Peterson says he grew up in a small farming community in northern Canada with a population of 3,000. The nearest town was over 60 miles away, but Peterson says he never felt isolated.

"I knew all about the world outside of the town I grew up in," he says. "I think Canadians are more interested in international events than Americans because it is such a small country, so politics affect it more."

Peterson says he joined a political party when he was 13 and was "actively involved" in Canadian politics from the ages of 13 to 18 because he "was always interested in politics."

This interest in politics may have led him, at age 17, to enter college in Grand Prairie, Canada, to study political science. Throughout his college years, he worked odd jobs, ranging from bee keeping to working on a railroad with Cree Indians.

"I guess what I probably learned [from that] was how to get along with all types of people--rough people," he says.

After receiving his undergraduate degree in three years, Peterson took a year off to work as a driver for social services. He then traveled around Europe, where he noticed the significant aftereffects of World War II.

In Europe, he says, the war was a lot more prevalent and not just something that happened and ended. Peterson says he was in Europe when the Cold War was still in full swing. This led him to ponder some psychological questions.

"At that time, 1982, the Cold War was still raging madly away and I was curious about how it could be that a group of people could have set up such a strange situation," Peterson says.

Peterson soon discovered that political science did not answer his questions.

"I was interested in how individuals could lead a group to commit those atrocities," Peterson says. "I was interested in typing to find out why people were so interested in their ideological positions that they would kill to maintain them."

So Peterson says he turned from political science to psychology, spending another year in school "doing straight psychology" before going on to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.

After earning his degree, Peterson conducted research and then came to the United States two years ago as an assistant professor at Harvard, where he settled with his wife and two children.

Drugs and Alcohol

Peterson-began his research career studying drug and alcohol abusers with other psychologists. The researchers discovered that when non-alcoholics with a family history of alcoholism consume liquor, their heart rate goes up nearly twice as much as that of "normal people."

Peterson says the excessive rise is due to the subjects' predisposition to alcohol and drugs which stimulate their positive systems.