PSYC23H3 Lecture 4: Week 4
Document Summary
Different physiological strategies to help us survive, form relationships, and contribute to a common good: e. g. , the notion of dissolution. Biological freedom constitutes the capacity to choose which physiological strategy to use: e. g. , make friends rather than freak out or give up. Potential candidates: genes and genetic mutations, serve and return (warm sensitive parents, society and cultural practices, gene x environment interactions, intergenerational transmission. Reducing social stress elicits emotional contagion of pain in mouse and human strangers: empathy for another"s physical pain has been demonstrated in humans [1] and mice. [2]; in both species, empathy is stronger between familiars: stress levels in stranger dyads are higher than in cage mate dyads or isolated mice. [2, 3], suggesting that stress might be responsible for absence of empathy for the pain of strangers: in another part of the study, scientists explored what it would take to alter stranger status in this setting.
