In Practice: Madonna-Whore: Not Complex

By Peter D. Kramer in In Practice :

If you want to pass on your genes, you might hold out for a quality mate and raise your offspring with care. On the other hand, you might just enjoy promiscuous sex and let the pups fend for themselves.

What determines which strategy you’ll choose? Your mother — or rather, the early life experience she provides. That, and how your genes fold. At least it’s that way for rodents.

At the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Michael Meany, a psychobiologist at McGill, presented the results of years of work on mothering, genes, and behavior in rats.
If a rat mother is nurturant (she tends to lick and groom her pups, making her “high LG”), her offspring will be less anxious, better at facing stress, and good at parenting their own broods. Low LG mothers produce does who encounter puberty early, show greater sexual receptivity, enjoy an increased pregnancy rate, and neglect their young. Subsequent generations of female offspring will do the same — unless a lucky pup is “cross-nurtured” by a mother who licks and grooms, in which case the cosseted rat will grow up to be be calm and picky.

These responses typify two Darwinian strategies. If the early message is that life is

nasty, you pass your genes on any which way. If you begin with a quality environment, you choose a more patient strategy.

The personality variants result from the way the brain handles the usual suspects: stress-responsive hormones, serotonin, and oxytocin. But in Meany’s rat model, at the base of the difference is an extremely simple difference in epigenetics.

Remember epigenetics? It refers to changes in the configuration of chromosomes that maintain the same gene sequences. Here, neglectful rearing results in the methylation of single base, a cytosine, found in a “non-coding” region of DNA that turns out to influence the production of receptors for stress hormones, via a “glucocorticoid receptor promoter.” It's not your genes, it's how they're folded, a geometry that encodes the trouble you've seen.

A “histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor” that helps reverse the methylation and refold the gene will make the low-LG offspring more resilient in face of stress. Absent this chemical re-parenting, once the methylation occurs — as it invariably does in the offspring of low LG mothers — it persists for a lifetime, muting the production of stress modulators even in flush intervals. The pattern will continue for generations, in a sort of rat family “culture of poverty.”

In human terms, if you, as a woman, get knocked up young and neglect your child in favor of more hot hookups, it may be a single methylated cytosine that’s to blame — or to praise, if that strategy works for you and yours. And if, as a man on the prowl, you think that the complaisant babe you’re ogling learned life’s lessons in the school of hard knocks, you’re probably right.

For more detail, you can download the first paper listed in this bibliography of Michael Meany's work. The essay concludes: “The quality of the environment influences the behavior of the parent, which in turn is the critical factor in determining whether development proceeds along an optimistic versus a pessimistic pattern of development. In mammals, . . . parental signals serve as a ‘forecast’ of the level of adversity that lies ahead. . . . various levels of environmental demand require different traits in the offspring. This is a simple, even obvious message, with significant social implications.” It’s also one that may be encoded reasonably simply in the mammalian brain, via DNA that’s responded to the way of the world.

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Psychology Today: Dare To Be Yourself

From Psychology Today:

A sense of authenticity is one of our deepest psychological needs, and people are more hungry for it than ever. Even so, being true to oneself is not for the faint of heart.

By: Karen Wright

It starts innocently enough, perhaps the first time you recognize your own reflection.

You're not yet 2 years old, brushing your teeth, standing on your steppy stool by the bathroom sink, when suddenly it dawns on you: That foam-flecked face beaming back from the mirror is you.

You. Yourself. Your very own self.

It's a revelation—and an affliction. Human infants have no capacity for self-awareness. Then, between 18 and 24 months of age, they become conscious of their own thoughts, feelings, and sensations—thereby embarking on a quest that will consume much of their lives. For many
modern selves, the first shock of self-recognition marks the beginning of a lifelong search for the one "true" self and for a feeling of behaving in accordance with that self that can be called authenticity.

A hunger for authenticity guides us in every age and aspect of life. It drives our explorations of work, relationships, play, and prayer. Teens and twentysomethings try out friends, fashions, hobbies, jobs, lovers, locations, and living arrangements to see what fits and what's "just
not me." Midlifers deepen commitments to career, community, faith, and family that match their self-images, or feel trapped in existences that seem not their own. Elders regard life choices with regret or satisfaction based largely on whether they were "true" to themselves.

Questions of authenticity determine our regard for others, as well. They dominated the presidential primaries: Was Hillary authentic when she shed a tear in New Hampshire? Was Obama earnest when his speechwriters cribbed lines from a friend's oration?

"Americans remain deeply invested in the notion of the authentic self," says ethicist John Portmann of the University of Virginia. "It's part of the national consciousness."

It's also a cornerstone of mental health. Authenticity is correlated with many aspects of psychological well-being, including vitality, self-esteem, and coping skills. Acting in accordance with one's core self—a trait called self-determination—is ranked by some experts as one of three basic psychological needs, along with competence and a sense of relatedness.

Yet, increasingly, contemporary culture seems to mock the very idea that there is anything
solid and true about the self. Cosmetic surgery, psychopharmaceuticals, and perpetual makeovers favor a mutable ideal over the genuine article. MySpace profiles and tell-all blogs carry the whiff of wishful identity. Steroids, stimulants, and doping transform athletic and
academic performance. Fabricated memoirs become best-sellers. Speed-dating discounts sincerity. Amid a clutter of counterfeits, the core self is struggling to assert itself.

"It's some kind of epidemic right now," says Stephen Cope, author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. "People feel profoundly like they're not living from who they really are, their authentic self, their deepest possibility in the world. The result is a sense of near-desperation."

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Psychology Today: Solitude vs Loneliness

Psychology Today reports:

Solitude is something you choose. Loneliness is imposed on you by others.

Loneliness is marked by a sense of isolation. Solitude, on the other hand, is a state of being alone without being lonely and can lead to self-awareness.

By: Hara Estroff Marano

As the world spins faster and faster—or maybe it just seems that way when an email can travel around the world in fractions of a second—we mortals need a variety of ways to cope with the resulting pressures. We need to maintain some semblance of balance and some sense that we are steering the ship of our life.

Otherwise we feel overloaded, overreact to minor annoyances and feel like we can never catch up. As far as I'm concerned, one of the best ways is by seeking, and enjoying, solitude.

That said, there is an important distinction to be established right off the bat. There is a world of difference between solitude and loneliness, though the two terms are often used interchangeably.

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