Prosocial behaviors are behaviors that advantage others and include helping, cooperating, volunteering, comforting, and sharing. The bird pictured below sharing his catch with his friend or mate is an example of a prosocial behavior. In humans, prosocial behaviors tend to be directed more toward people we like than those we do not like. In the […]
Emotion and Cognition
We experience potentially emotive stimuli all the time. Some of us suffer intense outrage when we mistakenly tune into Fox News. Others have the same experience when they stumble upon CNN. We all have developed strategies to cope with those events, a skill known as emotion regulation. Although emotions are often portrayed as “irresistible forces”—there […]
Attachments to other people – you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. Kevin Bacon in his classic role as Ren McCormack in “Footloose” is a bad boy teenager who reminds the straight-laced minister (played by John Lithgow) and his quiet town that dancing is also important in leading a fulfilling life. A social […]
Hidden Figures, a 2016 movie about the “computers” behind the calculations that put rockets and humans into space followed by a man on the moon (Project Mercury and the Apollo Missions) is a tale of racism, sexism, and discrimination. This movie highlights the lives of three African-American women and the struggles they faced in a […]
Did you meet your partner online? As recently as 2005, few Americans would have answered this question in the affirmative, but according to Pew Research, in 2016 around 15% of Americans reported using online dating sites or mobile dating apps.
We need to talk about Kevin has been described as masterful. But the film (or book) will probably leave you horrified. And perhaps you will be wondering about psychopathy afterwards. Psychopathy is characterized by “persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, egotistical traits”, according to Wikipedia. People with psychopathy make up 25% […]
“Isn’t that special?” Many people remember this quip from Saturday Night Live’s TV character “The Church Lady.” Brought to life by comedian Dana Carvey, The Church Lady was as sarcastic as she was smug; her “Superiority Dance” is also legendary. But it was The Church Lady’s signature retort, “Isn’t that special?” that has been immortalized […]
Have you checked if your front door is locked? Is your stove turned off? Are you “saving” all those mailers, coupons, and magazines? How about folding those plastic sacks from the grocery store and tucking them away for another day? Have you scrubbed your counter-tops recently? All of these behaviors are considered “normal” for most […]
The Google search string “how often do young men think about sex” returns around 4,000,000 hits. That number itself may point to an answer to the question. Exploring the search results further, the venerable BBC, for example, propounds a statistic that people think about sex every seven seconds, which adds up to 514 times an […]
I am a screenwriter. Screenwriters are the architects of a film—our script is the blueprint from which the film is built. Therefore, we set the stage for what happens when a film goes into production, even though many other elements are introduced into a film once it is in production, such as the music and […]