Category: Behavior/Psychology Page 15 of 27

Life Lessons from a Neuroscientist

On December 30, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Guest Post, Neuroscience

I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Anne Buckley, a professor and neuropathologist working in Dr. Chay Kuo’s cell biology lab at Duke. I got a first-hand account of her research on neuron development and function in mice. But just as fascinating to me were the life lessons she had learned during her time as a researcher.

Anne Buckley, M.D. Ph.D., is an assistant professor of pathology

Buckley’s research looks at brain tumors in mice. She recently found that some of the mice developed the tumors in an area full of neurons, the roof of the fourth ventricle, which is of particular interest because humans have developed tumors in the same location. This discovery could show how neurological pathways affect tumor formation and progression.

Buckley also gave me some critical words of advice, cautioning me that research isn’t for everyone.

“Research is not glamorous, and not always rewarding,” she warned me. When she first started research, Buckley learned a hard lesson: work doesn’t necessarily lead to results. “For every question I went after, I found ten more unresolved,” she said. “To be a researcher, it takes a lot of perseverance and resilience. A lot of long nights.”

But that’s also the beauty of research. Buckley says that she’s learned to find happiness in the small successes, and that she “enjoys the process, enjoys the challenge.”

And when discoveries happen?

“When I look at data, and I see something unexpected, I get really excited,” she says. “I know something that no one else knows. Tomorrow, everyone will know. But tonight, I’m the only person in the world who knows.”

Guest Post by Kendra Zhong, North Carolina School of Science and Math, Class of 2017

Evolutionary Genetics Shaping Health and Behavior

By Karl Bates

On December 28, 2016

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Field Research, Guest Post

Dr. Jenny Tung is interested in the connections between genes and behavior: How does behavior influence genetic variation and regulation and how do genetic differences influence behavior?

A young Amboseli baboon hitches a ride with its mother. (Photo by Noah Snyder-Mackler)

An assistant professor in the Departments of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke, Tung is interested in evolution because it gives us a window into why the living world is the way it is. It explains how organisms relate to one another and their environment. Genetics explains the actual molecular foundation for evolutionary change, and it gives part of the answer for trait variation. Tung was drawn as an undergrad towards the combination of evolution and genetics to explain every living thing we see around us; she loves the explanatory power and elegance to it.

Tung’s longest collaborative project is the Amboseli Baboon Research Project (ABRP), located in the Amboseli ecosystem of East Africa. She co-leads it with Susan Alberts, chair of evolutionary anthropology at Duke, Jeanne Altmann at Princeton, and Beth Archie at Notre Dame.

Tung has spent months at a time on the savannah next to Mount Kilimanjaro for this project. The ABRP monitors hundreds of baboons in several social groups and studies social processes at several levels. Recently the project has begun to include genetics and other aspects of baboon biology, including the social behaviors within the social groups and populations, and how these behaviors have changed along with the changing Amboseli ecosystem. Tung enjoys different aspects of all of her projects, but is incredibly grateful to be a part of the long-term Amboseli study.

Jenny Tung is an assistant professor in evolutionary anthropology and biology.

The process of discovery excites Tung. It is hard for her to pin down a single thing that makes research worth it, but “new analyses, discussions with students who teach me something new, seeing a great talk that makes you think in a different way or gives you new research directions to pursue” are all very exciting, she said.

Depending on the project, the fun part varies for her; watching a student develop as a scientist through their own project is rewarding, and she loves collaborating with extraordinary scientists. Specific sets of collaborators make the research worth it. “When collaborations work, you really push each other to be better scientists and researchers,” Tung said.

Guest post by Raechel Zeller, North Carolina School of Science and Math, Class of 2017

Would You Expect a 'Real Man' to Tweet "Cute" or Not?

By Karl Bates

On November 16, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Field Research, Mathematics, Statistics

There’s nothing cute about stereotypes, but as a species, we seem to struggle to live without them.

In a clever new study led by Jordan Carpenter, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Duke, a University of Pennsylvania team of social psychologists and computer scientists figured out a way to test just how accurate our stereotypes about language use might be, using a huge collection of real tweets and a form of artificial intelligence called “natural language processing.”

Word clouds show the words in tweets that raters mistakenly attributed to Female authors (left) or Males (right). The larger the word appears, the more often the raters were fooled by it. Word color indicates the frequency of the word; gray is least frequent, then blue, and dark red is the most frequent. <url> means they used a link in their tweet.

Starting with a data set that included the 140-character bon mots of more than 67,000 Twitter users, they figured out the actual characteristics of 3,000 of the authors. Then they sorted the authors into piles using four criteria – male v. female; liberal v. conservative; younger v. older; and education (no college degree, college degree, advanced degree).

A random set of 100 tweets by each author over 12 months was loaded into the crowd-sourcing website Amazon Mechanical Turk. Intertubes users were then invited to come in and judge what they perceived about the author one characteristic at a time, like age, gender, or education, for 2 cents per rating. Some folks just did one set, others tried to make a day’s wage.

The raters were best at guessing politics, age and gender. “Everybody was better than chance,” Carpenter said. When guessing at education, however, they were worse than chance.

Jordan Carpenter is a newly-arrived Duke postdoc working with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in philosophy and brain science.

“When they saw the word S*** [this is a family blog folks, work with us here] they most often thought the author didn’t have a college degree. But where they went wrong was they overestimated the importance of that word,” Carpenter said. Raters seemed to believe that a highly-educated person would never tweet the S-word or the F-word. Unfortunately, not true! “But it is a road to people thinking you’re not a Ph.D.,” Carpenter wisely counsels.

The raters were 75 percent correct on gender, by assuming women would be tweeting words like Love, Cute, Baby and My, interestingly enough. But they got tricked most often by assuming women would not be talking about News, Research or Ebola or that the guys would not be posting Love, Life or Wonderful.

Female authors were slightly more likely to be liberal in this sample of tweets, but not as much as the raters assumed. Conservatism was viewed by raters as a male trait. Again, generally true, but not as much as the raters believed.

Youthful authors were correctly perceived to be more likely to namedrop a @friend, or say Me and Like and a few variations on the F-bomb, but they could throw the raters for a loop by using Community, Our and Original.

And therein lies the social psychology takeaway from all this: “An accurate stereotype should be one with accurate social judgments of people,” but clearly every stereotype breaks down at some point, leading to “mistaken social judgement,” Carpenter said. Just how much stereotypes should be used or respected is a hot area of discussion within the field right now, he said.

The other value of the paper is that it developed an entirely new way to apply the tools of Big Data analysis to a social psychology question without having to invite a bunch of undergraduates into the lab with the lure of a Starbucks gift card. Using tweets stripped of their avatars or any other identifier ensured that the study was testing what people thought of just the words, nothing else, Carpenter said.

The paper is “Real Men Don’t Say “Cute”: Using Automatic Language Analysis To Isolate Inaccurate Aspects Of Stereotypes.” You can see the paper in Social Psychology and Personality Science, if you have a university IP address and your library subscribes to Sage journals. Otherwise, here’s a press release from the journal. (DOI: 10.1177/1948550616671998 )

Post by Karl Leif Bates

Depression Screening Questions Seem to Miss Men

By Karl Bates

On November 10, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Guest Post, Medicine, Neuroscience

Women may be more likely to be diagnosed and treated for anxiety and depression not because they are, but because they’re more willing than men to honestly answer the questions used to diagnose mental health problems, a new Duke study finds.

Asking men about their drinking might identify more cases of the blues like this guy. (Blauwe Week 1936 advertisement against alcohol. From Wellcome Images via Wikimedia Commons)

Jen’nan Read, a Duke sociologist and lead-author of the study, said men seem to adhere to a societal stigma to remain “macho” and are less likely to open up about their feelings. Her findings appear in Sociological Forum available online now and will appear in print in December.

Read’s study examines connections between mental and physical health in both men and women and suggests that the criteria used to examine mental health should be expanded beyond depression to include questions on substance abuse, which is another form of expressing mental distress, and more common among men.

The study finds that while depression is often how women express problems with mental health, men do so by drinking alcohol. The Duke study found that questioning men about alcohol use is a better way to diagnose both mental and physical health problems.

“Depression gives a lopsided picture,” Read said. “It makes mental health look like a women’s issue.”

A common set of questions include asking how often people have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, felt sad, lonely or like ‘you couldn’t shake the blues.’

Jen’nan Read is a Duke sociologist

“It’s more acceptable for women to answer affirmatively to these questions,” Read said. “Men are less likely to say they have feelings of anxiety. Issues of masculinity lead many to mask their problems.”

The result is often missed diagnoses of mental health problems in men.

The study crunches data from the Aging Status and Sense of Control Survey, in which people answer questions about their mental and physical health, diet, family situation, access and use of health care and other life factors. The average of women surveyed is about 54, and the average age of men was about 51.

Read’s study found that both men and women suffering from poor mental health are likely to suffer physical problems as well, like high blood pressure, diabetes and other issues.

The study was conducted by Read, Jeremy R. Porter, a sociologist with the City University of New York – Brooklyn College, and Bridget K. Gorman, a sociologist at Rice University.

Guest Post by Eric Ferreri, Duke News and Communications

Mapping the Brain With Stories

By Meg Shieh

On November 8, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Data, Lecture, Neuroscience, Visualization

Dr. Alex Huth. Image courtesy of The Gallant Lab.

On October 15, I attended a presentation on “Using Stories to Understand How The Brain Represents Words,” sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute and Neurohumanities Research Group and presented by Dr. Alex Huth. Dr. Huth is a neuroscience postdoc who works in the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley and was here on behalf of Dr. Jack Gallant.

Dr. Huth started off the lecture by discussing how semantic tasks activate huge swaths of the cortex. The semantic system places importance on stories. The issue was in understanding “how the brain represents words.”

To investigate this, the Gallant Lab designed a natural language experiment. Subjects lay in an fMRI scanner and listened to 72 hours’ worth of ten naturally spoken narratives, or stories. They heard many different words and concepts. Using an imaging technique called GE-EPI fMRI, the researchers were able to record BOLD responses from the whole brain.

Dr. Huth explaining the process of obtaining the new colored models that revealed semantic “maps are consistent across subjects.”

Dr. Huth showed a scan and said, “So looking…at this volume of 3D space, which is what you get from an fMRI scan…is actually not that useful to understanding how things are related across the surface of the cortex.” This limitation led the researchers to improve upon their methods by reconstructing the cortical surface and manipulating it to create a 2D image that reveals what is going on throughout the brain. This approach would allow them to see where in the brain the relationship between what the subject was hearing and what was happening was occurring.

A model was then created that would require voxel interpretation, which “is hard and lots of work,” said Dr. Huth, “There’s a lot of subjectivity that goes into this.” In order to simplify voxel interpretation, the researchers simplified the dimensional subspace to find the classes of voxels using principal components analysis. This meant that they took data, found the important factors that were similar across the subjects, and interpreted the meaning of the components. To visualize these components, researchers sorted words into twelve different categories.

The Four Categories of Words Sorted in an X,Y-like Axis

These categories were then further simplified into four “areas” on what might resemble an x , y axis. On the top right was where violent words were located. The top left held social perceptual words. The lower left held words relating to “social.” The lower right held emotional words. Instead of x , y axis labels, there were PC labels. The words from the study were then colored based on where they appeared in the PC space.

By using this model, the Gallant could identify which patches of the brain were doing different things. Small patches of color showed which “things” the brain was “doing” or “relating.” The researchers found that the complex cortical maps showing semantic information among the subjects was consistent.

These responses were then used to create models that could predict BOLD responses from the semantic content in stories. The result of the study was that the parietal cortex, temporal cortex, and prefrontal cortex represent the semantics of narratives.

meg_shieh_100hed Post by Meg Shieh

Does Digital Healthcare Work?

By Kara Manke

On November 7, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Data, Lecture, Medicine

Wearable technologies like Fitbit have been shown to provide a short-term increase in physical activity, but long-term benefits are still unclear, even if recent studies on corporate wellness programs highlight the potential healthcare savings.

Luca Foschini, PhD is a co-founder and head of data science at Evidation Health, and a visiting research scientist at UCSB. Source: Network Science IGERT at UCSB.

To figure out the effects of these technologies on our health, we need ways to efficiently mine through the vast amounts of data and feedback that wearable devices constantly record.

As someone who has recently jumped on the Fitbit “band” wagon, I have often wondered about what happens with all the data collected from my wrist day after day, week after week.

Luca Foschini, a co-founder and head of data science at Evidation Health, recently spoke at Duke’s Genomic and Precision Medicine Forum where he explained how his company uses these massive datasets to analyze and predict how digital health interventions — Fitbits and beyond — can result in better health outcomes.

California-based Evidation health uses real-life data collected upon authorization from 500,000-plus users of mobile health applications and devices. This mobile health or “mHealth” data is quickly becoming a focus of intense research interest because of its ability to provide such a wealth of information about an individual’s behavior.

Foschini and Evidation Health have taken the initiative to design and run clinical studies to show the healthcare field that digital technologies can be used for assessing patient health, behavioral habits, and medication adherence, just to name a few.

Foschini said that the benefits of mobile technologies could go far beyond answering questions about daily behavior and lifestyle to formulate predictions about health outcomes. This opens the door for “wearables and apps” to be used in the realm of behavior change intervention and preventative care.

Foschini speaks at Duke’s Genomic and Precision Medicine Forum

Foschini explains how data collected from thousands of individuals wearing digital health trackers was used to find a associations between activity tracking patterns and weight loss.

Evidation Health is not only exploring data based on wearable technologies, but data within all aspects of digital health. For example, an interesting concept to consider is whether devices create an opportunity for faster clinical trials. So-called “virtual recruiting” of participants for clinical studies might use social media, email campaigns and online advertising, rather than traditional ads and fliers. Foschini said a study by his firm found this type of recruitment is up to twelve times faster than normal recruitment methods for clinical trials (Kumar et al 2016).

While Foschini and others in his field are excited about the possibilities that mHealth provides for the betterment of healthcare, he acknowledges the hurdles standing in the way of this new approach. There is no standardization in how this type of data is gathered, and greater scrutiny is needed to ensure the reliability and accuracy of some of the apps and devices that supply the data.

amanda_cox_100 Post by Amanda Cox

Nature vs. Nurture: Predicting Our Futures

By Meg Shieh

On November 4, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Genetics/Genomics, Neuroscience

Sitting in The Connection at the Social Science Research Institute in Gross Hall was intimidating. I was surrounded by distinguished people: professors, visiting professors from distinguished universities, researchers, and postdocs, all of whom had gathered together to view a showing of the documentary, Predict My Future: The Science of Us.

Dr. Terrie Moffitt, a Duke professor. Image courtesy of Moffitt and Caspi.

Dr. Avshalom Caspi, a Duke professor. Image Courtesy of Moffitt and Caspi.

Predict My Future documents the work of Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, two Duke professors who study people in Dunedin, New Zealand. They have followed the lives of all the children born within a year in Dunedin for the last 40 years to measure genetics, personal habits, environment, jobs, physical attributes, and etc. The Dunedin Longitudinal Study is the largest study of its kind and offers deep insights into how children become adults.

The episode, “The Early Years,” first posed the questions, “Why do some people become successful and others become outcasts? Why are we the way that we are?” By tracking all of these personal factors and some behaviors, including risky sexual activities, criminal activities, and drinking and smoking habits, the Dunedin Longitudinal Study can answer these questions. The researchers can tell which children are likely to become “problem children,” “geniuses,” and so on, based on the child’s personality type.

Q&A Session After the Viewing of the Documentary. Image Courtesy of Duke SSRI and Taken By Shelbi Fanning.

The study first identified five different personality types in young children, and researchers discovered that the children’s’ personality types did not change in adulthood. The three personality types that are typically associated with doing well in life, having better health, having friends, and being more successful are: “well-adjusted,” “reserved,” and “confident.” The two personality types associated with having poorer quality of life in adulthood are “inhibited” and “undercontrolled.”

Then, the study identified other factors that lead to serious consequences later in life or simply predict futures. Children who experienced delays in walking and in talking were likely to have issues with brain development. Boys with these traits typically disliked school, did poorly in school, and were more likely to be involved in criminal activity.

The full house watching the documentary. Image Courtesy of Duke SSRI and Taken by Shelbi Fanning.

The amount of sleep children received between the ages of five and eleven would determine obesity in adulthood. Adults who received the least amount of sleep as children tended to be obese by age 32.

Schizophrenia, researchers discovered, starts developing in young children, not just adults as had previously been thought. About half of the 11-year-olds in the study who said they had seen or heard things that weren’t there had developed schizophrenia two decades later.

Watching more TV was associated with a higher likelihood of smoking and having anxiety. Regardless of IQ or environment, children who watched more TV were more likely to leave school without qualifications.

The important lesson the documentary emphasized was that having a good childhood is important. Warm, sensitive, stimulating, family-feeling invoking environments are great protective factors to risk factors.

Overall, this was a brilliant, stimulating, easy-to-understand documentary.

meg_shieh_100hed Post by Meg Shieh

An Expert’s Perspective on Mental Health

By Lola Sanchez-Carrion

On November 3, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Field Research, Global Health

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Week and Depression Awareness Month, I interviewed Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell, an associate research professor of Global Health in the Duke Global Health Institute whose research focuses on positive mental health, clergy health, and the integration of care within health systems.

In 2007, Proeschold-Bell founded the Clergy Health Initiative, a program developed to improve health outcomes among the clergy of North Carolina. In their first study, they performed a longitudinal survey of nine Methodist churches in North Carolina to determine the clergy’s health status. It was found that the clergy had a far higher obesity rate (41%) than the rest of North Carolina (29%). High rates of chronic disease associated with overweight/obese individuals were also present. The most interesting find, though, was that depression rates were double that of the regional average. Why?

Proeschold-Bell has conducted research in Kenya, Tanzania, Peru, India, and the U.S.

“Being the leader of an organization is difficult, says Proeschold-Bell. Churches are extremely underfunded and are constantly pressed for time. Pastors are expected to do all of the spiritual work that being a pastor entails, and also act as business managers for the church. But, thanks to donations from the Duke Endowment, Proeschold-Bell was able to develop three interventions to improve clergy health. Since then, she’s retrieved ten years of data that has allowed for further improvements in holistic health for the clergy of North Carolina.

When asked about depression specifically, Proeschold-Bell said that “the current model in place to treat depression does not work.” We focus strictly on treating the issue by mitigating its symptoms through an antidepressant, instead of pulling at the issue from multiple roots.

She says our efforts should be focused on increasing positive mental health. Positive mental health refers to the presence of positive emotions and good functioning (in both individual and social environments). Work being done by Corey Keyes at Emory has shown that individuals with high positive mental health are less likely to develop depression and chronic disease. By focusing our efforts towards improving one’s overall mental wellbeing, we can get individuals “ahead of the curve” and prevent them from even being depressed in the first place, says Proeschold-Bell.

Further research focusing on positive emotions has been conducted by Barbara Fredrickson at UNC, who suggests that positive emotions have been scientifically proven to increase people’s open-mindedness. Those with more positive emotions have been more willing to try new things and open up to other people, says Proeschold-Bell. These positive emotions connect greatly to one’s ability to be resilient, and there is research to be done in the overlap between possessing these emotions and being able to recover from situations of trauma and conflict that can be mentally straining.

To tackle mental health issues, we must look at them holistically and extensively. Not only do these issues need to be covered from all angles, but interventions need to be culturally competent and context-specific. Keeping these values in mind, will help improve global mental health outcomes.

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Post by: Lola Sanchez-Carrion

Economics and Health: The Biases Behind Our Decisions

By Lola Sanchez-Carrion

On October 21, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Global Health, Lecture, Medicine

Eric Finkelstein of the the Duke Graduate Medical School in Singapore studies how economic principles might be used to improve individual healthcare.

At a talk last Friday, Finkelstein, who was selected by Thomson Reuters as one of the world’s most influential scientific minds of 2015, argued that the same biases that affect our economic decisions could also influence our healthcare choices, and that understanding these biases could help motivate individuals to live healthy active lives.

In theory, people should be able to make healthy choices, Finkelstein said. Under the utility maximization model, individuals have the ability to rationalize and recognize the benefits of taking particular actions for themselves. But often we are not rational beings, he said, and there are several “deviations” that steer us away from maximizing our utility.

One of these deviations is the “present bias” preference, which leads us to make decisions in the present that our future self will regret. He discussed a particular experiment in which people are asked to choose what they will eat in one week’s time: a candy bar or an apple. Most choose the apple, but after a week, when they were given the opportunity to reevaluate their choice and change it, most switch to the candy bar.

This experiment shows not only the dynamic, unpredictable nature of our decisions, but also highlights our tendency to overestimate the will power of our “future selves.”

Another interesting bias that prevents us from being rational is our probabilistic assessment bias, which describes our tendency to overestimate the probability of very unlikely events, while underestimating the probability of those that are likely. This bias directly relates to health and our tendency to ignore the possibility of suffering a detrimental health problem like a heart attack, when in reality it’s quite commonplace.

Eric Finkelstein’s research, which focuses on the intersection between economics and global health, has gained him renowned success nationally and abroad. Source: Duke NUS Medical School.

To understand how these biases might influence individuals suddenly diagnosed with a terminal illness, Finkelstein and his medical team in Singapore conducted their own study on healthcare choices. In the experiment, both healthy and sick individuals were asked to identify what treatments they would prioritize if diagnosed with terminal cancer: level of pain, hours of care required, potential to extend life, cost of treatment and location of death.

Most healthy individuals said they would want whatever treatment was cheapest, but showed very little interest in investing in extending their life or selecting where they died. When sick patients were asked the same questions, on the other hand, they valued place of death (home was preferred) and survival time above everything else. Such information indicates just how difficult it is for us to predict where to invest in healthcare for cancer patients.

From this study and several others, Finkelstein concludes that we are not rational beings, but are instead irrational ones that feed off of biases and change our opinions constantly. But, he suggests that through the use of incentives, we can mediate these irrational biases and ultimately improve health outcomes.

Post by Lola Sanchez-Carrion

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Violence: Risk vs Protection Factors

By Meg Shieh

On October 17, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Lecture, Neuroscience

On Oct. 3, in place of a typical Interdisciplinary Discussion Course (IDC) for the Focus program, we were brought together in the White Lecture Hall on East to hear Dr. Jeremy G. Richman give a lecture on “Violence, Compassion, and the Brain”.

Dr. Jeremy G. Richman

Since his daughter Avielle was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Dr. Richman has been studying violence and the brain with the Avielle Foundation. Using his extensive research experience in neuroscience and neuropsychopharmacology, Dr. Richman has been working with a team on understanding the risk and protective factors for violence.

Dr. Richman lecturing in the White Lecture Hall on East Campus

The brain is very complex, and its processes and connections are still very much veiled. As a result, The Avielle Foundation currently conducts research on understanding violence by “bridging biochemical and behavioral sciences” using functional MRI brain scans, biochemistry, and genetics and epigenetics.

Based on the research he has analyzed, Dr. Richman identified four types of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that are risk factors for violence: psychological, physical, sexual, and household dysfunction/neglect.

Interestingly enough, research has shown that physically abused children are not necessarily more likely to be arrested for a violence-related crime. While it can happen, the situation is complicated because there is more than one factor involved. Adverse childhood experiences typically lead to violence towards oneself. When someone has at least four ACEs, their risk for alcoholism increases seven-fold. When males have more than five experiences within the ACE categories, their risk for drug use increases by 46 times. The more ACEs experienced, the greater exponentially the percentage of lifetime history of attempted suicides.

Studies have shown that firearm access in the home “is associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.”

The debate of Nature vs. Nurture also comes into play. Humans have a monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene, also known as the Warrior Gene. MAOA is also associated with low dopamine levels. When males experience physical abuse and have low MAOA, the chance for them to have psychopathology increases. The interesting thing is that there is one main difference between a violent psychopath and a resilient leader: childhood experiences. A violent psychopath likely had an adverse childhood experience; the resilient leader had a nurturing childhood. Richman noted that studies involving neuroscience and psychology always have shortcomings because of the brain’s complexity. The brain’s processes and connections are still very much veiled.

Despite all these risk factors to violence, there are protective factors in place. One is less at risk when in a compassionate, kind, resilient, and connection-building environment with family and peers who embody these ideals. Healthy habits, good nutrition, and exercise help reduce stress, which in turn helps reduce the chances for violence.

Post by Meg Shieh meg_shieh_100hed