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"The research, reported online in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology, could lead to new tools for diagnosis and treatment, and perhaps have applications in law enforcement. "Our paper is the first to show that you can use automated tools to detect the distinct speech patterns of psychopaths," says Jeff Hancock, professor of communication at Cornell University. This can be valuable to clinical psychologists, because the approach to treatment of psychopaths can be very different. Straight from the Source Read the original study DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02025.x Researchers compared stories told by 14 imprisoned psychopathic male murderers with those of 38 convicted murderers who were not diagnosed as psychopathic. Each subject was asked to describe his crime in detail; the stories were taped, transcribed, and subjected to computer analysis. A psychopath, as described by psychologists, is emotionally flat, lacks empathy for the feelings of others, and is free of remorse. Psychopaths behave as if the world is to be used for their benefit, and they employ deception and feigned emotion to manipulate others. The words of the experimental subjects matched these descriptions. Psychopaths used more conjunctions like "because," "since" or "so that," implying that the crime "had to be done" to obtain a particular goal. They used twice as many words relating to physical needs, such as food, sex, or money, while non-psychopaths used more words about social needs, including family, religion, and spirituality. Psychopaths are predators and their stories often include details of what they had to eat on the day of their crime, writes co-author Michael Woodworth, associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. Psychopaths were more likely to use the past tense, suggesting a detachment from their crimes-and tended to be less fluent in their speech, using more "ums" and "uhs." Researchers speculate that the

"Anyone considering, or already studying psychology will have to learn about and understand research methods and statistics. The fact that research methods and statistics is nearly always compulsory should immediately alert you to its importance. In order to critcally evaluate the findings of key studies you need to be aware of how the data supporting those findings came about; and you can't seriously hope to conduct your own research with confidence unless you have a clear idea how to design, execute and analyse your investigation. When I first started supervising research dissertations and psychology projects I came across a large number of students who refused to consider doing anything other than indepth interviews, whether such an approach was appropriate for their particular invesigation or not. The most common reason for this was the incorrect assumption that qualitative research methods (text based) are much easier to understand and carry out proficiently than Quantitative (number based) research methods. "

As behavioral genetics enters a second century, the field's oldest research method remains both relevant and controversial. "Twins have a special claim upon our attention; it is, that their history affords means of distinguishing between the effects of tendencies received at birth, and those that were imposed by the special circumstances of their after lives." -- Sir Francis Galton, 19th century behavioral genetics pioneer, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development,1875 More than a century after Galton's observation, twin studies remain a favorite tool of behavioral geneticists. Researchers have used twin studies to try to disentangle the environmental and genetic backgrounds of a cornucopia of traits, from aggression to intelligence to schizophrenia to alcohol dependence. But despite the popularity of twin studies, some psychologists have long questioned assumptions that underlie them--like the supposition that fraternal and identical twins share equal environments or that people choose mates with traits unlike their own. The equal environments assumption, for example, has been debated for at least 40 years. Many researchers have found evidence that the assumption is valid, but others remain skeptical (see Further Reading below). Overall, twin studies assumptions remain controversial, says psychologist James Jaccard, PhD, a psychologist who studies statistical methods at the University at Albany of the State University of New York. In response, though, researchers are working to expand and develop twin study designs and statistical methods. And while the assumptions question remains a stumbling block for some researchers, many agree twin studies will continue to be an important tool--along with emerging genome and molecular research methods (see article page 42)--in shedding light on human behavioral genetics."

"Although the year is young, it has already brought my first moral dilemma. In early January a friend mentioned that his New Year's resolution was to beat his chronic depression once and for all. Over the years he had tried a medicine chest's worth of antidepressants, but none had really helped in any enduring way, and when the side effects became so unpleasant that he stopped taking them, the withdrawal symptoms (cramps, dizziness, headaches) were torture. Did I know of any research that might help him decide whether a new antidepressant his doctor recommended might finally lift his chronic darkness at noon? The moral dilemma was this: oh, yes, I knew of 20-plus years of research on antidepressants, from the old tricyclics to the newer selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that target serotonin (Zoloft, Paxil, and the granddaddy of them all, Prozac, as well as their generic descendants) to even newer ones that also target norepinephrine (Effexor, Wellbutrin). The research had shown that antidepressants help about three quarters of people with depression who take them, a consistent finding that serves as the basis for the oft-repeated mantra "There is no question that the safety and efficacy of antidepressants rest on solid scientific evidence," as psychiatry professor Richard Friedman of Weill Cornell Medical College recently wrote in The New York Times. But ever since a seminal study in 1998, whose findings were reinforced by landmark research in The Journal of the American Medical Association last month, that evidence has come with a big asterisk. Yes, the drugs are effective, in that they lift depression in most patients. But that benefit is hardly more than what patients get when they, unknowingly and as part of a study, take a dummy pill-a placebo. As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs. Hence the moral dilemma. The placebo ef

"MID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. Researchers have long known that the "classical" language regions, like Broca's area and Wernicke's area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like "lavender," "cinnamon" and "soap," for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for "perfume" and "coffee," their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean "chair" and "key," this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like "a rough day" are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like "The singer had a velvet vo

"A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found. Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability. The scandal, involving about a decade of work, is the latest in a string of embarrassments in a field that critics and statisticians say badly needs to overhaul how it treats research results. In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged. "The big problem is that the culture is such that researchers spin their work in a way that tells a prettier story than what they really found," said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "It's almost like everyone is on steroids, and to compete you have to take steroids as well." "

"You'll probably remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you first learned that passenger jets had crashed into the World Trade Center. People tend to form exceptionally vivid memories of highly consequential news, and it doesn't get much bigger than 9/11. Recollections of that day have given researchers a unique window into how the brain forms memories of shocking events. "It's as if a flashbulb goes off and you take a mental picture of your surroundings," says psychologist William Hirst of the New York School for Social Research. Flashbulb memories, as they are known, are tricky to study as people are seldom keen to talk to researchers just after hearing or seeing emotionally charged news. It can also be difficult to know how accurate a person's memory of the event is, since there is usually no way to be sure what actually happened. Elizabeth Phelps of New York University was in Manhattan on 9/11 and saw the attack. When fellow neuroscientist John Gabrieli called to check on her they "decided to put together a consortium of memory researchers, and started collecting data within a week"."

"Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it. The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence. Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories). The experiment, being reported Friday in the journal Science, is likely to open a new avenue in the investigation of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, some experts said, as well as help explain how some memories seemingly come out of nowhere. The researchers were even able to identify specific memories in subjects a second or two before the people themselves reported having them. "This is what I would call a foundational finding," said Michael J. Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. "I cannot think of any recent study that's comparable. "

"FOR the last few weeks, the sex abuse scandal at Penn State and the harassment claims against the Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain have been fodder for discussion at my house. The same is true, I assume, around the country. Putting aside the specifics of each case, one question that has come up is, "What would I do?" That is, if I saw what seemed to be a crime or unethical act committed by a respected colleague, coach, teacher or friend, would I storm in and stop it? Would I call the authorities immediately? Would I disregard the potentially devastating impact on my job or workplace or beloved institution? Absolutely, most of us would probably reply. I think so, others might respond. And the most honest answer? I don't know. As much as we would like to think that, put on the spot, we would do the right - and perhaps even heroic - thing, research has shown that that usually isn't true. "People are routinely more willing to be critical of others' ethics than of their own," said Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and two other authors in the journal article "See No Evil: When We Overlook Other People's Unethical Behavior." The article appeared as a chapter in the book "Social Decision Making" (Psychology Press, 2009). "People believe they are more honest and trustworthy than others and they try harder to do good." But our faith in ourselves isn't borne out by history or research, something the Times columnist David Brooks pointed out in his column this week. The most well-known example of this in academia is the experiment conducted by the Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. In the experiment, participants were "teachers" and, unbeknown to the participants, the "learner" was really an actor. The teacher was to instruct the learner in word pairs. For every wrong answer, the teacher could shock the learner, increasing the intensity of the shock for

"Stress in the Brain Anxiety has become a hot topic in education research, as educators and policymakers become increasingly focused on test performance and more-intensive curricula, and neuroscience has begun to provide a window into how the brain responds to anxiety. Anxieties and Stereotypes Researchers have found that the more anxious their female teachers were about math, the more likely girls-but not boys- were to endorse gender-related stereotypes about math ability. In turn, the girls who echoed those stereotypical beliefs were performing less well than other students in math by year's end. SOURCE: University of Chicago Anxiety can literally cut off the working memory needed to learn and solve problems, according to Dr. Judy Willis, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based neurologist, former middle school teacher, and author of the 2010 book Learning to Love Math. When first taking in a problem, a student processes information through the amygdala, the brain's emotional center, which then prioritizes information going to the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for the brain's working memory and critical thinking. During stress, there is more activity in the amygdala than the prefrontal cortex; even as minor a stressor as seeing a frowning face before answering a question can decrease a student's ability to remember and respond accurately. "When engaged in mathematical problem-solving, highly math-anxious individuals suffer from intrusive thoughts and ruminations," said Daniel Ansari, the principal investigator for the Numerical Cognition Laboratory at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. "This takes up some of their processing and working memory. It's very much as though individuals with math anxiety use up the brainpower they need for the problem" on worrying. Moreover, a series of experiments at the Mangels Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Attention at Baruch College at the City University of New York sugg

Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer "language confusion," which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish - or Mandarin - for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before. Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren't many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child. But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two. Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior - where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention - to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies' brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain. Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their

"SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child's academic and intellectual development. They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual's brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn't so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins - one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin m

"MIT researchers have shown, for the first time ever, that memories are stored in specific brain cells. By triggering a small cluster of neurons, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing these neurons, the subject would lose that memory. As you can imagine, the trick here is activating individual neurons, which are incredibly small and not really the kind of thing you can attach electrodes to. To do this, the researchers used optogenetics, a bleeding edge sphere of science that involves the genetic manipulation of cells so that they're sensitive to light. These modified cells are then triggered using lasers; you drill a hole through the subject's skull and point the laser at a small cluster of neurons. Now, just to temper your excitement, we should note that MIT's subjects in this case are mice - but it's very, very likely that the human brain functions in the same way. To perform this experiment, though, MIT had to breed genetically engineered mice with optogenetic neurons - and we're a long, long way off breeding humans with optogenetic brains. In the experiment, MIT gave mice an electric shock to create a fear memory in the hippocampus region of the brain (pictured above) - and then later, using laser light, activated the neurons where the memory was stored. The mice "quickly entered a defensive, immobile crouch," strongly suggesting the fear memory was being recalled."

"Scientists say they have found a way to activate the brain cells that trigger particular memories, according to research published today in the journal Science. Researchers at MIT employed optogenetics, a branch of science that uses light to stimulate molecules, to show that memories reside in specific brain cells, and that activating a tiny fraction of brain cells can revive the entire memory. The study was performed on mice, but the researchers say it is a powerful demonstration that memories are tangible and are physically stored in a particular part of the brain. "We demonstrate that behaviour based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific memory, can be generated in a mammal by highly specific physical activation of a specific small subpopulation of brain cells, in this case by light," said Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study. In the early 1900s, the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield found that when he electrically stimulated certain neurons in the hippocampus area of the brain, his patients vividly recalled whole events. Until now, however, scientists have been unable to prove that the direct reactivation of the hippocampus was enough to cause memory recall."

"On a hot summer day 15 years ago in Parma, Italy, a monkey sat in a special laboratory chair waiting for researchers to return from lunch. Thin wires had been implanted in the region of its brain involved in planning and carrying out movements. Every time the monkey grasped and moved an object, some cells in that brain region would fire, and a monitor would register a sound: brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip. A graduate student entered the lab with an ice cream cone in his hand. The monkey stared at him. Then, something amazing happened: when the student raised the cone to his lips, the monitor sounded - brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip - even though the monkey had not moved but had simply observed the student grasping the cone and moving it to his mouth. The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, had earlier noticed the same strange phenomenon with peanuts. The same brain cells fired when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths as when the monkey itself brought a peanut to its mouth. Later, the scientists found cells that fired when the monkey broke open a peanut or heard someone break a peanut. The same thing happened with bananas, raisins and all kinds of other objects. "It took us several years to believe what we were seeing," Dr. Rizzolatti said in a recent interview. The monkey brain contains a special class of cells, called mirror neurons, that fire when the animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries out the same action on its own. But if the findings, published in 1996, surprised most scientists, recent research has left them flabbergasted. Humans, it turns out, have mirror neurons that are far smarter, more flexible and more highly evolved than any of those found in monkeys, a fact that scientists say reflects the evolution of humans' sophisticated social abilities. The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding

"Almost 150 years ago, English scientist Francis Galton coined the phrase "nature versus nurture" - and proposed that research on twins could resolve the debate. Genetics have long seemed to weigh heavily in favor of the role of nature in shaping the people we become. But even identical twins are different to varying degrees, and some researchers believe those differences suggest a third influence at work, called epigenetics. Peter Miller of National Geographic Magazine wrote the magazine's January cover story, "A Thing or Two About Twins." Miller explains how scientists are expanding the field of epigenetics with research on twins."

"To these scientists, and to biomedical researchers all over the world, twins offer a precious opportunity to untangle the influence of genes and the environment-of nature and nurture. Because identical twins come from a single fertilized egg that splits in two, they share virtually the same genetic code. Any differences between them-one twin having younger looking skin, for example-must be due to environmental factors such as less time spent in the sun. Alternatively, by comparing the experiences of identical twins with those of fraternal twins, who come from separate eggs and share on average half their DNA, researchers can quantify the extent to which our genes affect our lives. If identical twins are more similar to each other with respect to an ailment than fraternal twins are, then vulnerability to the disease must be rooted at least in part in heredity. These two lines of research-studying the differences between identical twins to pinpoint the influence of environment, and comparing identical twins with fraternal ones to measure the role of inheritance-have been crucial to understanding the interplay of nature and nurture in determining our personalities, behavior, and vulnerability to disease. Lately, however, twin studies have helped lead scientists to a radical, almost heretical new conclusion: that nature and nurture are not the only elemental forces at work. According to a recent field called epigenetics, there is a third factor also in play, one that in some cases serves as a bridge between the environment and our genes, and in others operates on its own to shape who we are."

"Fear can distort our perceptions, psychological research indicates, and creepy-crawly spiders are no different. People who are afraid of spiders see the arachnids as bigger than they actually are, recent experiments have shown. Researchers asked people who had undergone therapy to address their fear of spiders to draw a line representing the length of a tarantula they had just encountered in a lab setting. "On average, the most fearful were drawing lines about 50 percent longer than the least fearful," said Michael Vasey, lead study researcher and professor of psychology at Ohio State University. "We have seen participants draw lines that are at least three times as long as the actual spider." [What Scares You? (Infographic)] After undergoing exposure therapy - in which people confront something they fear, in this case, spiders - 57 people with spider phobia were given the task of approaching a spider in an aquarium, then using a 4-inch (10.2 centimeter) probe to nudge it around the tank. They repeated this encounterfive times with different species of spider over eight weeks. "

"Modern art is an explosion of colors, smooth lines, flat portraits - and it turns out, neuroscience. It also once triggered some strong psychology. A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public," the criticCamille Mauclair, said in outrage over a Paris showing of the artist Henri Matisse's vibrant works. His condemnation today seems more colorful than the paintings themselves, many now hanging in museums all over the world. What was really going on at the turn of the last century to excite such controversy? Brain researchers have increasingly turned their eyes on artists, in an effort to enrich our understanding of how we see art and of the time when paintings could shake society. "When we look at a picture and feel rewarded, we know something is occurring in our brain," says neuroscientist and artist Bevil Conway of Wellesley (Mass.) College. Conway and other neuroscientists, such as Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel, author of the just-released The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, represent the latest voices among brain researchers taking a look at art. "By closely examining artists' paintings and practices, we can discover hints to how the brain works, and achieve insight into the discoveries and inventions of artists and their impact on culture," Conway writes in the current Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, looking at color in the paintings of Matisse , Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet . Public domain Montross Gallery 1915 exhibition catalogue image of 'Gold Fish' by Henri Matisse. Color depends on more than the wavelength of light reaching your eye. Five decades ago, brain researchers thought only the cone-shaped "photoreceptor" cells in the retina determined what colors we see. But we now know that starting from the retina and proceeding through at least five brain regions, our perception of color is shaped not so much by the redness of the paint used to hang an apple from a tree, but

"A few months after the World Trade Center attacks, a strange message appeared on a U.S. Army computer: "Your security system is crap," it read. "I am Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels." Solo scanned thousands of U.S. government machines and discovered glaring security flaws in many of them. Between February 2001 and March 2002, Solo broke into almost a hundred PCs within the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and the Department of Defense. He surfed around for months, copying files and passwords. At one point he brought down the U.S. Army's entire Washington, D.C., network, taking about 2000 computers out of service for three days. U.S. attorney Paul McNulty called his campaign "the biggest military computer hack of all time." But despite his expertise, Solo didn't cover his tracks. He was soon traced to a small apartment in London. In March 2002, the United Kingdom's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit arrested Gary McKinnon, a quiet 36-year-old Scot with elfin features and Spock-like upswept eyebrows. He'd been a systems administrator, but he didn't have a job at the time of his arrest; he spent his days indulging his obsession with UFOs. In fact, McKinnon claimed that UFOs were the reason for his hack. Convinced that the government was hiding alien antigravity devices and advanced energy technologies, he planned to find and release the information for the benefit of humanity. He said his intrusion was detected just as he was downloading a photo from NASA's Johnson Space Center of what he believed to be a UFO. Despite the outlandishness of his claims, McKinnon now faces extradition to the United States under a controversial treaty that could land him in prison for years-and possibly for the rest of his life. The case has transformed McKinnon into a cause célèbre. Supporters have rallied outside Parliament with picket signs. There are "Free Gary" websites, T-shirts, posters. Rock star David Gilmour, the former guitarist for Pink Floyd, even recorded