Category: Psychology

For a woman with profound brain damage, SM seems rather unremarkable. Her IQ tests normal; she speaks like an average person, and her memory and perception show no sign of dysfunction. But the 44-year-old woman does have one very specific, very unusual, and for neuroscientists, a very interesting impairment: she has no amygdala, the part of the brain that’s the central switching box for analyzing external threats. SM has no fear.

SM’s story received a great deal of attention lately thanks to a paper describing her condition that was published in the journal Current Biology. (Neurophilosopy did a particularly incisive and digestible rundown of the paper’s findings.) The authors introduced SM, whose amygdalae were destroyed by a genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, to a variety of situations that a normal person might well find fear-inducing. They took her to an exotic animal shop where she handled snakes and looked at tarantulas; they took her to a “haunted house” attraction; showed her clips of movies like “The Blair Witch Project”; and told her that Sarah Palin had been appointed to the Supreme Court. (OK, not the last one). In each case, she showed no signs of fear, and reported feeling no anxiety. In fact, while scampering through the haunted house she was so delighted and curious that she scared one of the “monsters” by trying to poke its mask.

For most of us, fear seems like a negative emotion, one that stresses us out and inhibits us from trying things that might make our life more rewarding. But as the Current Biology paper makes clear, SM’s fearlessness has cost her a great deal. On the most obvious level, it has left her vulnerable to all kinds of dangers. She lives in a dangerous part of a big city, and several times she has walked obliviously into potentially violent encounters. One time, she was held up at gunpoint; another time, a drug addict accosted her and held a knife to her throat. Intriguingly, though she did not feel scared during those encounters, she did report feeling angry and upset afterward. Her emotional deficit is quite specific.

But in a sense SM’s fearlessness is not the worst part of losing her amygdalae. Continue reading The Strange Lives of Women With No Fear

We Americans are out of control. We want to lose weight, but we can’t stop eating. (Since 1980 the obesity rate in the United States has doubled; two-thirds of the population is now overweight.) We want to save, but we can’t stop spending. (The average American household owes more in debt than it earns in a year, and still keeps spending more than it takes in.) We want to be healthy, but we can’t stop smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. (One in ten Americans has an addiction disorder.) We can’t even control our attention. (We’re multitasking like never before, constantly switching our focus from Blackberries to iPhones, to email and texts and the internet.)

These behavioral problems aren’t just vexing and embarrassing. They’re killing us.  Smoking and obesity are the top two causes of preventable death in the United States. More than half of people who die between the ages of 15 to 64 do as a result of unhealthy decisions, compared to just 5 percent a century ago. And impulse control takes a toll across all age groups. Children born today might be the first in American history to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. They will also face greatly diminished economic prospects, as runaway spending in both private and public spheres contributes to an unprecedented and increasingly unsustainable debt load.

Self-control is one of the hardest things to achieve in modern life, but in the course of my research I’ve come across seven key tools that can help us to resist temptation. Continue reading 7 Essential Steps to Mastering Temptation

We all know that the most important thing in raising a child is to offer it unstinting love. But what are the next two most important things? Surprisingly, neither have to do with how you specifically relate to your child, as I learned from a fascinating article in the current issue of Scientific American Mind by child psychologist (and fellow PT blogger) Robert Epstein.

Epstein points out that parents are deluged with advice — there are more than 40,000 books on the topic listed on Amazon. So he and his colleagues set out to see if they could determine which techniques were the most important in raising healthy, happy, successful children. Epstein analyzed responses to an online parenting-skills questionnaire that had been completed by some 2000 people. The survey asked respondents to rate themselves in 10 different categories of parenting skill, which Epstein calls “The Parents’ Ten,” since prior studies have shown them to be crucial tools. The test-takers were also asked how well their children had turned out.

As expected, Epstein found that the most important parenting skill is simply love them. “Our… findings confirmed what most parents already believe,” Epstein writes, “that the best thing we can do for our children is to give them lots of love and affection.” But the second and third most important factors related not to how the parents treat the child, but one another and themselves. Continue reading The 2 Key Parenting Skills You Didn’t Know About

When I was a junior in high school my Spanish teacher started behaving very strangely. She became increasingly agitated and defensive, and the class, sensing her emotional frailty, responded as a pack of rabid adolescents predictably would: we relentlessly back-talked and baited her, which I’m sure did nothing to ease her predicament.

It all came to a head one day when she passed around a blank sheet of paper and asked that we sign it, to show that we had attended the class. Later, another faculty member asked me if I would share my thoughts on the petition we had signed. “What petition?” I answered. Apparently, she had attached our signatures to a piece of paper that said something to the effect of, “We, the undersigned, hereby state our unequivocal support and appreciation for our beloved teacher…”

She was promptly fired, and we never saw her again. Asked what had happened, we were told simply: “She had a nervous breakdown.”

Nervous breakdown. We all know what it means, in a vague sort of way: one day you’re more or less fine, then the pressure gets too much, and then, boom, off the rails. We all know someone who’s had one, or had one ourselves. But what does the phenomenon correlate to in modern psychological terminology? Continue reading The Nervous Breakdown: A Myth?

Recently my journalistic career brought me in contact with a man who, when I first met him, seemed to be the very embodiment of a charming and well-heeled gentleman. He is a natural raconteur, good-looking, athletic, intellectually curious, financially successful, and wittily self-deprecating. What few people know about him is that he has left behind a trail of emotional destruction, having spent decades abusing vulnerable individuals for his own twisted purposes.

Psychopaths, or sociopaths as some prefer to call them, are well known figures in our culture. We’re fascinated by their predatory relationship with the rest of humanity. Their chilling alien-ness makes them convenient villains in books, film, and television. When we encounter them in real life, we think: There really are monsters roaming the world. But as my own recent experience has taught me, the crimes of the psychopath are not merely a function of the perpetrator. We are not all equally likely to fall prey. Just as the psychopaths are a special breed, so too are their victims. Continue reading How Psychopaths Choose Their Victims

A career as a female TV news anchor isn’t all glamor. Away from the glare of the studio lights, the job is plagued by a little-known but particularly unpleasant occupational hazard: stalkers. In newsrooms across the country, the problem is endemic. “Everyone has a crazy guy,” says broadcaster Amy Jacobson. “It’s expected.”

Though no statistics exist on the scope of the problem, experts who study stalking confirm that female anchors and reporters can expect to be targeted sooner or later. “One in eight American women will get stalked in her lifetime,” says stalking consultant Dr. Park Dietz. “But for a female news readers, it’s virtually a certainty. At any given time, she might be stalked by several at once and not even know about it.” Continue reading The Women Most Likely to Be Stalked

Any time two or more people come together, one of them automatically and subconsciously establishes dominance. That’s the reality of being a mammal. We’re social creatures; a place in the hierarchy is a matter of life and death. We need allies to protect us, to fight with us, to groom us and help us bear and raise children. So our brains contain circuitry that automatically find a place for us in the social structure. Some dominate, others submit.

But how do our brains decide who will come out on top? Continue reading Who’ll Be the Alpha Male? Ask the Hormones

The conundrum that has puzzled the greatest minds from Silverlake to Williamsburg: if even hipsters hate hipsters, how could anyone choose to become one? At last, this remarkable video provides the answer.

As I wrote in a recent blog post, moments of extreme emotional intensity can trigger indelibly vivid memories. I cited the case of a reader, Alice from Jupiter, who wrote that she could clearly recall a number of thoughts racing through her head as a fatal accident unfolded. I took her at her word. But how can we be sure that this kind of intense memories is accurate? As reader Sarah writes on her blog at the Pratt Institute,

Did Alice from Jupiter really ask herself all of those questions before the car hit her, or did her mind plant them there as she relived the moment over and over? I would imagine that most New Yorkers also felt a lesser but still extremely high sense of danger and fear after first hearing about 9/11, but even these memories have proven to be susceptible to distortion over time.

The point is well taken. Though memory feels like a straightforward function — something happens, our mind registers and stores it — in fact it’s a dynamic process. Each time we access a piece of information, we’re likely to change it. A memory that seems crystal clear could very well be wrong. Continue reading Your Most Vivid Memory? Maybe It Never Happened

Behold the hipster, the stylishly disaffected breed of twentysomethings whose fog of twee whimsy envelopes Williamsburg and the East Village. Most who encounter the hipster in its natural habitat respond in one of two ways: derision or ridicule.

But science does not cast judgment. Its goal is to explore and explain dispassionately, whether the object of study be the noble eagle or the lowly nematode. So what does science have to tell us about this fascinatingly misunderstood breed, the indigenous North American hipster?

Surprisingly much. Continue reading The Sad Science of Hipsterism