Behave Flashcards
microexpressions
A microexpression is a brief, involuntary facial expression that appears on a person’s face according to the emotions being experienced. Unlike regular, pro-longed facial expressions, it is difficult to fake a microexpression.
When looking at faces expressing strong emotions, we tend to make microexpressions that mimic them; testosterone decreases such empathic mimicry.*4
MD - (Done) made on already with a microscope aimed at a person’s face. regular prolonged facial expressions can be faked, but a microexpression is brief and involuntary. you need a microscope to capture it. micro means small - as in brief
testosterone’s effects
makes people confident, delusionaly optimistic, impulsive, and apathetic, which feels good, but is not good for people around them.
Confident and optimistic. Well, endless self-help books urge us to be precisely that. But testosterone makes people overconfident and overly optimistic, with bad consequences. In one study, pairs of subjects could consult each other before making individual choices in a task. Testosterone made subjects more likely to think their opinion was correct and to ignore input from their partner. Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic. (loc 1720)
Testosterone boosts impulsivity and risk taking, making people do the easier thing when it’s the dumb-ass thing to do.7 Testosterone does this by decreasing activity in the prefrontal cortex and its functional coupling to the amygdala and increasing amygdaloid coupling with the thalamus—the source of that shortcut path of sensory information into the amygdala. Thus, more influence by split-second, low-accuracy inputs and less by the let’s- stop-and-think-about-this frontal cortex. (loc 1724)
Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable. Rats will work (by pressing levers) to be infused with testosterone and show “conditioned place preference,” returning to a random corner of the cage where infusions occur. “I don’t know why, but I feel good whenever I stand there.”8,9 (1728)
MD (almost done) carito injecting testosterone in his butt. I am fabulous, everyone will love these chocolate dipped rice crispies, your speech was too long, weiss crying (carito not caring).
Conditioned place preference
Conditioned place preference (CPP) is a form of Pavlovian conditioning used to measure the motivational effects of objects or experiences. By measuring the amount of time an animal spends in an area that has been associated with a stimulus, researchers can infer the animal’s liking for the stimulus.
Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable. Rats will work (by pressing levers) to be infused with testosterone and show “conditioned place preference,” returning to a random corner of the cage where infusions occur. “I don’t know why, but I feel good whenever I stand there.”8,9 (1728)
MD Carito as a lab rat on the toilet spending time in the bathroom where his testosterone infusions occur. He’s spent 30 minutes in that bathroom stall, he must like the stimulus.
testosterone does not make us more agressive, it makes us…
Makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status.
Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status. And the key point is what it takes. Engineer social circumstances right, and boosting testosterone levels during a challenge would make people compete like crazy to do the most acts of random kindness. In our world riddled with male violence, the problem isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression.
MD - Carito shooting on the soccer goal. Normally a person who detests sports would not participate, but his heightened testosterone makes him more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status.
oxytocin
hormone C43H66N12O12S2 that stimulates especially the contraction of uterine muscle and the secretion of milk, it also facilitates maternal behavior and partner relationships.
Oxytocin was discovered by Henry Dale in 1906.[7] Its molecular structure was determined in 1952.[8] Oxytocin is also used as a medication to facilitate childbirth.[9][10][11]
Infuse oxytocin into the brain of a virgin rat, and she’ll act maternally—retrieving, grooming, and licking pups. Block the actions of oxytocin in a rodent mother,*23 and she’ll stop maternal behaviors, including nursing. Oxytocin works in the olfactory system, helping a new mom learn the smell of her offspring. Meanwhile, vasopressin has similar but milder effects.
MD - In the brain, oxytocin acts as a chemical messenger and has been shown to be important in human behaviors including sexual arousal, recognition, trust, anxiety and mother–infant bonding. As a result, oxytocin has been called the ‘love hormone’ or ‘cuddle chemical’.
OXYgen channel targeted towards woman. Men who are affected with oxytocin will spend more time watching the oxygen channel with their partners.
What new response to oxytocin has evolved in the brains of domesticated wolves and humans?
When a dog and its owner interact, they secrete oxytocin. The more that time is spent gazing at each other, the bigger the rise.
Sometime in the last fifty thousand years (i.e., less than 0.1 percent of the time that oxytocin has existed), the brains of humans and domesticated wolves evolved a new response to oxytocin: when a dog and its owner (but not a stranger) interact, they secrete oxytocin.30 The more of that time is spent gazing at each other, the bigger the rise. Give dogs oxytocin, and they gaze longer at their humans . . . which raises the humans’ oxytocin levels. So a hormone that evolved for mother-infant bonding plays a role in this bizarre, unprecedented form of bonding between species. (1874)
“Oxytocin prepares the body of a female mammal for birth and lactation; logically, oxytocin also facilitates maternal behavior.” (loc 1822)
MD chomporno and man oxtocin being secreated from the pituitary gland.
fusiform face area (ffa)
Perception of the unchanging aspects of the human face occurs in the fusiform face area (FFA), which is part of the inferior temporal lobe (Figure 13.14).
Findings like these suggest that abnormalities in these neuropeptides increase the risk of disorders of impaired sociality, namely autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (strikingly, people with ASD show blunted fusiform responses to faces).37 Remarkably, ASD has been linked to gene variants related to oxytocin and vasopressin, to nongenetic mechanisms for silencing the oxytocin receptor gene, and to lower levels of the receptor itself.
MD - pic download
MD 2 -
negatives of oxytocin.
It makes us prosocial to us, but worse to everyone else.
Study done by artsen Dreu of the University of Amsterdam with Dutch students “Subjects had to decide whether it was okay to kill one person in order to save five. In the scenario the potential sacrificial lamb’s name was either stereotypically Dutch (Dirk or Peter), German (Marukus or Helumut), or Middle Eastern (Ahmed or Youssef); the five people in danger were unamed. Remarkably, Oxytocin made subjects less likely to sacrifice good ol Dirk or Peter, rather than Helmut or Ahmed. Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context—who you are, your environment, and who that person is. As we will see in chapter 8, the same applies to the regulation of genes relevant to these neuropeptides.”
