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

I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.

We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.

But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.

To out-group-members, oxytocin makes you crappier - less cooperative and more preemptively aggressive. It's not the luv hormone. It's the in-group parochialism/xenophobia hormone.

There's the complex categorization of low warmth/high competence. This is the hostile stereotype of Asian Americans by white America, of Jews in Europe, of Indo-Pakistanis in East Africa, of Lebanese in West Africa, of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, and of the rich by the poor most everywhere. It's the same low-high derogation: They're cold, greedy, clannish - -but, dang, they're sure good at making money and you should go to one who is a doctor if you're seriously sick.

Hormones influencing the sensitivity of the person to environmental stimuli.