Neuroscience in Psychology Textbooks 39[L]et’s consider the physical component of emotion. In emotional
situations the autonomic nervous system increases our physiological
arousal. The sympathetic nervous system goes into its “fight-or-flight”
mode—our heart rate and breathing increase, our blood pressure surges,
we start sweating, our pupils dilate, we begin trembling, our digestion
stops, and so on. This aroused state prepares us to react emotionally to the
situation, whether our reaction is to run from an attacker, hug a loved one,
or laugh at a roommate’s joke. (Griggs, 2010, p. 56)Wait a minute: fight or flight: in relation to love and jokes? In order to
make sense of this you would need a non-mainstream theory on love and
jokes. Perhaps a psychoanalytic approach would help us here to understand
why one would flee or fight the ones we love, or to understand how much
aggression can be involved in humor. But, as we repeatedly have referred
to psychoanalysis, can we truly hold strong that this theory would be able
to resist the turmoil of (neuro) psychologization and be a viable path for a
critique of (textbook) psychology?
CRITICALITY: CONCLUSION
The psychology textbooks, as any other contemporary textbooks, take
over the activity of the student: they make side-notes, draw summaries and
even devise memory bridges which once the student him or herself had to
concoct! In short, textbooks are thinking in your stead, they are not devised
to make you think critically. Consider in this respect an astonishing sexist
passage in the Feldman textbook:
[T]he hormone oxytocin is at the root of many of life’s satisfactions
and pleasures. In new mothers, oxytocin produces an urge to nurse
newborn offspring. The same hormone also seems to stimulate cuddling
between species members. And—at least in rats—it encourages sexually
active males to seek out females more passionately, and females to be
more receptive to males’ sexual advances. (Feldman, 2015, p. 65)