Annotated Bibliography

Fredrickson, Barbara. "Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become." The New Humanities Reader. Comp. Richard E. Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer. 5th ed. United States: Cengage Learning, 2015. 105-26. Print.

In these excerpts from her novel, Fredrickson redefines love as the forging of connections with another person, and details the scientific basis behind our connections with others. Through exploring the effects of neural coupling, oxytocin, and the vagus nerve, she brings to light a whole new meaning to what we may think “love” is, and how it continues to affect our behavior even when we do not realize it.

Gladwell, Malcolm. "The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime." The New Humanities Reader. Comp. Richard E. Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer. 5th ed. United States: Cengage Learning, 2015. 148-62. Print.

In this essay, Gladwell questions whether it is possible to control and direct cultural change simply by controlling the context. Specifically, he mentions crime rates in New York City and poses the idea that people continue to commit crime in the city because they see the chaos around them and decide there are no consequences if they add to that chaos. Their actions seem okay in that context, yet when put in a different situation would seem very wrong. This raises the question of whether or not our surroundings play a subconscious part in our actions.

Holt-Lunstad, Julianne et al. "Influence of a “Warm Touch” Support Enhancement Intervention Among Married Couples on Ambulatory Blood Pressure, Oxytocin, Alpha Amylase, and Cortisol." Ovid. Ovid Technologies, 4 June 2008. Web. 27 Oct. 2016. <http://ovidsp.ovid.com/ovidweb.cgi?T=JS&CSC=Y&NEWS=N&PAGE=fulltext&AN=00006842-200811000-00004&D=ovft&PDF=y>.

Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues investigated “whether a support intervention (warm touch enhancement) influences physiological stress systems that are linked to important health outcomes” (Holt-Lunstad et al). To do so, they tested a number of married couples and randomly monitored their behavior and physical states of being. In their results, they found that the more warm touches a couple shared, the greater the beneficial influence on multiple stress-sensitive systems.

Mauss, Iris B. et al. “Don’t Hide Your Happiness! Positive Emotion Dissociation, Social Connectedness, and Psychological Functioning.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100.4 (2011): 738–748. PMC. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.

In this scientific article, Mauss and her colleagues discuss why positive emotions lead to an enhancement in our physical functioning. Their study hypothesized and later proved that “positive experience-behavior dissociation predicted social connectedness such that greater dissociation was associated with lower social connectedness” (Mauss). Therefore, we can see that positive behavior is beneficial to our physical well-being, and as such, negative behavior should produce the opposite effect.

Sacks, Oliver. "The Mind’s Eye." The New Humanities Reader. Comp. Richard E. Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer. 5th ed. United States: Cengage Learning, 2015. 328-48. Print.

This essay challenges the previously accepted idea that the brain was a fixed structure, unable to change or adapt. Sacks argues that people are able to overcome challenges they face after experiencing perceptual deprivation, such as blindness, and by doing so, compensate for their lack of sight by making up for it in other areas. For example, he delves in the paradox of seeing even better when a person is blind, merely due to increased powers of visual imagery. Because our brain is able to change in response to these environmental and situational factors, we have to wonder whether or not it can work for things outside of visual perception (or lack thereof).