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Science doesn’t know everything - Jerome Kagan / Salon

"A popular illustration in journal articles on the effects of stress on children features a box enclosing the term adversity and an arrow pointing to a second box enclosing the phrase problems with self-regulation. Two additional boxes, sitting on top of the first pair, enclose the terms family environment and genetic background. Arrows from each of the four boxes point to a fifth box enclosing a list of undesirable outcomes that accompany poor regulation. The intended message in this array of boxes is that any adversity can, under some family and genetic conditions, compromise a child’s ability to control impulses and lead to a variety of maladaptive responses. The form of the adversity, the child’s interpretation, the specific family practices, the genes, and the settings in which regulation is required are free to vary, allowing readers to insert in the boxes any adverse event, parental practice, gene, form of regulation, and outcome they wish. This permissiveness makes it close to impossible to disprove the claim that some adversities compromise some aspect of regulation in some children born with certain genomes and growing up in certain families....

"The related, equally abstract term violence, intended to apply to humans, fails to specify the class of person committing the violence, their motives, the form the violence assumed, or the contexts in which a violent action occurred....

"A number of abstract psychological concepts remain popular because they satisfy the need for consistency among the investigator’s semantic networks. The networks for the concepts positive emotion and negative emotion are an example...."

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/02/science_doesnt_know_everything/

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