Shelley E. TaylorCritiques

Book read for class. Overall it was ok, bit dry. I think some of the information needs to be doubt checked as some information is actually incorrect.

Waded through this one for a social psychology class--not bad, not great.

Interesting book focusing on our "other" response to stress: "tend & befriend" in addition to "fight or flight." For years Taylor has studied stress and our physical, mental, & emotional reactions/consequences to stress, when she discovered that we have long made the assumption that "fight or flight" is our only response to stressful events. This assumption has led to other assumptions--ie, individualism, being out for oneself, the "selfish gene" hypothesis, aggression as dominance, economic self-sufficency theory, etc. However,the latest neuroscience research shows how important the "tending instinct" also is to human development, esp. given how vulnerable human babies are right after birth, and also how long their development period is.
Other topics covered: "talking" as "social glue," women's networking & social skills, oxytocin, EOPs, size of neocortex related to the size of our social connections (Dunbar), "social intelligence" drawing from separate parts of brain as compared to "general intelligence", "affiliative neurociruitry."½

Shelley Taylor (http://www.psych.ucla.edu/Faculty/faculty.php?id=89&area=7) toont levendig en overtuigend aan dat zorgzaamheid een essentieel onderdeel is van het menselijke bestaan, en dat dit waarschijnlijk altijd zo is geweest. Wij zijn in wezen een zorgende soort en zorgzaamheid, vriendschap en altruïsme horen evenzeer bij onze natuur als agressie en de hang naar dominantie.
Een ondubbelzinnige aanrader!
http://minervaria.wordpress.com/2007/06/07/het-knuffelinstinct/

It's now available as an ebook on the MIT press portal http://mitpress-ebooks.mit.edu/product/foundations-in-social-neuroscience