Pop Psych

Unpacking evolutionary psychology

Where Did I Leave My Arousal?

Some psychologists think our brains are bad at keeping arousal from fear separate from arousal from sex. I think they happen to be looking at the mind from the entirely wrong perspective. Read More

Same circuitry

Can't it be just because fear and sexual arousal share the same neurological pathways? Maybe arousal needs a qualifier before triggering a reaction, and such qualifiers are faster / less stable than arousal itself, so they can switch from one to the other not because some evolutionary advantage, but because of the quirky way brains happened to evolve? In the bridge experiment, subjects didn't have less confidence in their future _after_ they've crossed the bridge.

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Jesse Marczyk, M.A., is a Ph.D. student at New Mexico State University; he studies evolutionary psychology and writes the blog Pop Psychology: The Internet's evolutionary psycholo-guy.


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