People have long speculated about why girls love horses, according to Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. By identifying with these dynamic, strong animals, Orenstein says, girls are expressing their own power. “They’re all active, they’re all sources of power and motion and transformation,” she says. Laurel Braitman, an MIT graduate student in the history of science who writes about animals and what we think about them, says girls’ fascination with these animals is more than power — the animals fuel girls’ imaginations. “Horses and dolphins and unicorns — these are all borderland creatures; gateway animals to other worlds,” she says. “They help us imagine wonderful other ways of being in the world. They let us be cowgirls and oceanographers and mermaids and princesses.” (Via NPR)
People with Williams syndrome — a rare genetic disorder with a variety of symptoms — are known for being almost compulsively loving and trusting. The syndrome is often called the “anti-autism” because people with Williams, rather than isolating themselves from others, are hyper-social. Children with Williams, for example, often climb into cars with perfect strangers or tell random salespeople that they love them.
But this hyper-social quality is not the only thing that characterizes Williams disorder, there are a wide variety of much less-publicized symptoms that affect their interactions with people and handling of daily tasks. And, one of the most unfortunate aspects is that even as people with Williams thrive on emotional closeness, other symptoms of the syndrome make it really tough for them to develop relationships…
I read a similar story to this the other week, but it’s focus more on trust in government:
When The ‘Trust Hormone’ Is Out Of Balance
This is a story about a fickle little hormone that plays a large role in our lives.
The name of the hormone is oxytocin, and until recently it was mostly dismissed by scientists. They knew it played a role in inducing labor and facilitating breast-feeding, but otherwise didn’t give it much attention.
But over the past 10 years, oxytocin has come up in the world, and several researchers have begun making big claims about it. Now dubbed “the trust hormone,” oxytocin, researchers say, affects everything from our day-to-day life to how we feel about our government.
The narrative of oxytocin — the trust hormone — is being rewritten.
