Most of the news we’ve seen about teaching men and boys to not batter, not rape, not coerce or dominate, etc., involves academic curriculum changes and additions, or workshops from community organizations, faith-based institutions, etc.
If true, easy fixes of curricula would achieve the necessary attitude adjustments toward minorities, women, poor people, and so on.
The research reports in this diary show a perspective of neurologists, psychologists, sociologists, etc, that change-needing ideas & behaviors aren’t much instilled the way we hope changed behavior could be. Which may say something about the realism of that hope as the total arsenal for change. After all, schools, parents, faiths etc have overtly taught good behavior for centuries, and for decades highschool and colleges have offered and required classes with the curricula we hope about ... with very disappointing results so far.
While nothing in the diary directly involves feminist research about behavior formation and change, it does all offer insight into how humans come to think/believe/feel and behave as they do socially, and politically (in the sense of power behavior, even aside from party affiliation). Especially under the influence of powerful nonconventional “teaching” that saturates American society in every direction and at every phase of idea formation. Most of it not even come from political sources — instead it’s the overt and covert commercial messaging, not least as embedded in popular culture, for leveraging fairly basic human drives in order to sell products.
Full disclaimer: no, I don’t understand 100% of the terms and concepts in this kind of research. I read and learn more as I can, because it’s highly insightful about bad{sic} human behavior in multi-dimensional ways that news items on their own cannot begin to encompass by reporting only on ‘events’ as they occur.
This Week In The War On Women welcomes all who are interested to comment in the discussion, bring relevant links and stories, join in order to reblog diaries on women’s issues, and consider writing for the Saturday schedule — see schedule comment in the thread.
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All sources are free full text, bolding added. Images are from other free sources, added for visual interest — hover cursor on images to get their information.
<big>📌</big> Prominent economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton publish the paper “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century” cited in modernhealthcare.com … Hospitals tackling social determinants set the course... (history, context & progress) — the article and the Case-Deaton paper coincidentally shed some light on factors in how Americans (or others) become republican or democrat, liberal or reactionary.
<big>📌</big> A Comparison of the Electrocortical Response to Monetary and Social Reward — Is a common neural system involved in the generation of electrocortical responses to monetary and social reward? April 23, 2018
...Affective science research on reward processing has primarily focused on monetary outcomes; however, there has been growing interest in evaluating the neural basis of social decision-making and reward processing (e.g. Guyer et al., 2012; Bhanji and Delgado, 2014; Vrtička et al., 2014; Jarcho et al., 2015). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research suggests that there is a common neural system implicated in reward-learning for both non-social (e.g. monetary) and social rewards. For example, Izuma et al. (2008) found that both positive feedback regarding one's reputation and receiving a monetary reward activated an overlapping aspect of the striatum. Indeed, the striatum is engaged during trial and error-based learning tasks (Daniel and Pollmann, 2014) and reward-based learning tasks (Lin et al., 2012) regardless of the type of reward received. Moreover, Hausler et al. (2015) found that the reward of scoring a goal in soccer vs winning money activated similar regions of prefrontal cortex and striatum… Together, these fMRI findings suggest that a common neural system is likely involved in reward processing for both nonsocial and social rewards.
<big>📌</big> Greater involvement of action simulation mechanisms in emotional vs cognitive empathy 15 February 2018 Some advocate that empathy may be facilitated through the embodied simulation or internal representation of perceived experience in others.
Empathy is crucial for successful interpersonal interactions… Action-perception matching, or action simulation mechanisms, has been suggested to facilitate empathy by supporting the simulation of perceived experience in others. However, this remains unclear, and the involvement of the action simulation circuit in cognitive empathy (the ability to adopt another’s <tt>perspective</tt>) vs emotional empathy (the capacity to share <tt>and react</tt> affectively to another’s emotional experience) has not been quantitatively compared. ...Conjunction analyses [of tasks by subjects in this study] revealed common recruitment of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), thought to be critical for action-perception matching, during both action simulation and emotional, but not cognitive, empathy. Furthermore, activation was significantly greater in action simulation regions in the left IFG during emotional vs cognitive empathy, and activity in this region was positively correlated with mean feeling ratings during the emotional empathy task. These findings provide evidence for greater involvement of action simulation mechanisms in emotional than cognitive empathy...
<big>📌</big> Risk-taking, Peer-influence and Child Maltreatment: a Neurocognitive Investigation. This neurocognitive study investigated the relationship of childhood maltreatment with risk-taking and risk sensitivity and the influence of peers on risk behavior. January 22, 2018 (The image at right may be pertinent: an fMRI of consequences of shaken-baby syndrome — perhaps violence begets violence...)
<big>📌</big> Tribal Love: The Neural Correlates of Passionate Engagement in Football Fans This fMRI study investigated the neural basis of the 'tribal love' clearly evident between passionate football fans and their beloved teams. July 19, 2017
<big>📌</big> Memory and Reward Systems Coproduce 'Nostalgic' Experiences in the Brain This MRI study investigated the relationship between memory-reward co-activation and nostalgia, using childhood-related visual stimuli. September 28, 2016
<big>📌</big> Narcissism Is Associated With Weakened Frontostriatal Connectivity: A DTI Study The authors posit that narcissism arises, at least in part, from a neural disconnect between the self and reward. Can a correlating structural deficit be located via diffusion tensor imaging? September 14, 2016
<big>📌</big> Neuromodulation of Group Prejudice and Religious Belief Can religious ideologies be altered using transcranial magnetic stimulation? March 17, 2016 ...Parochial ideologies motivate numerous aspects of human social life, from art movements to wars. Moralistic ideologies involving group chauvinism and religion are arguably the most socially impactful—and, at times, the most perniciously divisive...
People cleave to ideological convictions with greater intensity in the aftermath of threat. The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behavior to resolve such conflicts. Building on prior literature examining the role of the pMFC in shifts in relatively low-level decision processes, we demonstrate that the pMFC mediates adjustments in adherence to political and religious ideologies...
<big>📌</big> Altered Amygdala Connectivity in Urban Youth Exposed to Trauma Might early life trauma produce changes in neural connectivity which impact emotional response and alter interactions with the world later in life? December 09, 2015
<big>📌</big> Engaged Listeners: Shared Neural Processing of Powerful Political Speeches What is happening in the brains of a captivated audience? This study examined the neural responses to speeches of varying rhetorical quality. HIGHLIGHTS: ■ A task is used to study how the brain implements consensus decision-making ■ Consensus decision-making depends on three distinct computational processes ■ These different signals are encoded in distinct brain regions ■ Integration of these signals occurs in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. October 07, 2015,
<big>📌</big> Neural Mechanisms Underlying Human Consensus Decision-Making. Neuron Volume 86, Issue 2, 22 April 2015, Pages 591-602
Consensus building in a group is a hallmark of animal societies, yet little is known about its underlying computational and neural mechanisms. Here, we applied a computational framework to behavioral and fMRI data from human participants performing a consensus decision-making task with up to five other participants. We found that participants reached consensus decisions through integrating their own preferences with information about the majority group members’ prior choices, as well as inferences about how much each option was stuck to by the other people. These distinct decision variables were separately encoded in distinct brain areas—the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, “The vmPFC has been implicated in diverse functions ranging from emotion and emotion regulation to episodic and semantic memory to economic valuation ”posterior superior temporal sulcus/temporoparietal junction, and intraparietal sulcus—and were integrated in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Our findings provide support for a theoretical account in which collective decisions are made through integrating multiple types of inference about oneself, others, and environments, processed in distinct brain modules.
<big>📌</big> Self-Other Mergence in the Frontal Cortex during Cooperation and Competition. Neuron Volume 91, Issue 2, 20 July 2016, Pages 482-493. HIGHLIGHTS ■ People confuse their own performance with the performance of others ■ Cooperation leads to positive and competition to negative self-other confusion ■ Confusion is reflected in area 9 indicating interdependent self-other processing ■ Learning from own performance history is represented in perigenual ACC.
SUMMARY To survive, humans must estimate their own ability and the abilities of others. We found that, although people estimated their abilities on the basis of their own performance in a rational manner, their estimates of themselves were partly merged with the performance of others. Reciprocally, their ability estimates for others also reflected their own, as well as the others’, performance. Self-other mergence operated in a context-dependent manner: interacting with high or low performers, respectively, enhanced and diminished own ability estimates in cooperative contexts, but the opposite occurred in competitive contexts. Self-other mergence not only influenced subjective evaluations, it also affected how people subsequently objectively adjusted their performance. Perigenual anterior cingulate cortex tracked one’s own performance. Dorsomedial frontal area 9 tracked others’ performances, but also integrated contextual and self-related information. Self-other mergence increased with the strength of self and other representations in area 9, suggesting it carries interdependent representations of self and other.
<big>📌</big> Aggression Influenced by Genetic, Environmental Factors August 24, 2020 — Genes and environment (including the human environment) are factors in individual aggression, itself...
“...a complex triad of emotion, cognition, and behavior. The emotion is anger, the cognition is hostility, and the behavior is aggression. And they sort of go in that order..."
said Dr. Emil F. Coccaro in a presentation for the American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists annual conference that year.
Although aggression can be thought of in numerous ways, premeditated and impulsive aggression are most relevant to behavioral studies in psychiatry… Premeditated aggression is goal oriented, while impulsive aggression comes from frustration or a response to a threat. Impulsive aggression is "typically social or frustrative in nature, and studies [show in part the tendencies] that [aggressives] move toward a threat while nonaggressives move away ..." Both types of aggression can be seen in the same individuals at different times.
Aggression also can be considered using a threshold model. Calm individuals, for example, might have a low baseline of aggression and a high threshold before they act out. An aggressive person, on the other hand, has a lower threshold and a higher baseline level. "Their delta to get to the point where they're going to explode is much shorter, much lower than it is in someone who is healthy..."
"...the threshold to explode is probably regulated by various neurobiological features. The baseline state of aggression also may be related to baseline neurobiological features, but also what's going on in the environment, because the neurobiological features that send someone to exploding aggression are there all the time..."
The article explains that secondary aggression tends to stem from an underlying primary disease of the brain, systemic or metabolic disorder, or a psychiatric one such as schizophrenia. "If someone's ... got voices telling them to hurt somebody, or delusions that someone's going to hurt them, that's not primary aggression, that's secondary to the psychosis..."
In contrast, primary aggression is likely to involve intermittent explosive disorder (IED). Strangely (in my view) IED was an aspect of "passive-aggressive personality" in DSM-I (1952), then DSM-II (1968) as "explosive personality," then disorder IED in DSM-III (1974) as a diagnosis of exclusion Coccaro considers poorly operationalized — DSM-III criteria for IED didn’t look to define numbers of recurrent outbursts, what they looked like, the time frame, and excluded general impulsivity. "That's not really what these people look like and it's not what impulsive aggression looks like..." DSM-IV (1994) merely removed some exclusion criteria, apparently.
Since 2013 we’re in the, um, controversial DSM-5 era, god help us, defining IED as
...verbal and physical aggression without destruction or assault, twice equally on average for 3 months, or three or more episodes of physical destruction/assault over a 1-year period. These individuals have outbursts "grossly out of proportion to provocation," the aggression is generally impulsive, and it causes stress and impairment with an age of onset at older than 6 years….
<big>📌<big>The Basal Ganglia and the Cerebellum in Human Emotion 2020
The basal ganglia (BG) and the cerebellum historically have been relegated to a functional role in producing or modulating motor output. Recent research, however, has emphasized the importance of these subcortical structures in multiple functional domains, including affective processes such as emotion recognition, subjective feeling elicitation and reward valuation….
<big>📌</big> Becoming the King … Identification with Fictional Characters is Associated with Greater Self-Other Neural Overlap. 2021
...During narrative experiences, identification with a fictional character can alter one's attitudes and self-beliefs to be more similar to those of the character. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) is a brain region that shows increased activity when introspecting about the self but also when thinking of close friends.
Here we test whether identification with fictional characters is associated with increased neural overlap between self and fictional others. Nineteen fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones performed trait evaluations for the self, 9 real-world friends, and 9 fictional characters during functional neuroimaging.
Overall, participants showed a larger response in the vMPFC for self compared to friends and fictional others. However, among participants higher in trait identification we observed greater neural overlap in the vMPFC between self and fictional characters. Moreover, the magnitude of this association was greater for the character that participants reported feeling closest to/liked the most as compared to those they felt least close to/liked the least.
<big>These results suggest that identification with fictional characters leads people to incorporate these characters into their self-concept: the greater the immersion into experiences of "becoming" characters, the more accessing knowledge about [fictional] characters resembles accessing knowledge about the self.</big></big>
If true of fictional characters, what are the implications in regard to sports idols, political heroes, mass media pundits, demagogues of any stripe...
</big>All this in mind, consider seductive, powerful societal mechanisms operating far more constantly in our lives than educational institutions do. In broadest sense, popular culture most of all. Which plays on basic bio-psychological drives. Can curriculum alone pose an adequate counterbalance? After all, most students resent education on principle, especially if so privileged as to imagine not needing it much in order to have the lives they desire.
But current-wave feminism doesn’t reject popular culture nearly as much as 2nd wave feminism did. Not nearly as much as the entire 60s/70s progressive movement did. Because since then, manufacturers of popular culture constantly adapt to how to gratify rejection away —how to keep us feeling pleased, satisfied, and even partnered by the drug upon society that most popular culture is, no matter how camoflaged. And they have hundreds, even thousands of new-minted graduates in psychology and biology each year wanting jobs and not squeamish about qui bono.
E.g., films like WonderWoman (or Black Panther, etc) aren’t made to comply with genuinely revolutionary values, and they embody none — they’re dressed-up retreads of the same messages reliably feeding us the illusion that our societal agonies are being championed and our demands met. Popular music the same: on close look at artists who seem to be rebels, we see their rebellions take forms remarkably attractive and seductive in familiar ways. Popular culture is both a product we consume and that consumes and shapes us, playing on our dreams for life to be as we wish it was, leaving little impetus to take effective real-world action, as we imagine that action being taken for us by by someone more powerful. Infantilism and paternalism — we are relieved of sense of responsibility to shoulder the work ourselves, far less take risks in that cause.
We’re now in an era of much more hopeful signs. One is a paradox, that any time there’s hundred$ of million$ to be gleaned by identifying and playing to a newly lucrative “market” (a.k.a. audience), that IS entertainment that will be made. The makers only require reasonable evidence that it’ll BE a profitable product (and hopefully addictive), that the target audience (not a coincidental expression) now has money to burn on that product. Making it appear to comply with the target’s hopes, demands & dreams is just good business strategy. Always has been, ever since masses of people began to gain spending power … roughly a century, more or less.
The total American female market, the total American minority market, and others (not the poor, of course), have had increasingly more money to blow on entertainment since the ‘60s because civil rights and the 2nd wave did in fact open doors to more kinds of livelihood than before, building upon advances carved out by their World War II experiences (that generation in turned having built upon hardwon gains from before). For women, we can see pre-war films of smart, strong women succeeding in men’s world — essentially an illusion contrary to all reality but so gratifying and such fun that women bought it and men didn’t mind.
The present moment has its own comparable addictives. Hopefully mixed in with what may be more genuine food for the soul, but one swallow doesn’t make spring.
Not with daily horrific and appalling news of violence and coercion of women and minorities. BUT! — the reason it’s in the news at all is because there is now a much more profitable market/audience for it, and growing. These things have always been happening but most of the market didn’t want to be confronted with it. Now more of the market demands it bee seen. Since advertisers want the opportunity to persuade us to buy the products and services it profits them to keep us addicted to, for-profit news-delivery has to deliver it. And because of the competition to corner the market, for-profit news has to meet production criteria that overlap entertainment in satisfying us. Hence, “if it bleeds, it leads”... but ONLY if who bleeds is someone who matters to a profitably large enough, money-to-spend-enough viewership/readership/audience/market.
(Including at this site: we read here, therefore we are progressive, is the gratifying credo. No need to conduct our lives in any straitly progressive ways, not even here — e.g., hatred of people different from ourselves is quite popular here. No need to get out in the real world with sleeves rolled up, shoulder to shoulders with others applying elbow grease to the machineries of change, unless we actually choose to.)
Nothing takes the push out of a liberation movement like pleasing the strongest bulk of it, blunting their power with satisfaction/gratification, leaving the unentertained minority small, insignificant, and figuring as unreasonable demanders whose noise creates obstacles to their success. ...while the gratified (entertained) majority go on being “taught” by entertainment, product placement, and advertising, about how to behave in order to get the life they want. And how to not behave to avoid getting the sticky end of the lollipop.
Nationally/federally, this country might now possess the potential to build upon all progressive eras that came before. The catch is, the bills have not yet come due: we’re spending with no clarity about where the wherewithal will come from. But popularly, we’re seeing very encouraging wins in entertainment industry awards that seem to reinforce political/govt’l prospects. But again, we can’t tell yet how this is all going to play out. Should we relax and trust that the champions, infantilists and paternalists will take care of us women and minorities at last?
History suggests otherwise. And as is famously said, failure to learn those lessons means repeating them, with all painful karma involved. What are all the ways critical for change-making teaching and learning? Keep thinking about that. Keep finding more ways. History teachers that there can never be too many. YMMV, of course.
Free further reading in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (wik: Ψ) “a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering social neuroscience published by Oxford University Press. Its focus is on empirical research reports...” via Medscape (the professional arm of WebMD) no paywall but registration required.
This Week In The War On Women welcomes all who are interested to comment in the discussion, bring relevant links and stories, join in order to reblog diaries on women’s issues, and consider writing for the Saturday schedule — see schedule comment in the thread.
Our Saturday diaries are always a team effort. Thank you to everyone bringing volunteer energy for the team.
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