No wonder Wayne LaPierre is freaking out
By Dana Milbank at the Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-wonder-wayne-lapierre-is-on-edge/2018/02/23/3aedcab0-18af-11e8-b681-2d4d462a1921_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-b%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.6ca9ca6553c9
"SNIP........
The science is simple. If you are calm, your executive functions handled by the brain’s prefrontal cortex — organizing, problem-solving, self-control, decision-making — perform well. If you are overly stressed, those functions decline as your brain floods with cortisol. Stress is contagious, and if you are in the presence of somebody who is out of control — a parent, an employer or, say, a president — your own executive functions decline.
“It’s a terrible thing for a chief executive of anything to be fear-mongering or emotionally reactive,” Johnson explained, “because all the bright capable people around you become less bright and less capable if they’re overly stressed.”
You don’t have to be the focus of the person’s ire or in the person’s physical presence for the stress to spread. A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that those who watched six hours or more of media about the Boston Marathon bombings reported higher stress than those present at the bombings. And Trump is almost a perfect stress-inducing machine, hitting all the buttons that University of Montreal psychiatry professor Sonia Lupien lists as causes of stress: novelty, unpredictability, perceived threat to safety or ego, and a low sense of control.
In theory, some who support Trump would be less affected, because they might feel comforted by an I-alone-can-fix-it authority figure. But, as poor Wayne LaPierre shows, no one is immune.
..........SNIP"