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Consequences of Low Status: Balancing Sociality and Self-Preservation
People are naturally social—every day we interact with other people. However, these interactions do not occur in isolation; rather, they are couched within a larger social hierarchy that can actually influence how we treat each other. These hierarchies are very visible in animals, as animals fight for mates or leadership (your dog will even…
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Understanding Cellular Aging
In my last article, I talked about epigenetics and how we can measure epigenetic changes (read here if you missed it). Now we’re moving on to the good stuff—how we assess epigenetic aging and what it means for biological and psychological research. Many Different Clocks With about 20,000 protein-coding genes, there is a big…
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Do Our Cells Age as Quickly as We Do?
Measuring Chronological Age Aging is something that we all experience, but that we still struggle to understand. We know that aging is natural and allows us to mature, and is ultimately related to natural mortality. Many researchers have sought to develop a measure for aging in our cells. A measure of aging can help us…
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Polyvagal Theory Part 2: The Stress Response
Polyvagal Theory In the first article in this series (read here if you missed it!), we got an overview of the vagus nerve and its role in stress physiology. In this second article, we will go through the specific stages of the stress response in polyvagal theory. These stages, in order from least to most…
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Polyvagal Theory Part 1: The Wandering Nerve
The polyvagal theory is a neurobiological theory relating social engagement, physiology, and developmental outcomes. When I was first learning the theory, I struggled to understand some of the theory’s basic terms and could not find a resource that simplified it. Therefore, this three–part series of articles is intended to serve as an introduction to the…