PRAVEEN R. KAMBAM and H. ERIC BENDER EARLIER this summer the actor Jim Carrey, a star of the new superhero movie “Kick-Ass 2,” tweeted that he was distancing himself from the film because, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, “in all good conscience I cannot support” the movie’s extensive and graphically violent scenes. Mark Millar, a creator of the “Kick-Ass” comic book series and one of the movie’s executive producers, responded that he has “never quite bought the notion that violence in fiction leads to violence in real life any more than Harry Potter casting a spell creates more boy wizards in real life.” While Mr. Carrey’s point of view has its adherents, most people reflexively agree with Mr. Millar. After all, the logic goes, millions of Americans see violent imagery in films and on TV every day, but vanishingly few become killers. But a growing body of research indicates that this reasoning may be off base. Exposure to violent imagery does not preordain violence, but it is a risk factor. We would never say: “I’ve smoked cigarettes for a long time, and I don’t have lung cancer. Therefore there’s no link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.” So why use such flawed reasoning when it comes to media violence? There is now consensus that exposure to media violence is linked to actual violent behavior — a link found by many scholars to be on par with the correlation of exposure to secondhand smoke and the risk of lung cancer. In a meta-analysis of 217 studies published between 1957 and 1990, the psychologists George Comstock and Haejung Paik found that the short-term effect of exposure to media violence on actual physical violence against a person was moderate to large in strength. Mr. Comstock and Ms. Paik also conducted a meta-analysis of studies that looked at the correlation between habitual viewing of violent media and aggressive behavior at a point in time. They found 200 studies showing a moderate, positive relationship between watching television violence and physical aggression against another person. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 18562 - Posted: 08.26.2013

Drinking pop tied to aggression in 5-year-olds

Drinking several servings of soda a day is associated with behaviour problems such as aggression, a new study of preschoolers suggests. When researchers looked at 2,929 children in the U.S., they found 43 per cent of parents said their child had at least one serving of soda a day and four per cent had four or more servings daily. Four per cent of parents in the study reported their children had four or more servings of pop a day. Sugar and caffeine are potential triggers for behaviour, but parenting practices and home environment are also an influence.Four per cent of parents in the study reported their children had four or more servings of pop a day. Sugar and caffeine are potential triggers for behaviour, but parenting practices and home environment are also an influence. (Reuters) "In this large sample of five-year-old urban U.S. children, we found strong and consistent relationships between soda consumption and a range of problem behaviours, consistent with the findings of previous studies in adolescents," Shakira Suglia of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York and her coauthors concluded in Friday's issue of the Journal of Pediatrics. Children who consumed four or more servings of soda per day were more than twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, to get into fights and to physically attack people compared with children who drank no soda. Drinking four servings of soft drinks was associated with increased aggressive behaviour, even after accounting for factors such as TV viewing, candy consumption, maternal depression and intimate partner violence. © CBC 2013

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 18521 - Posted: 08.17.2013

Spider's personality matters when job hunting

By Meghan Rosen The career choices of one type of social spider depend on its personality. Character wins out over factors such as age or body size in shaping the spider’s job prospects, researchers report July 31 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Lena Grinsted of Aarhus University in Denmark and colleagues marked more than 600 Stegodyphus sarasinorum spiders with brightly colored paint to identify individuals. Then the team gave the spiders a personality quiz. Researchers measured spiders’ boldness by blasting them with a puff of air and aggression by prodding them with a stick. Bold spiders froze when they first felt the air but quickly recovered. Aggressive spiders struck a threatening pose after feeling the stick. Then the team let the spiders build nests for hiding and webs for capturing prey. When the researchers wiggled a leaf in the webs to mimic a struggling insect, the boldest spiders hustled out to investigate. The findings bolster the idea that spider colonies are not homogenous societies where everyone contributes in the same way, the authors suggest. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 18448 - Posted: 08.03.2013

Smart, Social and Erratic in Captivity

By JAMES GORMAN Should some of the most social, intelligent and charismatic animals on the planet be kept in captivity by human beings? That is a question asked more frequently than ever by both scientists and animal welfare advocates, sometimes about close human cousins like chimpanzees and other great apes, but also about another animal that is remarkable for its intelligence and complex social organization — the killer whale, or orca. Killer whales, found in all the world’s oceans, were once as despised as wolves. But in the last half century these elegant black-and-white predators — a threat to seals and other prey as they cruise the oceans, but often friendly to humans in the wild — have joined the pantheon of adored wildlife, along with the familiar polar bears, elephants and lions. With life spans that approach those of humans, orcas have strong family bonds, elaborate vocal communication and cooperative hunting strategies. And their beauty and power, combined with a willingness to work with humans, have made them legendary performers at marine parks since they were first captured and exhibited in the 1960s. They are no longer taken from the wild as young to be raised and trained, but are bred in captivity in the United States for public display at marine parks. Some scientists and activists have argued for years against keeping them in artificial enclosures and training them for exhibition. They argue for more natural settings, like enclosed sea pens, as well as an end to captive breeding and to the orcas’ use in what opponents call entertainment and marine parks call education. Now the issue has been raised with new intensity in the documentary film “Blackfish” and the book “Death at SeaWorld,” by David Kirby, just released in paperback. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Crickets talk trash, dance and brag, study finds

An Ontario researcher has discovered that common male crickets talk trash, dance and brag after winning a fight. The discovery has caught the attention of fellow researchers and National Geographic magazine. Lauren Fitzsimmons, a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Windsor, discovered the brash behaviour. Fitzsimmons placed pairs of male crickets in a small, clear arena, which always led to fights. The arena included a viewing area for other crickets. She set up three audience situations: a male watching and listening to a fight, a female watching and listening to a fight, or no audience. The combatants bit, pushed and flipped each other around the ring. "After a series of these bouts, one male will kind of sulk away and not interact anymore, while the other will perform a song and dance," Fitzsimmons said. She said the winning cricket would "shake his body back and forth" and chirp in victory. "When we had a male audience watching, the male would produce more of these victory displays," Fitzsimmons said. "The speculation is they can tell there is another individual there, and they’re showing off. "We know females prefer dominant males and males who win fights." © CBC 2013

Related chapters from BN: 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: 18378 - Posted: 07.16.2013

Smile: You Are About to Lose

By Piercarlo Valdesolo The posed stare-down is a staple of the pre-fight ritual. Two fighters, one day removed from attempting to beat the memories from each other, stand impossibly close, raise their clenched fists and fix their gaze on the other’s eyes as cameras click away. This has always seemed little more than a vehicle for media hype, but new research from psychologists at the University of Illinois suggests that there may be clues in this bit of theatre that predict the results of the fight to come. Specifically, the researchers hypothesized that there’s something about the fighters’ facial expressions in this standoff that reveal the competitive dynamics between them. A subtle, and perhaps unintentional, communication of submission from one fighter to the other. A recognition of the opponent’s power. The smile. Facial expressions have long been thought to be reliable indicators of a person’s true feelings. Indeed, in his book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” Darwin suggested that such expressions have evolved precisely because they serve this important function. The smile has attracted much empirical attention and has generally been interpreted as a signal of an individuals’ immediate, as well as long-term, well-being. In a particularly interesting study, the frequency and “authenticity” of smiles in high school yearbook photos tended to predict higher levels of subjective well-being years later. But smiles can mean different things in different contexts. The researchers here were particularly interested in what a smile might mean when displayed between competitors. Instead of merely communicating a fighter’s good spirits, the researchers hypothesized that it would be a submissive signal that reveals a fighter’s reduced hostility and lower willingness to aggress towards the opponent. © 2013 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 18232 - Posted: 06.05.2013

Wasps aren’t objective when it comes to fighting

By Felicity Muth If you grew up with brothers or sisters you will know that competition is a key part of childhood. Personally, I experienced competition for food resources (the last bar of chocolate), parental investment (attention) and other more unusual resources (the best colour of lego pieces). As we age, we continue competing, although what we compete for changes. We compete in sports, for partners and for jobs. Like humans, pretty much all other animals will compete in one way or another. Even if they live a solitary life they may be still competing indirectly with others. But, like humans, animals need to choose which battles are worth fighting, and how much effort to put into it. One obvious way of deciding when to bother competing with another is the absolute worth of the thing you’re fighting over. If you and a stranger stumbled across some money in the street, you might fight vigorously for a $100 note, but more half-heartedly for $5 (this is of course an example using some very money-driven and aggressive individuals). However, how much value an individual puts on an item’s worth is going to be somewhat subjective. If you’re poor and starving, you might invest more into fighting for $5 than someone who is not. Thus, most competitions will contain both objective and subjective aspects: the intrinsic worth of an object (large food items are better than small), and the individual’s state when they’re assessing that item. © 2013 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 18225 - Posted: 06.04.2013

From Fearsome Predator to Man’s Best Friend

By CARL ZIMMER Imagine a wolf catching a Frisbee a dozen times in a row, or leading police officers to a stash of cocaine, or just sleeping peacefully next to you on your couch. It’s a stretch, to say the least. Dogs may have evolved from wolves, but the minds of the two canines are profoundly different. Dog brains, as I wrote last month in The New York Times, have become exquisitely tuned to our own. Scientists are now zeroing in on some of the genes that were crucial to the rewiring of dog brains. Their results are fascinating, and not only because they can help us understand how dogs turned into man’s best friend. They may also teach us something about the evolution of our own brains: Some of the genes that evolved in dogs are the same ones that evolved in us. To trace the change in dog brains, scientists have first had to work out how dog breeds are related to one another, and how they’re all related to wolves. Ya-Ping Zhang, a geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has led an international network of scientists who have compared pieces of DNA from different canines. They’ve come to the conclusion that wolves started their transformation into dogs in East Asia. Those early dogs then spread to other parts of the world. Many of the breeds we’re most familiar with, like German shepherds and golden retrievers, emerged only in the past few centuries. © 2013 The New York Times Company

The Criminal Mind

By ADRIAN RAINE In studying brain scans of criminals, researchers are discovering tell-tale signs of violent tendencies. WSJ's Jason Bellini speaks with Professor Adrian Raine about his latest discoveries. The scientific study of crime got its start on a cold, gray November morning in 1871, on the east coast of Italy. Cesare Lombroso, a psychiatrist and prison doctor at an asylum for the criminally insane, was performing a routine autopsy on an infamous Calabrian brigand named Giuseppe Villella. Lombroso found an unusual indentation at the base of Villella's skull. From this singular observation, he would go on to become the founding father of modern criminology. Lombroso's controversial theory had two key points: that crime originated in large measure from deformities of the brain and that criminals were an evolutionary throwback to more primitive species. Criminals, he believed, could be identified on the basis of physical characteristics, such as a large jaw and a sloping forehead. Based on his measurements of such traits, Lombroso created an evolutionary hierarchy, with Northern Italians and Jews at the top and Southern Italians (like Villella), along with Bolivians and Peruvians, at the bottom. These beliefs, based partly on pseudoscientific phrenological theories about the shape and size of the human head, flourished throughout Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Lombroso was Jewish and a celebrated intellectual in his day, but the theory he spawned turned out to be socially and scientifically disastrous, not least by encouraging early-20th-century ideas about which human beings were and were not fit to reproduce—or to live at all. ©2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 18111 - Posted: 05.04.2013

Previous Page | Next Page

Links By Chapter:

Links for Keyword: Aggression