Quiz 2 - Chapter 2 Flashcards
What do hormones do?
Regulate metabolism, growth, development, and behaviour
Are hormones impacted by genes?
Yes
Testosterone correlation
Relevant for everyone?
Has a relatively small positive correlation with aggression
Only seems to be existent for males –> there is likely societal/environmental factors at play
What is testosterone responsible for?
Primary and secondary sex characteristics
What is the role of testosterone with aggression?
An indirect role
What might testosterone interact with?
May interact with high cortisol levels to influence antisocial behaviour
Neurotransmitters
Synthesized by amino acid tryptophan
Serotonin
Behavioural inhibition and mood regulation
What is low serotonin activity linked to?
Is this true for all individuals?
Impulsivity, irritability, aggression
Women typically have lower levels than men, but no aggression effect
Seems to exist only for men
People low in serotonin levels can sometimes have what characteristics
Aggressive and antisocial individuals
What happened in studies that artificially manipulated tryptophan levels?
Found a possible causal link between that and aggression
Autonomic responses examples
Heart rate, skin conductance
What are autonomic responses important for?
Fight or flight response
Helps you feel fear and act appropriately
Autonomic responses are associated with?
What is it linked to?
Fear, anger, anxiety, etc.
Antisocial behaviours
There is a small to moderate correlation between _______ and __________
low autonomic arousal and antisocial behaviours
Explain the fearlessness theory
Lack of fear when stressed
Childhood stressors may habituate someone to life stress = fearlessness
Biology behind fearlessness theory
NS becomes habituated
Evolutionary adaptation
Stimulation-seeking theory
Need for stimulation
Chronic low arousal is unpleasant; may engage/seek risk to feel arousal
What is low self-reported fear related to?
Antisocial behaviour, even after controlling for callous-unemotional traits
What is a historical example of neuroimaging findings?
Phineas Gage allowed early researchers to examine links between behaviour and brain structure and functioning
He was very calm before accident, but afterwards, he could still walk and talk but his personality changed a lot and began to engage in risky/antisocial behaviour and swore lots
What is antisocial behaviour linked to?
What brain structure is this linked to?
Poor executive functioning (attention, memory, inhibition, problem-solving, moral decision-making)
Prefrontal cortex
What does electrode stimulation of the PFC cause?
People to report being less likely to commit physical and sexual offences and judged them as more immoral in comparison to a control group
People can sometimes become more prosocial even than the average person
How is diet related to aggression and antisocial behaviour?
Low blood sugar is linked to aggression and antisocial behaviour
Diet affects hormone levels and serotonin levels
Explain the Schoenthaler (1983) study
3000 incarcerated juveniles
More healthy diet (e.g., fruit juices, nutritious snacks)
Existing diet (e.g., soft drinks, junk food)
Healthy diet was linked to 48% reduction in antisocial behaviour
Explain the Schoenthaler (2021) study
449 youth were given either a placebo/vitamin pill
Vitamin was linked to 39% fewer rule violations
Lead (Pb) link
Neurotoxin that affects brain (probably prefrontal lobe) development
Children with elevated lead levels exhibited more antisocial behaviour
Evolutionary theory
Species and their genes have evolved/transformed in response to environmental pressures through natural selection
Gradual change of genetic code over time
Psychological mechanisms and evolution
Psychological mechanisms have been designed and maintained because they offer an advantage for survival and reproduction (e.g., antisociality)
Selection pressures
Finding a mate, hunting, gathering, protecting children, avoiding predators, finding shelter
How long do selection pressures take to show up in a species’ genome?
A few thousand generations
What do our current psychological mechanisms reflect?
Selection pressures of prehistoric hunter-gatherers
Life history theory and antisocial behaviour
Survival and reproduction depended on trade-offs between hunting/gathering, finding/attracting a mate, protecting/nourishing children
Give example of life history theory and antisocial behaviour
Women favour protecting/nurturing children to pass on genes
Cannot reproduce with as many partners; less need to aggressive and violent
Women have an increased degree of parental investment (fixed # of children in lifetime)
Adaptive phenotypic plasticity
Psychological mechanisms are highly flexible
Impact of unpredictable/chaotic environment
People engage in riskier survival and mating activity
Give example of evolutionarily, why men tend to be more aggressive
In an unpredictable/chaotic environment, they may fight competing male suitors rather than protecting/nurturing existing offspring
Children who grow up in unpredictable homes are more likely to _____
Compare this to a stable environment
engage in antisocial behaviours, earlier sex, short-term sex strategies
Supportive childhood; growing up with abundance of resources –> people prioritize long-term strategies like parental investment
What do psychopaths possess?
Explain
Cheater strategies
Superficial charm, manipulation, deceit, lack of remorse or conscience, parasitic lifestyle, impulsivity, grandiosity
Cheater strategies and frequency dependent selection
Enhances reproductive success if found in only a small minority of people alongside which most people are honest, cooperative, and unassuming
Homicide and evolutionary theories
Usually results from arguments, insults, rivalries between male acquaintances who are unmarried and unemployed
Violence/aggression is an adaptive response to status or reputational threats in order to prevent future explanation of resources and/or lack of mates
Ghengis Khan
Social selection
Has an estimated 16M direct male descendants (as opposed to average 20)
Female-perpetrated crime
Relative lack is due to lower fear threshold in face of danger
Evolutionary need for maternal survival and reproductive success
Resource scarcity/poverty drives…
Attempts to provide for oneself directly (e.g., property offending) and indirectly through competition for mates (e.g., violent offending)
