Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Emotions are as old as humankind. But what do we know about them and what importance do we assign to them? Emotional Lexicons is the first cultural history of terms of emotion found in German, French, and English language encyclopaedias since the late seventeenth century. Insofar as these reference works formulated normative concepts, they documented shifts in the way the educated middle classes were taught to conceptualise emotion by a literary medium targeted specifically to them ...

Two studies investigated the overpowering hypothesis as a possible explanation for the currently inconclusive empirical picture on age differences in affective responding to unpleasant events. The overpowering hypothesis predicts that age differences in affective responding are particularly evident in highly resource-demanding situations that overtax older adults’ capacities ...

How do organisms evolve into individuals that are distinguished from others by their own personal brain structure and behavior? Scientists in Dresden, Berlin, Münster, and Saarbrücken have now taken a decisive step towards clarifying this question. Using mice as an animal model, they were able to show that individual experiences influence the development of new neurons, leading to measurable changes in the brain ...

Richard Wagner ist der Komponist, über den die deutsche Gesellschaft bis heute nicht zur Ruhe gekommen ist. Nach Wagners Tod holte sie sich den Vergangenen in ihre Gegenwart zurück. Denn Wagner konnte beinahe allen alles verheißen. Sven Oliver Müller erzählt in diesem Buch die aufregende Geschichte des Wagner-Mythos zwischen Verklärung und Verdammung, zwischen Hass und Hingabe ...

Swine flu, the bank crisis, BSE, Fukushima: The only thing we can be certain of is that we live in a world of uncertainty and risk. For psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, these scares and the public reaction to them describe our irrational way of dealing with risks. Gigerenzer gives the reader the lowdown on how the psychology of risk works. Much of the problem is caused by confusing statistics and probabilities that are so readily propagated by experts and the media. One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is ...

With the goal of better medicine, Gerd Gigerenzer and J. A. Muir Gray deal with the fundamental problem that many doctors as well as most patients do not properly understand the relevant information regarding therapies and diagnostics. That this lack of understanding is fatal can be seen in the waste of enormous amounts of money as well as in the frequent failure of disease treatments ...

Simple Heuristics in a Social World invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others. The social world is a terrain where humans and other animals compete with conspecifics for myriad resources, including food, mates, and status, and where rivals grant ...