Science of the SpiritS


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Chimps and humans share similar personality traits

Elizabeth Palermo
Live Science
Sat, 10 May 2014 06:28 UTC
Human Ape
© DreamstimeWhile there are many differences between humans and chimps, it turns out, they share similar personality traits.
Ever heard of a conscientious chimp? An extroverted ape? New research suggests that chimpanzees, man's closest living relatives, have personality traits quite similar to their human cousins.

The study, conducted by researchers at Georgia State University, found that chimpanzees not only possess many of the same personality traits as humans - from agreeableness to extroversion - these traits are structured almost identically in both humans and chimps.

"Our work demonstrates the promise of using chimpanzee models to investigate the neurobiology of personality processes," said Robert Latzman, assistant professor of psychology at Georgia State University, who led the research team.

"We know that these processes are associated with a variety of emotional health outcomes. We're excited to continue investigating the links."

To analyze chimp personalities, researchers used a common tool called the Chimpanzee Personality Questionnaire. Think of it as a Myers-Briggs test for chimps. Caregivers are asked to rate chimps in 43 categories based on their observations of each animal's daily behavior. Is the chimp excitable? Does it demonstrate impulsive tendencies? Is it playful or timid?
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Bulb

Sophisticated analysis and mental calculation: Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion

Jann Ingmire
University of Chicago
Mon, 24 Mar 2014 15:32 UTC
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Neuroscience research demonstrates that the brain regions underpinning moral judgment share resources with circuits controlling other capacities such as emotional saliency, mental state understanding and decision-making.
People who care about justice are swayed more by reason than emotion, according to new brain scan research from the Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience.

Psychologists have found that some individuals react more strongly than others to situations that invoke a sense of justice - for example, seeing a person being treated unfairly or mercifully. The new study used brain scans to analyze the thought processes of people with high "justice sensitivity."

"We were interested to examine how individual differences about justice and fairness are represented in the brain to better understand the contribution of emotion and cognition in moral judgment," explained lead author Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry.
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Arrow Up

What would a psychopath do? Here are five things

Rob Kall
OpedNews
Wed, 07 May 2014 16:36 UTC
Ayn Rand
© DonkeyHoteyAyn Rand

Psychopaths are predators without empathy. They don't care. Psychopaths have a pattern of meanness and manipulation.

They use their prodigious charisma, boldness and ability to stay calm in situations that would stress out or upset most people to manipulate, dominate, exploit and get over on their victims.

Psychopaths engage in predatory behavior for fun, because it gives their lives meaning-- they feel superior, which feeds into the narcissistic personality disorder that most psychopaths comorbidly experience.

Psychopaths win at all costs. Well, the successful ones win doing anything that they can get away with. And psychopaths tend to be loners, or to get into profoundly dysfunctional, abusive relationships. There are psychologists who specialize in helping victims of psychopathic relationships.

So, reading the rantings of one psychopath, I started wondering: if psychopaths could change the rules to their benefit, what would they do?

Here are a few ways that you might expect psychopaths to try to shape the culture, the narrative and the rules.
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Compass

War: The social consequence of child abuse

Alice Miller, PhD
Alice-Miller.com
Wed, 07 May 1997 16:17 UTC
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© PCADV.org
Since adolescence I have always wondered why people take pleasure in humiliating others. Clearly the fact that some people are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the destructive urge is not a universal aspect of human nature. So why do some tend to solve their problems by violence while others don't?

Philosophy failed to answer my question, and the Freudian theory of the death wish has never convinced me. It was only by closely examining the childhood histories of murderers, especially mass murderers, that I began to comprehend the roots of good and evil: not in the genes, as commonly believed, but often in the earliest days of life. Today, it is inconceivable to me that a child who comes into the world among attentive, loving and protective parents could become a predatory monster. And in the childhood of the murderers who later became dictators, I have always found a nightmarish horror, a record of continual lies and humiliation, which upon the attainment of adulthood, impelled them to acts of merciless revenge on society. These vengeful acts were always garbed in hypocritical ideologies, purporting that the dictator's exclusive and overriding wish was the happiness of his people. In this way, he unconsciously emulated his own parents who, in earlier days, had also insisted that their blows were inflicted on the child for his own good. This belief was extremely widespread a century ago, particularly in Germany.
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Hourglass

Top five regrets of the dying

Susie Steiner
The Guardian
Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:40 UTC
regrets of the dying
© Montgomery Martin/AlamyA palliative nurse has recorded the top five regrets of the dying.
A nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying, and among the top ones is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life?

There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'.

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again."

Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware:

Comment: Read Gabor Maté's When the Body Says No, for a thorough understanding on the societal and familial programming that prevents us from living authentic lives, and how we can learn to be true to ourselves and the people close to our hearts.

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Life Preserver

Behavioural training reduces inflammation

Heidi Ledford
Nature
Mon, 05 May 2014 09:59 UTC
Research subjects suppress immune responses using physical conditioning.
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The effectiveness of meditation and other techniques helps explicate links between the immune and nervous systems.
Dutch celebrity daredevil Wim Hof has endured lengthy ice-water baths, hiked to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts and made his mark in Guinness World Records with his ability to withstand cold. Now he has made a mark on science as well.

Researchers have used Hof's methods of mental and physical conditioning to train 12 volunteers to fend off inflammation.

The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, suggest that people can learn to modulate their immune responses - a finding that has raised hopes for patients who have chronic inflammatory disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.

Comment: Just do one session of Éiriú Eolas and you'll find out the impact of breathing exercises on our behavior and physiology: eebreathe.com

See also When the Body Says No: Caring for ourselves while caring for others - Dr. Gabor Maté

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Telephone

You don't always know what you're saying

Brian Owens
Nature
Fri, 02 May 2014 09:54 UTC
People's conscious awareness of their speech often comes after they've spoken, not before.
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© Ikon Images / Alamy
If you think you know what you just said, think again. People can be tricked into believing they have just said something they did not, researchers report this week.

The dominant model of how speech works is that it is planned in advance - speakers begin with a conscious idea of exactly what they are going to say. But some researchers think that speech is not entirely planned, and that people know what they are saying in part through hearing themselves speak.

So cognitive scientist Andreas Lind and his colleagues at Lund University in Sweden wanted to see what would happen if someone said one word, but heard themselves saying another. "If we use auditory feedback to compare what we say with a well-specified intention, then any mismatch should be quickly detected," he says. "But if the feedback is instead a powerful factor in a dynamic, interpretative process, then the manipulation could go undetected."
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Bulb

What happens to your cells when you experience happiness?

Dr. Marianna Pochelli
Prevent Disease
Sun, 04 May 2014 07:18 UTC
Too much research has been devoted to the science of stress, depression and the connection to disease and not enough to the biology of joy. If a greater emphasis was placed on why we don't go to doctors when we are feeling optimistic, happy, and joyful, there would be less value and importance placed on the emotional states that coincidentally generate more money for those manufacturing medication. There are many ways to experience pleasure in our brains and happiness might be the one emotion that prevents and reverses the cascade of cellular events that lead to disease.
brain
© unknown
Artificial Happiness

A lot of people get addicted to chemicals - alcohol, cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, and nicotine. Why do they do that, and why aren't they happy? It is because brains have a variety of chemical systems that regulate their electrical activities in waking and sleeping, and the addictive drugs artificially stimulate those systems, but the feelings are not those of joy.
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Family

How big-hearted babies become selfish monsters - Our natural instinct for altruism is being destroyed by the demands of modern life

Tracy McVeigh
The Observer
Sun, 04 May 2014 00:19 UTC
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© Jamie Grill/GettyA baby being fed a homemade meal will need half as much as being weaned on ready-made food.
If you've been planning a shopping trip with the kids for bank holiday Monday, you might not want to read any further, because teaching your children consumerism is helping to turn them into selfish, immoral creatures without a streak of empathy, according to a new study. You may be making them just like stressed-out adults, whose potential as human beings is killed off as genuine altruism is suffocated by their greed and anxiety.

In a new book which suggests that social changes and the shift towards an ever more unequal society are making us cold-hearted and mean, psychotherapist Graham Music says we're more likely to be born big-hearted and kind but then pushed towards being selfish and cold than the other way around.

"We're losing empathy and compassion in dealing with other people in our society," said Music, a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman clinics in London. "There is a lot of evidence that the speed of life and the resultant anxiety have an enormous impact on how we deal with other people. We all know it anecdotally. You live in a dog-eat-dog world and it makes sense to be highly stressed and vigilant to cope with it. From that stress come some really fundamental shifts in behaviour, along with pretty poor outcomes in everything from health to life expectancy and happiness."
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Footprints

The slow death of the art of purposeless walking

Finlo Rohrer
BBC
Thu, 01 May 2014 13:33 UTC
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A number of recent books have lauded the connection between walking - just for its own sake - and thinking. But are people losing their love of the purposeless walk?

Walking is a luxury in the West. Very few people, particularly in cities, are obliged to do much of it at all. Cars, bicycles, buses, trams, and trains all beckon.

Instead, walking for any distance is usually a planned leisure activity. Or a health aid. Something to help people lose weight. Or keep their fitness. But there's something else people get from choosing to walk. A place to think.

Wordsworth was a walker. His work is inextricably bound up with tramping in the Lake District. Drinking in the stark beauty. Getting lost in his thoughts.
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