Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.

Give lab rats oxytocin and, according to that meme, they get better at talking about their feelings and sing like Joan Baez.

On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.

The frontal cortex doesn't even fully develop until age 25, which is wild!

Pulling a gun's trigger can be an appalling act. But if it is suicidal drawing fire to save someone, it has an utterly different meaning. Placing your hand on someone's arm can be an act of deep compassion or the first step of betrayal. The punch line? It's all about context, and the biology of context is vastly more complicated than the biology of the behavior itself.

The problem isn't testosterone and aggression; it's how often we reward aggression. And we do: We give medals to masters of the "right" kinds of aggression. We preferentially mate with them. We select them as our leaders.

Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.