Ask for help

As primates, we often find ourselves in need of help from our friends and conspecifics. Actually asking for help, however, can be quite difficult. I believe this is one of the many situations that your amygdala plays an important role in everyday life.

For some reason, I once pretended I made my copies instead of asking the person waiting behind me if they could help me use the machine. Dispite knowing I could not go home for the day until I completed this task, I somehow decided that the cost of asking for help was outweighed by its benefit. Here, like in many social situations, the actual cost of asking for help was more likely to be a new friend than the pejorative interaction I feared.

Our amygdala is thought to underlie much of our emotion related learning, housing our fears within its very synapses. A major challenge for affective science is to understand the many ways, such as the example above, where these putatively amygdalar fears drive irrational behavior.

I have written about this phenomena in monkeys, and would love to hear any ideas on how to study this in humans. :-D

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