Hold that marshmallow and don't ask for s'more.

Some kids today wait much longer to get an extra treat in the famed marshmallow test than they did in the 1960s or even the '80s, researchers say. So, so much for the view that internet-savvy, smartphone-toting tykes want what they want at warp speed.

This willingness to delay gratification has recently bloomed among U.S. preschoolers from predominantly white, middle-class families, say psychologist Stephanie Carlson of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and her colleagues. Youngsters aged 3 to 5 in the 2000s waited an average of two minutes longer during the marshmallow test than children in the 1960s did, and an average of one minute longer than 1980s kids did, the scientists report June 25 in Developmental Psychology.

Reasons for kids' rising patience when confronted with an available treat are unclear. Carlson's team offers several possible explanations, including increases in the ability to think abstractly, pay attention, plan and prioritize that have been linked to preschool attendance and early use of digital technologies.

Loneliness may not be entirely down to a floundering social life. A new study has found that a person's gene coding may contribute to a crippling feeling of isolation.

Scientists at Cambridge University explored the biological causes of loneliness as well as whether the onset of life-threatening depressive feelings are a cause or symptom of social withdrawal.

During the study, which has been published in the journal Nature, researchers gleaned data from hundreds of thousands of people thanks to the UK Biobank. Using survey responses from 452,000 volunteers in the databank, the research team were able pinpoint 15 genomic loci that are likely to contribute to loneliness in certain people.

Can a mind ever know itself? Maybe we don't want to know: solving the 'hard problem' of consciousness could threaten our sense of self and free will

It is a concept so intrinsic to the fabric of our reality that starting to pick away at it leaves us feeling quite unravelled. "We can come closer to defining what it is to be an elephant than what it is to be conscious," says Nicholas Shea, who researches philosophy of the mind at the University of Oxford.

Consciousness is the essence of what it is to be "you". It is all your subjective experiences - from the feeling of the sun's warmth on your skin to the desolation of grief - conjured up somehow by your brain. "It still seems to many people, sometimes to me, very hard to see how things happening in the physical world could give rise to any sort of conscious experience at all," says neuroscientist Anil Seth at the University of Sussex, UK.

Anticipating stress messes with your memory, new research finds.

People who woke up feeling the day would be stressful had worse memory later on, even if the stress did not materialise.

Mr Jinshil Hyun, the study's first author, said:

"Humans can think about and anticipate things before they happen, which can help us prepare for and even prevent certain events.

But this study suggests that this ability can also be harmful to your daily memory function, independent of whether the stressful events actually happen or not."

Working memory was the type affected by anticipating stress.

Dr Martin Sliwinski, study co-author, explained its function:

Sharing out the dishwashing duties more fairly could be one of the best ways to improve a relationship, new research suggests. Out of all household chores, (not) doing the dishes is the most likely to damage a relationship.

Women in heterosexual relationships who did more dishes than their partners reported:

• Lower relationship satisfaction,
• more relationship conflict,
• and worse and less sex.

The study looked at different household tasks including shopping, cleaning and laundry. It revealed that there is something particularly irritating about doing the dishes.

Spurred by social comparison, Cain and Abel represent rival responses to the suffering inherent in the human condition following the rise of self-consciousness. Abel's suffering leads to his self-development as a warrior. Cain's suffering leads to envy, malevolence, and murder. This essay explicates and develops Peterson's interpretation of the story.
In his "Biblical Series V: The Hostile Brothers" and in his international best seller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan Peterson provides a rich interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel. The archetypal brothers both suffer, but their radically different responses to their suffering represent perennial human options.

After becoming self-conscious and leaving the Garden of Eden, "Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, 'I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord'" (Genesis 4:1). Cain is not just the first-born son, Peterson notes, but the first-born human being.

Alan Sanderson is a psychiatrist specializing in hypnotherapy, who has become an advocate of spirit release therapy - a technique by which a hypnotherapist communicates directly with spirit entities purportedly harassing a patient. One of his cases, dating from 1995, involves a patient he calls Clara. He has written about it at some length in an article called "Clara - Spirit Releasement Therapy in a Case Featuring Depression and Panic" (European Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, April 4, 1998). He also alludes to the case in a more recent article, "Spirit Release in Clinical Psychiatry - What Can We Learn?" (2014) Here I want to present an abridged version of the case, relying primarily on the first, more detailed article. (All quotations are taken from the 1998 paper.)

What intrigues me the most about those case are its obvious parallels to numerous case histories recounted in Carl Wickland's 1924 book Thirty Years Among the Dead. (Clicking this link automatically downloads a PDF to your downloads folder. The book can also be purchased at Amazon.) Wickland used a medium (his wife) to contact the spirits, while Sanderson uses hypnosis. But the resulting dialogues are strikingly similar.

Sanderson notes that "possession" cases, as studied by himself and other researchers, can involve a wide variety of conditions, including phobias, addictions, and depression. "The great majority of these cases lack a subjective sense of possession. While the patient may have the feeling of spirit proximity, for instance that a deceased relative has been close by, the identification of a spirit presence usually comes as a surprise." In other words, we're not talking about dramatic, obvious "demonic" behavior or manifestations a la The Exorcist. (I'm not sure I would use the term "possession" for these cases; "obsession" or "harassment" seem like better words.)


He finds Clara's case to be of particular interest "because the patient's complaints of depression, anxiety, headache and panic are common symptoms and the picture in no way resembled that of the popular concept of possession." He tells us that Clara had no longterm history of mental problems or psychiatric treatment, was raised in a stable family, and reported a normal childhood. By the time she came to him, however, she was seriously depressed, drank and smoked heavily, and had gained more than twenty pounds in a few months.

A few years ago, I proposed that the feeling of cold in one's spine, while for example watching a film or listening to music, corresponds to an event when our vital need for cognition is satisfied. Similarly, I have shown that chills are not solely related to music or film but also to the practice of science (mainly physics and mathematics) and to the social logic of religious rituals. I believe that chills and aesthetic emotions in general can teach us something that we do not know yet. They can help us to understand what truly matters to the mind and to the society of minds.

When cold or sick, humans shiver. Shivering is a muscle tremor that produces heat which allows the body to maintain its core temperature in a changing world. Human core temperature can vary temporarily between about 28 to 42 degrees Celsius. Outside these thresholds, death occurs. Humans also shiver in the case of a fever, as heat slows down the rate of pathogen growth and improves the immune response of a living body. Goosebumps or piloerection (the bristling of hairs) can be side effects, as the muscle tremor causes hair to become erect which creates a thin layer of air, thus minimising heat loss. Strangely enough, humans also shiver independently of any such events. For instance, certain social situations seem to provoke the shivers.

Introverts who have more stable personalities have higher levels of general knowledge, research finds.

These two personality factors, along with being open to experience, predict people's general knowledge.

General knowledge - or as psychologists call it, crystallised intelligence - is one of two broad aspects of intelligence.

General knowledge is often linked to success in life because innate talent is not enough - application matters.

The other type is called 'fluid intelligence', and refers to abstract reasoning and the speed at which the brain works.

Researchers looked at the effect of negative events such as losing a job, the death of a loved one or financial problems.

Negativity is one of the most powerful relationship killers.

Reducing negativity is the key to getting through tough points in a relationships, new research finds.

Small negative gestures in a relationship are much more powerful than positive actions, psychologists have found.