It was a technique that therapist Lionel Logue used to help George VI, as shown in The King's Speech - now scientists have discovered why singing is so effective at treating a stammer.

Surprisingly it has nothing to do with the melody but instead is based on the rhythm, say scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

Researchers found that highly familiar song lyrics and formulaic phrases expressed rhythmically had a strong impact on articulation - regardless of whether they were sung or spoken.

The results may lead the way to new therapies for speech disorders.

It has been almost a decade since 9/11/2001, and for the past ten years we have all lived in a stressful global reality in permanent flux. The Chinese culture, inspired by Confucius, places at the core of its value system the notion of balance and harmony. Almost ten years ago, any hope for even some harmonious outcome of world events was smashed to pieces and it hasn't be mended ever since. A vicious cycle of crisis has engulfed our global reality: wars, food crisis, financial crisis, natural disasters and man-made disasters.

This inexorable cycle of death and destruction is a fast spreading global disease taking its toll on all of us, and none of us are immunised from it. The storms have become tornadoes or hurricanes aiming straight at us, and the big waves must be killer Tsunamis to make it into the headlines. It can not be contested by anyone that we are currently living in a period of deep turmoil, but very few propose solutions which are not purely cosmetic and merely at the periphery of the core issues. Most of us shift the blame for this global crisis, unfolding since a decade, on entities such as corporations, governments: what can be called a global system of governance and production or exploitation of people and resources. But, first of all we could have resisted this global system a long time ago, and secondly most of us carry within ourselves the psychological attributes we so vehemently reject in the global social context. Character traits such as greed, quest for power, narcissism and lack of empathy.

This year some positive changes are occurring in the global consciousness: Arabs are challenging the power of corrupt autocratic rulers across the Middle-East, protests are spreading in Europe within Greece, Spain, and now London. Activists are reaching across country boundaries to join forces and define common goal. Some are talking about the need of a global revolution. However, we can only challenge the order of a ruthless, amoral, "dog eat dog" mentality that is our global reality, by having a revolution within ourselves. We must change our own psychology, otherwise we will never make lasting progress in a global consciousness where brutality, selfishness, corruption and amorality are the real driving forces of social success.

One in 25 bosses may be psychopaths - a rate that's four times greater than in the general population - according to research by psychologist and executive coach Paul Babiak.

Babiak studied 203 American corporate professionals who had been chosen by their companies to participate in a management training program. He evaluated their psychopathic traits using a version of the standard psychopathy checklist developed by Robert Hare, an expert in psychopathy at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Psychopaths, who are characterized by being completely amoral and concerned only with their own power and selfish pleasures, may be overrepresented in the business environment because it plays to their strengths. Where greed is considered good and profitmaking is the most important value, psychopaths can thrive.

Ignotas nulla curatio morbid - do not attempt to cure what you do not understand - is the opening theme in this study of evil. Political Ponerology is "a science on the nature of of evil adjusted for political purposes." The author, Andrzej Lobaczewski, describes himself as a Polish psychologist who - with many other colleagues - found meaning living through Nazism and then Communism by studying how evil happens and triumphs in a wider political and economic system.

Lobaczewski's hypothesis is that a small percentage of humans are born psychopaths. He describes the research to back up that data that was destroyed and supressed. Another minority percentage are of a nature to go along with psychopaths while the vast majority of people are essentially healthy. The majority who are healthy have a difficult time understanding that some people are not - they can not fathom being a psychopath or acting like one.

No one has worked harder in the last five years to understand the Tapeworm than Harry Blazer. It was Harry who discovered Political Ponerology and sent it to me. I found it chock full of deeply useful insights that can inform organizing to shift our situation. For example, Lobaczewski discovered that dealing with psychopathic systems made healthy people neurotic. However, they could heal very quickly when he gave them a scientific framework for understanding what had happened and why. With a sound framework, they could start to differentiate who was healthy and who was not and to devise strategies to deal effectively with psychopaths in power. Rather than having their relations with all humans destroyed, they were able to discriminate between healthy and unhealthy and increase their immunity to the drain of unhealthy culture and systems.

Consider the old saying that perception is 9/10th of reality. I was never a fan of this saying since it can be such an easy outlet to take everything at face value rather than to seek the truth. Instead, let us consider that reality is but 1/10th of reality.

It is important to note that early Greek philosophers made the common mistake of basing their reality on their often flawed sense perception since they lacked sophisticated scientific equipment capable of measuring and calculating the world around us. In fact, it was not until thousands of years later that humankind could more accurately calculate and determine atomic structure with microscopes while advanced telescopes were used to ascertain cosmic distance, to name a few examples.

Based on the leaps and bounds of modern science and the ability to closely examine the world around us, we now know that what we perceive, as humans, is only reliant on 5 human senses which remain greatly biased according to our own prejudices and beliefs (The 6th Sense is another topic for another time which still remains unknown)

Are some children just born evil? Michelle Griffin reports.

A mother sits in a playroom with her young son. The phone rings. When she picks it up, a researcher watching through a two-way mirror asks her to look into her son's eyes and ''show him, in the way that feels most natural for you, that you love him''.

The mother is doing her best to connect, but this little boy won't return her gaze. He looks at her mouth, where the words are coming from, but it's as if he can't understand what she means.

Mark Dadds says some children literally cannot see the love in their mother's eyes. Professor Dadds, a parenting expert from the University of New South Wales, has just published results of his work in the British Journal of Psychiatry and the Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology that suggest the ability to make eye contact is vital in learning how to love other people.

For the past five years, he has been working with children referred to his Sydney clinic for sustained rages, continual aggression, calculated violence and, occasionally, cruelty to animals.

According to findings published online this week in Molecular Psychiatry, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine found molecular-level changes in the brains of women with major depressive disorder which link two hypotheses of the biological mechanisms that lead to depression. The results also allowed the researchers to recreate the changes in a mouse model that could improve future research on depression.

Senior author Etienne Sibille, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry at the Pitt School of Medicine remarked that despite the fact that women are two times more likely to develop depression with more severe and frequent symptoms compared with men, very little research has focused on women or has been conducted in other female animals.

Sibille said:

"It seemed to us that if there were molecular changes in the depressed brain, we might be able to better identify them in samples that come from females. Indeed, our findings give us a better understanding of the biology of this common and often debilitating psychiatric illness."

Fluctuating levels of the brain chemical serotonin, often brought on when someone hasn't eaten or is stressed, affect brain regions that enable people to regulate anger, scientists said on Thursday.

In a study using healthy volunteers, researchers from Britain's Cambridge University found that when serotonin levels are low, it may be more difficult for the brain to control emotional responses to anger.

Although reduced serotonin levels have previously been linked to aggression, this is the first study to show how this chemical helps regulate behavior in the brain as well as why some individuals may be more prone to aggression.

The researchers behind the work, which was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, hope their findings could help in the search for new treatments for psychiatric disorders where violence and aggression are common symptoms.

UCLA life scientists have identified for the first time a particular gene's link to optimism, self-esteem and "mastery," the belief that one has control over one's own life - three critical psychological resources for coping well with stress and depression.

"I have been looking for this gene for a few years, and it is not the gene I expected," said Shelley E. Taylor, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA and senior author of the new research. "I knew there had to be a gene for these psychological resources."

The research is currently available in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and will appear in a forthcoming print edition.

The gene Taylor and her colleagues identified is the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR). Oxytocin is a hormone that increases in response to stress and is associated with good social skills such as empathy and enjoying the company of others.

Forensic psychology might sound like a field of brain studying where men in lab coats standing around pristine laboratories smoking pipes and pondering the brain chemistry of prisoners who dream about hacking their mother to death with a frozen fish. Believe it or not, the strides and studies done in the field don't just apply to people who are legally prevented from being able to use forks. Some of the field's most comprehensive and groundbreaking studies apply to the whole spectrum of the human mind and can prevent non-felony carrying citizens of society from being really dumb.

1. James Cattell's Psychology of Testimony

Confidence seems to have been replaced in this day in age with correctness. It doesn't matter if the crazy thing you are spouting into a microphone, through a television camera or at the few pigeons in the park who can stand to be around you is completely wrong. As long as you are 100 percent sure of your assessment of the world, then being wrong about it doesn't matter. For instance, just look at everything Glenn Beck has ever said. The preceding describes this phenomenon perfectly (I'm sure the pigeon thing is just around the corner).

James Cattell, one of psychology's founding fathers who pushed to have it studied as a major scientific field, conducted a study to test the reliability of testimony by asking Columbia University students a series of questions and rate their degree of confidence in the answer they gave. He found the higher their confidence was in the answer, the greater their inaccuracy making it that much harder to shake their belief in it.