Posted on 01/12/2011 9:27:04 AM PST by neverdem
Oxytocin has been described as the hormone of love. This tiny chemical, released from the hypothalamus region of the brain, gives rat mothers the urge to nurse their pups, keeps male prairie voles...
--snip--
For military commanders, nothing is more important than the group cohesion of their soldiers, for which oxytocin might now seem the ideal prescription. But this assumption is a bridge too far, Dr. De Dreu said, given that his findings are based only on lab experiments.
What does it mean that a chemical basis for ethnocentrism is embedded in the human brain? “In the ancestral environment it was very important for people to detect in others whether they had a long-term commitment to the group,” Dr. De Dreu said. “Ethnocentrism is a very basic part of humans, and it’s not something we can change by education. That doesn’t mean that the negative aspects of it should be taken for granted.”
Bruno B. Averbeck, an expert on the brain’s emotional processes at the National Institute of Mental Health, said that the effects of oxytocin described in Dr. De Dreu’s report were interesting but not necessarily dominant. The brain weighs emotional attitudes like those prompted by oxytocin against information available to the conscious mind. If there is no cognitive information in a situation in which a decision has to be made, like whether to trust a stranger about whom nothing is known, the brain will go with the emotional advice from its oxytocin system, but otherwise rational data will be weighed against the influence from oxytocin and may well override it, Dr. Averbeck said.
Dr. Averbeck said he was amazed that a substance like oxytocin can affect such a high-level human behavior. “It’s really surprising to me that this neurotransmitter can so specifically affect these social behaviors,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism
An apparently natural preference for your own kind, who'da thunk it? I'm surprised to see this in the NY Times. It doesn't help diversity, multiculturalism or La Raza.
I can’t see how it would be helpful for soldiers to feel about one another the way I feel about Francisco, the world’s most wonderful baby. Or about his dad, for that matter ...
It means liberalism is a mental disorder
On the internet no one knows you’re a prairie vole.
Yes....but the left is ever trying to control every aspect of people, especially all emotions.
Their studies are to facilitate total control over the mind.....Brave New World. They are developing some pills or vaccines as I speak to control man and they already have mandating, fascist government in place. Ready and waiting.
Perhaps we could call it the Mama Grizzlie harmone
Only it’s not. Oxytocin makes you nurse your baby 14 hours a day, if necessary. Adrenaline makes you throw people down the stairs if they make a sound when you finally got him to sleep long enough for you to use the bathroom.
If commanders just wanted troops to sit around feeling strongly bonded, they could give them marijuana.
***Only it’s not. Oxytocin makes you nurse your baby 14 hours a day, if necessary. Adrenaline makes you throw people down the stairs if they make a sound when you finally got him to sleep long enough for you to use the bathroom.***
LOL! But, FIRST, gag those noise makers, and then pad the stairs to keep their bouncing noises from waking the baby.
Oh, good points!
Liberalism is not a mental disorder, per se. It is a psychological strategy, created by evolution. It evolved to offer an uncompetitive specimen competitive advantage within a Competitive species. It is very good at what is does, as evidenced by it’s persistence, and the persistence of the imbeciles who adopt it.
If you want to know where Liberalism came from, click on my nick, and check my profile page. Know thine enemy.
Perhaps so. But those who practice liberalism eventually become deranged through obsessive hatred for conservatives, (Bush, Reagan, Palin). It is required of liberals that that they live in a delusional mindset, because they must believe in the theories of man-made 'global warming' and 'evolution' and call them "science", even though neither of these core liberal beliefs have been verified by universally accepted science. To gain scientific agreement they must force scientists with opposing views to agree with their theories though peer pressure, ostracization and political correctness. Finally, be loyal liberals they must place their faith in political policies that have proven through time to be detrimental to society, (socialism, Marixm, appeasement, anti-patriotism, feminism, etc). Hence, they live in a lie, a delusion, and eventually must either leave liberalism or reality, one or the other.
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