Editor's note: The following is an excerpt adapted from the book, People Will Talk: The Surprising Science of Reputation, by John Whitfield (Wiley, 2011).

People who don't care - or don't need to care - what others think of them show how crucial reputation is to civilization. Understanding it could reduce crime, improve ethical behavior and rein in Wall Street excesses

About one in every 100 people doesn't care what others think of him. These people are hard to spot. They are usually physically healthy, and their intelligence is often above average. Yet, in the words of one psychiatrist, they lie without compunction, cheat, steal, and casually violate any and all norms of social conduct whenever it suits their whim. They have no concern for others' suffering, no remorse when caught, and punishment does little to change them. They are called psychopaths.

Mental-health professionals have usually treated psychopathic behavior as a disorder - a large proportion of the prison population, after all, has been diagnosed with some version of the trait. But viewed from an evolutionary angle, psychopathy looks more like a feature than a bug. Most people are cooperative, trusting and generous. This pays off in the long term. It also creates an opening for those who would rather prey on society than join it.

A psychopath's deceitful, manipulative, and callous nature equips him (it's several times more likely to be a "him") to fill this niche. Psychopaths' deficit is in empathy, not reason. They understand morality, but they are immune to other people's emotions. There aren't many openings for psychopaths, because if there were lots of them, there would be no society to plunder. Evolutionary biologists call this frequency dependence: it means that the rarer a trait becomes, the more it pays off. This advantage when rare makes the trait more common, which reduces its advantage. The effect is to keep multiple traits in balance. Sex is one example of frequency dependence: if males were more common than females, they would be less likely to find a mate, so it would pay to have female offspring, pushing the sex ratio back toward equality. Similarly, mathematical models suggest that if antisocial behavior is rare enough, it can prosper.

From the moment they're born, babies are highly attuned to communicate and motivated to interact. And they're great listeners.

New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that during the first year of life, when babies spend so much time listening to language, they're actually tracking word patterns that will support their process of word- learning that occurs between the ages of about 18 months and two years.

"Babies are constantly looking for language clues in context and sound," says Jill Lany, assistant professor of psychology and director of Notre Dame's baby lab, where she conducts studies on how babies acquire language.

"My research suggests that there are some surprising clues in the sound stream that may help babies learn the meanings of words. They can distinguish different kinds of words like nouns and verbs by information in that sound stream."

The study, initiated by the Swiss researchers and published in Nature, constitutes ground-breaking work in exploring emotions in the brain.

Anxiety disorders constitute a complex family of pathologies affecting about 10% of adults. Patients suffering from such disorders fear certain situations or objects to exaggerated extents totally out of proportion to the real danger they present. The amygdala, a deep-brain structure, plays a key part in processing fear and anxiety. Its functioning can be disrupted by anxiety disorders.

Although researchers are well acquainted with the neurons of the amygdala and with the part those neurons play in expressing fear, their knowledge of the involvement of other regions of the brain remains limited. And yet, there can be no fear without sensory stimulation: before we become afraid, we hear, we see, we smell, we taste, or we feel something that triggers the fear. This sensory signal is, in particular, processed in the cortex, the largest region of the brain.

For the first time, these French and Swiss scientists have succeeded in visualising the path of a sensory stimulus in the brain during fear learning, and in identifying the underlying neuronal circuits.

What happens in the brain?

During the experiments conducted by the researchers, mice learnt to associate a sound with an unpleasant stimulus so that the sound itself became unpleasant for the animal.

John analyzes our current social and spiritual state as a featured speaker at the US Social Forum in Detroit, June 2010.

In the movie American Psycho actor Christian Bale plays an up-and-coming corporate vice president who barbarically kills people in his off hours. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, this unremorseful psychopath exhibits the oft rewarded business traits of aggressiveness, ruthlessness and aloofness while in the corporate suite. He may be callous but he gets the job done especially when it comes to business card selection.

While the Patrick Bateman character is fiction, it may not be far from the truth, according to recent research into the psychology of CEOs who are responsible for bringing down the world's financial system. One researcher, Clive Boddy, Professor of Marketing at Nottingham Business School in England, has been studying what he and others call Corporate Psychopaths well before the current global meltdown. They have found significant evidence that many of these business leaders may well be psychopaths whose behavior mimics serial killers and other social deviants but without the blood and gore.

He writes in the Journal of Business Ethics

"In watching these events [the global financial meltdown] unfold it often appears that the senior directors involved walk away with a clean conscience and huge amounts of money. Further, they seem to be unaffected by the corporate collapses they have created. They present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings, and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events are very persuasive in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own continued worth and value... Many of these people display several of the characteristics of psychopaths and some of them are undoubtedly true psychopaths."

Meaning in Madness: Milton Greek, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, believes that decoding the messages in delusions can help some people recover.


She was gone for good, and no amount of meditation could resolve the grief, even out here in the deep quiet of the woods.

Milt Greek pushed to his feet. It was Mother's Day 2006, not long after his mother's funeral, and he headed back home knowing that he needed help. A change in the medication for his schizophrenia, for sure. A change in focus, too; time with his family, to forget himself.

And, oh yes, he had to act on an urge expressed in his psychotic delusions: to save the world.

So after cleaning the yard around his house - a big job, a gift to his wife - in the coming days he sat down and wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, supporting a noise-pollution ordinance.

Individuals and courts deal more harshly with people who actively commit harm than with people who willfully allow the same harm to occur. A new study finds that this moral distinction is psychologically automatic. It requires more thought to see each harmful behavior as morally equivalent.

People typically say they are invoking an ethical principle when they judge acts that cause harm more harshly than willful inaction that allows that same harm to occur. That difference is even codified in criminal law. A new study based on brain scans, however, shows that people make that moral distinction automatically. Researchers found that it requires conscious reasoning to decide that active and passive behaviors that are equally harmful are equally wrong.

For example (see below), an overly competitive figure skater in one case loosens the skate blade of a rival, or in another case, notices that the blade is loose and fails to warn anyone. In both cases, the rival skater loses the competition and is seriously injured. Whether it is by acting, or willfully failing to act, the overly competitive skater did the same harm.

Children exposed to family violence show the same pattern of activity in their brains as soldiers exposed to combat, new research has shown.

In the first functional MRI brain scan study to investigate the impact of physical abuse and domestic violence on children, scientists at UCL in collaboration with the Anna Freud Centre, found that exposure to family violence was associated with increased brain activity in two specific brain areas (the anterior insula and the amygdala) when children viewed pictures of angry faces.

Previous fMRI studies that scanned the brains of soldiers exposed to violent combat situations have shown the same pattern of heightened activation in these two areas of the brain, which are associated with threat detection. The authors suggest that both maltreated children and soldiers may have adapted to be 'hyper-aware' of danger in their environment.

However, the anterior insula and amygdala are also areas of the brain implicated in anxiety disorders. Neural adaptation in these regions may help explain why children exposed to family violence are at greater risk of developing anxiety problems later in life.

Experienced meditators seem to be able switch off areas of the brain associated with daydreaming as well as psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, according to a new brain imaging study by Yale researchers.

Less day dreaming has been associated with increased happiness levels, said Judson A. Brewer, assistant professor of psychiatry and lead author of the study published the week of Nov. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Understanding how meditation works will aid investigation into a host of diseases, he said.

"Meditation has been shown to help in variety of health problems, such as helping people quit smoking, cope with cancer, and even prevent psoriasis," Brewer said.

The Yale team conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on both experienced and novice meditators as they practiced three different meditation techniques.

Jason Torpy says military chaplains are assigned many secular advising duties that atheist service members need, too.

Retired Army captain and Iraqi war veteran Jason Torpy says the chaplains employed by the U.S. military can't relate to people like him. He's an atheist.

He's also the president of a group that's trying to get the armed forces to become more inclusive by hiring atheist chaplains. The Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers wants the military to provide for the estimated 40,000 atheists, agnostics and humanists who serve in U.S. forces.

Military chaplains, most of whom are Protestant Christians, are assigned many secular advising duties, including marriage, family and suicide counseling, Torpy tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin. They touch so many parts of service members' lives, he says, they can help improve what he sees as an environment of exclusion.