The Fear Factor - Marsh, Abigail

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Résumé :
When a dog ran in front of her car, Abigail Marsh swerved to avoid it. She next opened her eyes to see that she was stranded in the middle of the highway, facing oncoming traffic, and unable to restart her car. Just as she abandoned all hopes of survival, a stranger, at great risk to his own life, crossed the highway, got her car running, and brought her back to safety. For Marsh, this remains a revelation: much of social psychology depicts human nature as fundamentally selfish, cruel, and self-interested but here was a fellow human willing to help another with no benefit to himself. Why? In [this book], Marsh, now a psychology professor at Georgetown, provides the answer--by studying a surprisingly simple mechanism lying behind our capacity for empathy: the ability to recognize others' fear.--

Biographie:
Abigail Marsh is an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgetown. She directs its prize-winning Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience. She lives in Washington, DC....

Sommaire:
In this compelling scientific detective story, a leading neuroscientist looks for the nature of human kindness in the brains of heroes and psychopaths (Wall Street Journal).

At fourteen, Amber could boast of killing her guinea pig, threatening to burn down her home, and seducing men in exchange for gifts. She used the tools she had available to get what she wanted, and, she didn't care about the damage she inflicted. A few miles away, Lenny Skutnik was so concerned about the life of a drowning woman that he jumped into the ice-cold river to save her. How could Amber care so little about others' lives, while Lenny cared so much?
Abigail Marsh studied the brains of both psychopathic children and extreme altruists and found that the answer lies in our ability to recognize others' fear. And as The Fear Factor argues, by studying people who demonstrate heroic and evil behaviors, we can learn more about how human morality is coded in the brain.
A path-breaking read, The Fear Factor is essential for anyone seeking to understand the heights and depths of human nature....