Women at a particular stage in their monthly menstrual cycle may be more vulnerable to some of the psychological side-effects associated with stressful experiences, according to a study from UCL.

The results suggest a monthly window of opportunity that could potentially be targeted in efforts to prevent common mental health problems developing in women. The research is the first to show a potential link between psychological vulnerability and the timing of a biological cycle, in this case ovulation.

A common symptom of mood and anxiety problems is the tendency to experience repetitive and unwanted thoughts. These 'intrusive thoughts' often occur in the days and weeks after a stressful experience.

In this study, the researchers examined whether the effects of a stressful event are linked to different stages of the menstrual cycle. The participants were 41 women aged between 18 and 35 who had regular menstrual cycles and were not using the pill as a form of contraception. Each woman watched a 14-minute stressful film containing death or injury and provided a saliva sample so that hormone levels could be assessed. They were then asked to record instances of unwanted thoughts about the video over the following days.

Until now, little was scientifically known about the human potential to cultivate compassion -- the emotional state of caring for people who are suffering in a way that motivates altruistic behavior.

A new study by researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that adults can be trained to be more compassionate. The report, published Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, investigates whether training adults in compassion can result in greater altruistic behavior and related changes in neural systems underlying compassion.

"Our fundamental question was, 'Can compassion be trained and learned in adults? Can we become more caring if we practice that mindset?'" says Helen Weng, lead author of the study and a graduate student in clinical psychology. "Our evidence points to yes."

Is "practice makes perfect" an age-old adage to live by or just thinking inside-the-box?

According to University of Michigan associate professor Zachary Hambrick, endless hours spent trying to perfect a skill could be a waste of time.

In a new study published in the journal Intelligence, Hambrick and a team of American researchers suggest that "deliberate practice is not sufficient to explain individual differences in performance" among musicians and chess players.

"Practice is indeed important to reach an elite level of performance, but this paper makes an overwhelming case that it isn't enough," Hambrick said. "The evidence is quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice."

In the study, the team reviewed 14 studies involving chess players and musicians and looked explicitly at how practice routine was related to performance. They found that time spent practicing accounted for only about one third of the measurable skill differences in both music and chess.

Hambrick said that the discrepancy can be explained by other factors such as intelligence, innate ability, or age.

There is far more to mothering than giving birth. Just ask Alison Fleming. The University of Toronto Mississauga psychology professor has spent the past four decades researching the complex neurobiology and psychology involved in motherhood. Through her work, she has learned that while the hormonal changes associated with birthing help prepare females to take care of their young, maternal behaviours don't just come automatically; they develop over time.

"There's a lot of stuff that comes into play.... It's not like there's an instinct called mothering," Fleming says, noting that fathers also undergo hormonal changes when exposed to their babies, and that women who adopt become every bit as attached and attracted to their children as those who raise their own offspring. "I think it's just a matter of getting the experience and the interaction."

The numerous studies Fleming and her colleagues have conducted over the years have contributed to a greater understanding of why mothering matters, and have provided insight into what drives mothers to nurture their young. A mother's love, support and physical touch (or, in the absence of a mother, the simulation of sensitive parental care) are all critical to the offspring's healthy brain development and social and emotional development, she says. And the greater the exposure a mother has to her babies, the stronger her motivation becomes to care for them.

Even though most companies on paper say they don't tolerate bullying in the workplace, bullies can still thrive in office environments.

This may be explained by a social gift many bullies share: They know how to strategically abuse their coworkers - with belittling comments, deliberate exclusion and the like - while still garnering positive evaluations from their supervisors, researchers say.

"Many bullies can be seen as charming and friendly, but they are highly destructive and can manipulate others into providing them with the resources they need to get ahead," Darren Treadway, associate professor of organization and human resources at the University of Buffalo, said in a statement.

In a new study, Treadway and colleagues measured bullying behavior and career success for by looking at behavioral and job performance data from 54 employees at a mental health organization in the northwest U.S. The researchers found a strong correlation between bullying, social competence and positive job evaluations.

This week we were joined by Dr. Colin Ross, a psychiatrist who received his M.D. from the University of Alberta in 1981 and completed his specialty training in psychiatry at the University of Manitoba in 1985. He is the author of over 170 papers in professional journals, most of them dealing with dissociation, psychological trauma and multiple personality disorder. He is a past president of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation and Trauma and a former Laughlin Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists.

Dr. Ross is also the author of 27 books, including, The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists, Military Mind Control: A Story of Trauma and Recovery and The Great Psychiatry Scam.

In his book, The C.I.A. Doctors, Dr. Ross provides proof, based on 15,000 pages of documents obtained from the C.I.A. through the Freedom of Information Act, that there have been pervasive, systematic violations of human rights by American psychiatrists over the last 65 years. He also proves that the Manchurian Candidate "super spy" is fact, not fiction. He describes the experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new identities, hypnotic access codes, and new memories in the minds of experimental subjects.

In The Great Psychiatry Scam, Dr. Ross provides evidence that modern psychiatry is actually a pseudo-science, with many of the main accepted theses about the causes of human mental illness actually disproven by psychiatric experiments and research.

Your brain often works on autopilot when it comes to grammar. That theory has been around for years, but University of Oregon neuroscientists have captured elusive hard evidence that people indeed detect and process grammatical errors with no awareness of doing so.

Participants in the study -- native-English speaking people, ages 18-30 -- had their brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, from which researchers focused on a signal known as the Event-Related Potential (ERP). This non-invasive technique allows for the capture of changes in brain electrical activity during an event. In this case, events were short sentences presented visually one word at a time.

Subjects were given 280 experimental sentences, including some that were syntactically (grammatically) correct and others containing grammatical errors, such as "We drank Lisa's brandy by the fire in the lobby," or "We drank Lisa's by brandy the fire in the lobby." A 50 millisecond audio tone was also played at some point in each sentence. A tone appeared before or after a grammatical faux pas was presented. The auditory distraction also appeared in grammatically correct sentences.

This approach, said lead author Laura Batterink, a postdoctoral researcher, provided a signature of whether awareness was at work during processing of the errors. "Participants had to respond to the tone as quickly as they could, indicating if its pitch was low, medium or high," she said. "The grammatical violations were fully visible to participants, but because they had to complete this extra task, they were often not consciously aware of the violations. They would read the sentence and have to indicate if it was correct or incorrect. If the tone was played immediately before the grammatical violation, they were more likely to say the sentence was correct even it wasn't."

Disrupted sleep is so commonly a symptom of depression that some of the first things doctors look for in diagnosing depression are insomnia and excessive sleeping. Now, however, scientists have observed for the first time a dysfunctional body clock in the brains of people with depression.

People with major depression, also known as clinical depression, show disrupted circadian rhythms across brain regions, according to a new study published today (May 13) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers looked at post-mortem brain samples from mentally healthy donors and compared them with those of people who had major depression at the time of their death.

They found that gene activity in the brains of depressed people failed to follow healthy 24-hour cycles.

"They seem to have the sleep cycle both shifted and disrupted," said study researcher Jun Li, a professor of human genetics at the University of Michigan.

When trouble approaches, what do you do? Run for the hills? Hide? Pretend it isn't there? Or do you focus on the promise of rain in those looming dark clouds?

New research suggests that the way you regulate your emotions, in bad times and in good, can influence whether - or how much - you suffer from anxiety.

The study appears in the journal Emotion.

In a series of questionnaires, researchers asked 179 healthy men and women how they managed their emotions and how anxious they felt in various situations. The team analyzed the results to see if different emotional strategies were associated with more or less anxiety.

The study revealed that those who engage in an emotional regulation strategy called reappraisal tended to also have less social anxiety and less anxiety in general than those who avoid expressing their feelings. Reappraisal involves looking at a problem in a new way, said University of Illinois graduate student Nicole Llewellyn, who led the research with psychology professor Florin Dolcos, an affiliate of the Beckman Institute at Illinois.

"When something happens, you think about it in a more positive light, a glass half full instead of half empty," Llewellyn said. "You sort of reframe and reappraise what's happened and think what are the positives about this? What are the ways I can look at this and think of it as a stimulating challenge rather than a problem?"

Study participants who regularly used this approach reported less severe anxiety than those who tended to suppress their emotions.

In 1987, Adrian Raine, who describes himself as a neurocriminologist, moved from Britain to the US. His emigration was prompted by two things. The first was a sense of banging his head against a wall. Raine, who grew up in Darlington and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was a researcher of the biological basis for criminal behaviour, which, with its echoes of Nazi eugenics, was perhaps the most taboo of all academic disciplines.

In Britain, the causes of crime were allowed to be exclusively social and environmental, the result of disturbed or impoverished nurture, rather than fated and genetic nature. To suggest otherwise, as Raine felt compelled to, having studied under Richard Dawkins and been persuaded of the "all-embracing influence of evolution on behaviour", was to doom yourself to an absence of funding. In America, there seemed more open-mindedness on the question and, as a result, more money to explore it. There was also another good reason why Raine headed initially to California: there were more murderers to study than there were at home.

When Raine started doing brain scans of murderers in American prisons, he was among the first researchers to apply the evolving science of brain imaging to violent criminality. His most comprehensive study, in 1994, was still, necessarily, a small sample. He conducted PET [positron emission tomography] scans of 41 convicted killers and paired them with a "normal" control group of 41 people of similar age and profile. However limited the control, the colour images, which showed metabolic activity in different parts of the brain, appeared striking in comparison. In particular, the murderers' brains showed what appeared to be a significant reduction in the development of the prefrontal cortex, "the executive function" of the brain, compared with the control group.