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Hi everyone,
My name is Jen Benson; I'm a senior Psych major and Music minor at Haverford. I have very little background in Neurobiology and could add to the conversation my interests in personality psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and music.
I would be interested to learn how individual differences (such as in extraversion, neuroticism, etc.) in personality are manifest at the neurobiological level. For example, I know that introverted people have a lower threshold for responding physiologically to social situations and even lower volumes of music, in terms of heart rate and other measures. How might their brain behaviors be expected to influence these different reactions to the same environmental conditions?
Research in the cross-cultural sect of psychology has explored ways that culture influences cognition and emotion (Markus and Kitayama, year?). For example, some tribes of Eskimos are said to not experience anger; and their definition of anger only describes some level of immaturity and loss of self-control. Do these people respond at the neurological and physiological level differently to a frustrating situation or do they merely express their thoughts and feelings differently in order to align themselves with cultural norms? Are there any documented neurobiological differences between cultures, for example between individualist and collectivist cultures?
As a musician I would also be interested to learn what happens in the brain when people hear, process, and respond to music. I have read that musical ability may be understood as its own kind of intelligence, separate from interpersonal, verbal, spatial, and other kinds of intelligence. Which brain functions, processes, or parts contribute to musical talent?
I hope these questions don't seem silly to those who know more about neurobiology. See you all in class,
-Jen Benson