The Fear Factor Quotes

“Once the proto-mammalian brain was equipped with the wholly novel and evolutionarily necessary capacity to care about the welfare of other beings outside the self, there was no limit to what other kinds of love could theoretically be felt. It’s little wonder that the ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt viewed the emergence of maternal nurturing as ‘a turning point in the evolution of vertebrate behaviour – one of those celestial moments that [a poet] would call a star hour’.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“He was among the subset of psychopaths who are completely blind to others’ fear: he got every single fearful expression wrong. Not once did he recognise the wide eyes, oblique brows and grimace of a fearful face as signifying fear. He knew he was performing badly too. When he got to the final fearful expression in the set and yet again failed to identify it, he mused aloud, ‘I don’t know what that expression is called. But I know that’s what people look like right before I stab them.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“Yet another problem with the ‘threat response’ theory is that it has difficulty explaining why damage to the amygdala impairs not just people’s ability to respond appropriately to fearful expressions but their ability to even identify them – to come up with a name for what the expresser is feeling. When S.M. sees a fearful face, it isn’t as though she knows what to call it but fails to show appropriate signs of fearful avoidance or vigilance in response. It’s that she sees it and is mystified by its very meaning, like a colour-blind person searching for a number in a featureless array of brown dots.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“The coordinated volley of firing in the amygdala in response to danger is central to the felt experience of fear, as we know from studying patients like S.M. who lack both an amygdala and the ability to experience fear and from studying psychopaths in whom both the amygdala and the experience of fear are stunted. So yes, it’s certainly possible that amygdala responses to fearful expressions represent a learned response that these expressions signal the presence of danger. But there are also problems with this explanation.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“The hubbub of activity in the amygdala following the perception of a fearful face is much greater than what follows the perception of any other expression. This is true even when the fearful expression is mostly obscured, leaving only the sclera visible. It’s true even if those sclera are presented so quickly that the viewer has no conscious awareness of having seen anything at all.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“My own experience bears this out. My husband and I tried to take care of our first daughter without enough help, and the effects on our mental health were grim. We were not living in poverty, and I suffered no complications, but we were grossly inexperienced at taking care of babies, had no close family living nearby and were miserable. We were much smarter about paying for extra allomothering the second time around. The salary we paid Marie, our lovely night nurse, to help care for my second daughter may be the best investment I’ve ever made, and it opened my eyes to the importance of allomothering in raising human children.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“Inadequate social support is a top risk factor for postpartum depression; it’s a bigger risk factor than poverty or having medical complications.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“It’s so difficult that mothers in some foraging cultures (as well as mothers of other allomothering species) will abandon their newborns if they perceive that they will not receive sufficient allomothering support. The prevalence of postpartum depression has much less to do with postnatal hormones (a common myth) than with how legitimately depressing it is to care for a baby without enough help.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“As a result, in most species, alarm signals take the form of barks and squeals or bursts of pheromones, not visual cues. For the same reason, the fearlike facial expressions of other primates don’t really function as alarm signals. Instead, they are used to signal submission and appeasement – to inhibit others’ aggression.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“As a rule, the amygdala does respond rapidly to sensory events in the world that portend danger – the rippling eddy of a snake, the click of a gun being cocked, the feel of the wind along a cliff. The amygdala can learn very quickly, sometimes after a single trial, to link cues like these to incipient harm. Thereafter, when these cues are detected, cells within the amygdala fire furiously, sending urgent messages out to the rest of the brain that danger is near.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“Dartmouth College professor Paul Whalen and his colleagues once demonstrated this by flashing just the wide, white sclera of fearful facial expressions on a plain black background to brain imaging study participants for a mere seventeen milliseconds – far too quickly to be consciously detected. They found that the amygdala still burst into a furious volley of activity – much more than when only the sclera of neutral expressions were presented. This remarkable degree of sensitivity shows that others’ fear is unusually important information to the amygdala. But why?”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“This is far too fast for the information to have arrived in the amygdala via any pathway other than the rapid, ancient route we have just travelled through the colliculus and thalamus. And here’s the wild part: no other facial expression that we know about gets passed along this same privileged, speedy route to the amygdala. Not resting faces, not happy faces, not angry faces. Just fear. The mystery is: why?”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“the colliculi pass the gist of the information carried by beams of light (‘Lots of sclera! So much white!’) to new fibres that extend upwards to an oblong mass of neurons perched in the centre of the brain, the thalamus.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“The colliculi are two backward-facing nubs of tissue perched like pert Barbie breasts atop the brain stem. Their role is to rev up a lightning-fast response to important visual information coming in, well before the person even has any conscious awareness of what was seen.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“It’s hard to overstate the effect of seeing another person’s fear on a human brain. The sight changes patterns of activity in nearly every crevice of the brain, although not all at once. The first region to receive the message from the retina is a pair of evolutionarily ancient structures deep in the brain’s core called the superior colliculi.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“Agents are people who commit moral or immoral deeds – they rescue or rob someone. And patients are the recipients of those deeds – the rescued or the robbed. Agents are the actors, and patients are the acted-upon.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“With his student Kurt Gray, Wegner explored a phenomenon they called ‘moral typecasting’. The idea is that we automatically and unconsciously divide other people into two categories: moral ‘agents’ and moral ‘patients’.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“as Aristotle, who concluded that, ‘All the friendly feelings are derived to others from those that have the Self primarily for their object.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between