Modern neuroscience is beginning to substantiate Darwin's notion that the roots of human morality lie in social instincts, present in several species. The role of primitive motivational-emotional systems in human morality still remains under-recognized, however. Based on recent experimental evidence and classic neuroanatomical data, we here portray a view of how "ancient" limbic-neurohumoral sy...

Public health education may have harmful side effects: generate fear, give rise to healthism and contribute to a medical sorting society. To prevent these adverse reactions a new deal for public health communication is presented. It is commended to move public health from omnipotence to moderation, from life style to living conditions, from risk to the bright sides of health, from statistical c...

Catatonia, long viewed as a motor disorder, may be better understood as a fear response, akin to the animal defense strategy tonic immobility (after G. G. Gallup & J. D. Maser, 1977). This proposal, consistent with K. L. Kahlbaum's (1874/1973) original conception, is based on similarities between catatonia and tonic immobility ("death feint") as well as evidence that catatonia is associated wit...

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is an increasingly popular metaheuristic algorithm for solving complex optimization problems. Its popularity is due to its repeated successes in finding an optimum or a near optimal solution for problems in many applied disciplines. The algorithm makes no assumption of the function to be optimized and for biomedical experiments like those presented here, PSO ty...

To understand human behavior, it is important to know under what conditions people deviate from selfish rationality. This study explores the interaction of natural survival instincts and internalized social norms using data on the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania. We show that time pressure appears to be crucial when explaining behavior under extreme conditions of life and death. Even t...

Epstein (1994; 2003) proposed that there are two cognitive information processing systems that operate in parallel: the intuitive thinking style and the rational thinking style. Decisional fit occurs when the preferred thinking style is applied to making a decision and research has shown that this fit increases the value of the outcome of a decision. Additionally, decisional fit leads to less r...

P HYLOANALYSIS, of which the late Dr. Trigant Burrow was the leading exponent, is a body of psychological theory dealing with the internal universe of behavior, the basic reactions that motivate men’s feelings, thoughts, and actions. Burrow held that it was humanity’s acquisition of language as a tool which caused men to deviate from the biological norm and led them into their present pathologi...

The human brain is a veritable hodgepodge of ad hoc assemblages of the old, the borrowed, and the new, gerrymandered in response to millennia of internal and external forces. It follows that human cognition has unfolded, over evolutionary time, out of disparate fragments: emotion, movement programs, very old instincts, multiple memory systems, visual patterning and many uses of sound, all in co...

<i>Tōka no Kiku</i>, published by MishimaYukio in 1961, is considered the second play of his “Trilogy on February 26 Incident”. It loosely based a specific element assassination Makino Nobuaki, and highlights non-violent instincts young Imperial Japanese Army officers who organized attack. On other hand, image surviving soldier this play, created Mishima, attempted to represent hist...