Quotes About Behavior

There is often an inverse relationship between levels of intragroup and intergroup aggression. In other words, groups with highly hostile interactions with neighbors tend to have minimal internal conflict. Or, to spin this another way, groups with high levels of internal conflict are too distracted to focus hostility on the Others.

We don't passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn't anymore.

when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest.

And behavior is altered by "situational labels"—call the game the "Wall Street Game," and people become less cooperative. Calling it the "Community Game" does the opposite.

it's human behavior, human social behavior, and in many cases abnormal human social behavior. And it is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things.

University of Cambridge.68 When compared with non-CAH girls, CAH girls do more rough-and-tumble play, fighting, and physical aggression. Moreover, they prefer "masculine" toys over dolls. As adults they score lower on measures of tenderness and higher in aggressiveness and self-report more aggression and less interest in infants. In addition, CAH women are more likely to be gay or bisexual or have a transgender sexual identity.

A "neurobiological" or "genetic" or "developmental" explanation for a behavior is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective.

no se puede empezar a comprender algo como la agresividad, la competencia, la cooperación y la empatía sin la biología;

Cuando haya acabado de leer este libro, verá que, al hablar de los distintos aspectos de un comportamiento, no tiene sentido distinguir entre los que son «biológicos» y aquellos que podrían ser descritos por ejemplo como «psicológicos» o «culturales». Están totalmente entrelazados.

THE AMYGDALAfn8 IS the archetypal limbic structure, sitting under the cortex in the temporal lobe. It is central to mediating aggression, along with other behaviors that tell us tons about aggression.

Our prototypical behavior has occurred. How was it influenced by events when the egg and sperm that formed that person joined, creating their genome—the chromosomes, the sequences of DNA—destined to be duplicated in every cell in that future person's body? What role did those genes play in causing that behavior?

Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood … but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse. And if there was no such history, the variant was not predictive of anything. This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment.

Thus, over the course of seconds sensory cues can shape your behavior unconsciously.

This context dependency means that rather than causing X, testosterone amplifies the power of something else to cause X.

Other work has shown that when people are hungry, they become less generous with money and show more future discounting (i.e., are more likely to want reward X now, rather than wait for reward 2X).

you asked amygdala experts what behavior their favorite brain structure brings to mind, "aggression" wouldn't top their list. It would be fear and anxiety.

Over the course of minutes to hours, hormonal effects are predominantly contingent and facilitative. Hormones don't determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains.

Research shows that rejecting an offer is an emotional decision, triggered by anger at a lousy offer and the desire to punish. The

Schultz's group has shown that the magnitude of an anticipatory dopamine rise reflects two variables. First is the size of the anticipated reward. A monkey has learned that a light

Thus, adult behavior produces persistent molecular brain changes in offspring, "programming" them to be likely to replicate that distinctive behavior in adulthood.76

And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual—how has culture shaped the behavior of people living in that individual's group?—what ecological factors helped shape that culture—expanding and expanding

Logically, gambling shouldn't evoke much anticipatory dopamine, given the astronomical odds against winning. But the behavioral engineering—the 24-7 activity and lack of time cues, the cheap alcohol pickling fronto-cortical judgment, the manipulations to make you feel like today is your lucky day—distorts and shifts the perception of the odds into a range where dopamine pours out and, oh, why not, let's try again.

So dopamine is more about anticipation of reward than about reward itself.

Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; dopamine "binds" the value of a reward to the resulting work. It's about the motivation arising from those dopaminergic projections to the PFC that is needed to do the harder thing (i.e., to work). In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.fn50,99