Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Is testosterone one of the causes of evil?
No, this isn't a man-bashing post; it's about people with higher-than-average levels of testosterone for their gender. With that said; we take it so for granted that the overwhelming majority of crimes, especially violent ones, are committed by MEN that we don't wonder WHY... all *I* ever thought about it was that testosterone often leads to aggression, and aggression can be the root of criminal behavior, but that's clearly not a sufficient explanation. If testosterone is part of what creates, not just aggression, but EVIL, that'd explain alot; here's the 1st hint that this could be so (asterisks mine):
"Most people don't appreciate an angry look, but a new University of Michigan psychology study found that ***some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will readily learn ways to encourage them.***
'It's kind of striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as a very negative signal by almost everyone, yet at a non-conscious level can be like a tasty morsel that some people will vigorously work for,' said Oliver Schultheiss, co-author of the study and a U-M associate professor of psychology."
This is horrifying, of course, but shouldn't come as a surprise; we've all known people who clearly enjoy being able to upset others... but did you ever consider what the psychological mechanism could be that'd cause them to have that response? They're bad people, yes, but what's in their brains that MAKES them bad; abnormal physical structures, alteration to mental pathways due to trauma... or, reasonably enough, hormonal or other chemical differences? (Evil is so huge and so varied that it almost certainly arises from a combination of things, but we need to know what they ARE.) This article doesn't explicitly make the connection that people who have this anti-social response are evil, but there's no other word for those that get a kick out of making others angry; nice folks don't react that way.
"They took saliva samples from participants to measure testosterone, a hormone that has been associated with dominance motivation.
Participants then worked on a 'learning task' in which one complex sequence of keypresses was followed by an angry face on the screen, another sequence was followed by a neutral face, and a third sequence was followed by no face.
Participants who were high in testosterone relative to other members of their sex learned the sequence that was followed by an angry face better than the other sequences, while participants low in testosterone did not show this learning advantage for sequences that were reinforced by an angry face.
Notably, ***this effect emerged more strongly in response to faces that were presented subliminally,*** that is, too fast to allow conscious identification. Perhaps just as noteworthy, participants were not aware of the patterns in the sequences of keypresses as they learned them.
While high-testosterone participants showed better learning in response to anger faces, they were unaware of the fact that they learned anything in the first place and unaware of what kind of faces had reinforced their learning.
Wirth, the lead author of the study and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added: 'Better learning of a task associated with anger faces indicates that the anger faces were rewarding, as in a rat that learns to press a lever in order to receive a tasty treat. In that sense, anger faces seemed to be rewarding for high-testosterone people, but aversive for low-testosterone people.'"
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=3209
I don't have to point out how powerful and deeply ingrained the enjoyment of angry looks has to be for it to work subliminally, right? There might've been some gray area if they'd been showing the angry faces of those the subjects dislike or are competitive with, but they were using the faces of strangers, so all this can be is the pure love of the anger of others... pure evil.
What IS evil? We don't know. We're finally emerging from the shameful days of imagining that so-called "mental illnesses" arose from some mystical thing separate from our physical beings (a mystical thing inexplicably affected by medication) and accepting that they, like every other affliction, are caused by PHYSICAL issues (mostly from imbalances of neurotransmitters in the brain); it's high time that we grasp that evil MUST arise from physical sources as well. Can we be genetically predisposed to be evil? How about genetically CERTAIN? We don't know. Are the brains of evil people fundamentally different, as the brains of schizophrenics typically are? Which of the wide variety of chemical and electrical processes our brains possess are abnormal in evil people? We don't know... and can you think of any possible excuse as to WHY we don't know, and why as best as I can determine no one's studying this? We should be dragging every serial killer and equivalent scumbag in our prisons out of their cells and into research centers to do every test and scan in existence on them, right down to their DNA, to see exactly how their brains differ from those of decent human beings; once we know what the sources of evil are, we've got a shot at what would be the greatest advance in all of human history... treatments, or even CURES, for evil.
"Most people don't appreciate an angry look, but a new University of Michigan psychology study found that ***some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will readily learn ways to encourage them.***
'It's kind of striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as a very negative signal by almost everyone, yet at a non-conscious level can be like a tasty morsel that some people will vigorously work for,' said Oliver Schultheiss, co-author of the study and a U-M associate professor of psychology."
This is horrifying, of course, but shouldn't come as a surprise; we've all known people who clearly enjoy being able to upset others... but did you ever consider what the psychological mechanism could be that'd cause them to have that response? They're bad people, yes, but what's in their brains that MAKES them bad; abnormal physical structures, alteration to mental pathways due to trauma... or, reasonably enough, hormonal or other chemical differences? (Evil is so huge and so varied that it almost certainly arises from a combination of things, but we need to know what they ARE.) This article doesn't explicitly make the connection that people who have this anti-social response are evil, but there's no other word for those that get a kick out of making others angry; nice folks don't react that way.
"They took saliva samples from participants to measure testosterone, a hormone that has been associated with dominance motivation.
Participants then worked on a 'learning task' in which one complex sequence of keypresses was followed by an angry face on the screen, another sequence was followed by a neutral face, and a third sequence was followed by no face.
Participants who were high in testosterone relative to other members of their sex learned the sequence that was followed by an angry face better than the other sequences, while participants low in testosterone did not show this learning advantage for sequences that were reinforced by an angry face.
Notably, ***this effect emerged more strongly in response to faces that were presented subliminally,*** that is, too fast to allow conscious identification. Perhaps just as noteworthy, participants were not aware of the patterns in the sequences of keypresses as they learned them.
While high-testosterone participants showed better learning in response to anger faces, they were unaware of the fact that they learned anything in the first place and unaware of what kind of faces had reinforced their learning.
Wirth, the lead author of the study and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added: 'Better learning of a task associated with anger faces indicates that the anger faces were rewarding, as in a rat that learns to press a lever in order to receive a tasty treat. In that sense, anger faces seemed to be rewarding for high-testosterone people, but aversive for low-testosterone people.'"
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=3209
I don't have to point out how powerful and deeply ingrained the enjoyment of angry looks has to be for it to work subliminally, right? There might've been some gray area if they'd been showing the angry faces of those the subjects dislike or are competitive with, but they were using the faces of strangers, so all this can be is the pure love of the anger of others... pure evil.
What IS evil? We don't know. We're finally emerging from the shameful days of imagining that so-called "mental illnesses" arose from some mystical thing separate from our physical beings (a mystical thing inexplicably affected by medication) and accepting that they, like every other affliction, are caused by PHYSICAL issues (mostly from imbalances of neurotransmitters in the brain); it's high time that we grasp that evil MUST arise from physical sources as well. Can we be genetically predisposed to be evil? How about genetically CERTAIN? We don't know. Are the brains of evil people fundamentally different, as the brains of schizophrenics typically are? Which of the wide variety of chemical and electrical processes our brains possess are abnormal in evil people? We don't know... and can you think of any possible excuse as to WHY we don't know, and why as best as I can determine no one's studying this? We should be dragging every serial killer and equivalent scumbag in our prisons out of their cells and into research centers to do every test and scan in existence on them, right down to their DNA, to see exactly how their brains differ from those of decent human beings; once we know what the sources of evil are, we've got a shot at what would be the greatest advance in all of human history... treatments, or even CURES, for evil.
