Evolution, Emotion, and Language

In a study on Meerkats in the Kalahari Desert, a team from the University of Zurich found that young meerkats respond to vocalization information about “threat urgency” (via tone) earlier than “threat type” (via variation in vocalization) as compared to older meerkats who can distinguish both pieces of information. The researchers argue this association between [...]

Do you enjoy your life?

I overheard a man asking this question of the woman next to him on a commuter train a year ago. The boldness of the asking contrasted with the gentle and sincere tone in which it was delivered. He managed to convey, to me at least, that he cared about the response he might receive.
The question [...]

(Re)Productive Years

The 70’s seemed to bring change for women. Choices. Marriage followed by reproduction was penultimate rather than ultimate. Many still reproduced (without partners, with female partners…) but more than every before, women produced (art, leadership, inventions, and so on). Even more revolutionary, women were choosing not to reproduce. For a brief time, there was a [...]

Conflict

So much of life is filled with conflict: traffic, workplace encounters, listservs, jobs/promotions/advancement, governments, religions… I find it increasingly having a visceral affect on me.
Newness is greeted with hostility and suspicion. Mistakes are openings for destruction, rather than constructive critiques. The worse possible interpretation is taken from an ambiguous statement which then leads to offense. [...]

Human Social Life and Negativity Spirals

As primates, humans have a strong evolutionary selection for social groupings. Facial expressions in others, for human and nonhuman primates, evoke a rapid emotive response quite separate from the pre-existing emotional state of the organism. So, emotional states, for better or worse, can be transmitted like infectious disease during human contact.
When you are in a [...]

Time Affluence and Ragged Trousers

Marshall Sahlins described hunter-gatherers as the original affluent human societies. They worked very little (less than 20 hours a week) getting the necessities of life and had tons of leisure time left in the week. No matter how much I try to reinvent the view of the contemporary college student on hunter-gatherers, I fail. They [...]

Casual Eating

While sitting in my old neighborhood in a local coffee shop, I saw a little boy sit down on the sofa near me and wolf down a huge slice of chocolate cake as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He also downed a milky coffee drink in the same gulpy manner. Granted the kid had [...]

Sacred and Corporate

Settlement archaeologists take pains to reconstruct, among other things, how past populations used their space. One site may have a plethora of temples, another homogenized dwelling spaces, and yet another central courtyards where tools were made communally. We can learn so much from looking at how we organize ourselves and our activities in space.
There is [...]

Narcissism and Evil

A study by Jean Twenge (San Diego University associate professor of psychology and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before) has shown a moderate increase in narcissism in the modern college student compared to previous generations. She recently garnered quite a bit of press [...]

Another perspective on evil

http://www.slate.com/id/2076195/