Vulnerable Minds: The HARM of Childhood Trauma and the HOPE OF Resilience
Books Marc Hauser Books Marc Hauser

Vulnerable Minds: The HARM of Childhood Trauma and the HOPE OF Resilience

In Vulnerable Minds, Hauser provides a new, scientific and humanistic understanding of how the nature of childhood adversity creates unique signatures of trauma. At the same time, Hauser reveals that some children bounce back from adversity, presenting with signatures of resilience. Hope for these children comes from designing interventions that are sensitive to their signatures, enabling greater resilience to and recovery from trauma.

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The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
Articles Marc Hauser Articles Marc Hauser

The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?

We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. We suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. We submit that a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) and in the narrow sense (FLN). FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements. We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. We further argue that FLN may have evolved for reasons other than language, hence comparative studies might look for evidence of such computations outside of the domain of …

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