International Law

Dan Gilbert on the importance of Social Psychology

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

"Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old.

Social psychology is the exception.

We kept cognition alive during the behaviourist revolution that denied it, we kept emotion alive during the cognitive revolution that ignored it, and today we are keeping behaviour alive as the neuroscience revolution steams on and threatens to make it irrelevant.

But psychological revolutions inevitably collapse under their own weight and psychologists start hunting for all the babies they tossed out with the bathwater.

Social psychology is where they typically go to find them. So the challenge for social psychologists watching yet another revolution that promises to leave them in the dustbin of history is to remember that we've outlived every revolutionary who has ever pronounced us obsolete."

We are entering, hopefully only a short, a stage in which the MRI imaging of brain's will, wrongly, reduce the social to the MRI pictures.

Here is the type of reduction that you want to be aware of and guard against:

"When the mother's saw photos of their own baby's face, an extensive brain network was activated, according to the study. But, it was when mothers saw their own infant's happy face that the dopaminergic reward system in particular was activated. This system was not activated when mothers saw their own children looking either sad or neutral.

"This study is fascinating. It's a step towards unraveling the chemistry of emotion, and it begins to show the complex chemistry of the mother-child relationship," said Dr. Michael Wasserman, a pediatrician at Ochsner Health System in New Orleans.

Strathearn explained that for some mothers, there may be a problem in this natural reward system, and that may help to explain why some women never bond with their children or even abuse their children."

It is really doesn't matter what part of the brain lights up when we revel in our baby's smile - what matter is that we do it.

If you are a parent and don't revel in your baby's smile, you don't need a new brain - but you could give your head a shake.

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on July 07, 2008 (boomark / email).