Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.

Normal human beings are naturally empathic. Human society however has been plagued throughout its history by the influence of psychopaths who, having attained to positions of power, exerted a nefarious and pathological influence on human thought, 'morality' and beliefs.

We are all aware that a bright day may lift our mood. However the brain mechanisms involved in such effects of light are largely unknown.

Researchers at the Cyclotron Research Centre (University of Liege), Geneva Center for Neuroscience and Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (University of Geneva), and Surrey Sleep Research Centre (University of Surrey) investigated the immediate effect of light, and of its color composition, on emotion brain processing using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results of their study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the colour of light influences the way the brain processes emotional stimuli.

Brain activity of healthy volunteers was recorded while they listened to "angry voices" and "neutral voices" and were exposed to blue or green light. Blue light not only increased responses to emotional stimuli in the "voice area" of the brain and in the hippocampus, which is important for memory processes, but also led to a tighter interaction between the voice area, the amygdala, which is a key area in emotion regulation, and the hypothalamus, which is essential for biological rhythms regulation by light. This demonstrates that the functional organization of the brain was affected by blue light.

A study is under way at Emory University testing the value of meditation in helping people cope with stress. The Compassion and Attention Longitudinal Meditation Study (CALM) will help scientists determine how people's bodies, minds and hearts respond to stress and which specific meditation practices are better at turning down those responses.

"While much attention has been paid to meditation practices that emphasize calming the mind, improving focused attention or developing mindfulness, less is known about meditation practices designed to specifically foster compassion, and what specific problems can be alleviated through this practice," says Charles Raison, MD, associate professor in Emory's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and principle investigator of the study.

Raison and principle contemplative investigator, Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, PhD, senior lecturer in the Emory Department of Religion, collaborated on an earlier study at Emory showing that college students who regularly practiced compassion meditation had a significant reduction in stress and physical responses to stress.

The success of this initial study led the pair to embark on an expanded protocol for adults.

The CALM study has three different components.

Humans have a deep-seated urge to be social, and new research on the interactions of twins in the womb suggests this begins even before babies are born.

Researchers from the University of Padova in Italy have been studying pregnancies involving twins. Leader of the team, psychologist Umberto Castiello, explained that newborns appear to be already "wired" to interact socially with other humans soon after birth, and previous research has demonstrated that within only a few hours after birth, babies can imitate gestures of people around them and make other social interactions. Studying twins in the womb made it possible to see investigate the pre-wired hypothesis and see if socialization was already apparent while still in the womb.

The study, which was published in the Public Library of Science One (PLoS One), used four-dimensional ultrasonography to make 3D videos of twins at 14 and 18 weeks of gestation. The five pairs of twins were found to be reaching for each other even at 14 weeks, and making a range of contacts including head to head, arm to head and head to arm. By the time they were at 18 weeks, they touched each other more often than they touched their own bodies, spending up to 30 percent of their time reaching out and stroking their co-twin.

We've all heard the adage that whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger, but until now the preponderance of scientific evidence has offered little support for it.

However, a new national multi-year longitudinal study of the effects of adverse life events on mental health has found that adverse experiences do, in fact, appear to foster subsequent adaptability and resilience, with resulting advantages for mental health and well being.

The study, "Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability and Resilience," to be published in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is available on the website of the American Psychological Association.

It examined a national sample of people who reported their lifetime history of adverse experiences and several measures of current mental health and well being.

Anxiety, or the reaction to a perceived danger, is a response that differs from one animal or human to another -- or so scientists thought. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University are challenging what we know about stress, and their study has implications for helping clinicians better treat victims of terrorism or natural disasters.

Prof. David Eilam and his graduate student Rony Izhar of Tel Aviv University's Department of Zoology are spearheading a study designed to investigate the anxieties experienced by an entire social group. Using the natural predator-and-prey relationship between the barn owl and the vole, a small animal in the rodent family, researchers were able to test unified group responses to a common threat.

The results, which have been reported in the journals Behavioural Brain Research and Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, demonstrated that while anxiety levels can differ among individuals in normal circumstances, surprisingly, group members display the same level of anxiety when exposed to a common threat.

We know that casting a ballot in the voting booth involves politics, values and personalities. But before you ever push the button for your candidate, your brain has already carried out an election of its own to make that action possible. New research from Vanderbilt University reveals that our brain accumulates evidence when faced with a choice and triggers an action once that evidence reaches a tipping point.

The research was published in the October issue of Psychological Review.

"Psychological models of decision-making explain that humans gradually accumulate evidence for a particular choice over time, and execute that choice when evidence reaches a critical level. However, until recently there was little understanding of how this might actually be implemented in the brain," Braden Purcell, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology and lead author of the new study, said. "We found that certain neurons seem to represent the accumulation of evidence to a threshold and others represent the evidence itself, and that these two types of neurons interact to drive decision-making."

The researchers presented monkeys with a simple visual task of finding a target on a screen that also included distracting items. The researchers found that neurons processing visual information from the screen fed that information to the neurons responsible for movement. These movement neurons served as gatekeepers, suppressing action until the information they received from the visual neurons was sufficiently clear. When that occurred, the movement neurons then proceeded to trigger the chosen movement.

According to Prof Ivor Browne, treatment of mental illness can not - and should not - be undertaken without the effort of the patient, and the power of change and recovery being firmly placed in their hands

The world is a sea of troubles and we have to adapt to these as best we can. People use all kinds of ways to manage. Some are better than others, while some are counterproductive and land us in difficulty. Mental illness is seen as a disease caused by either a disturbance in our biochemistry or by genetic influences - but this is a myth.

This view of mental illness arises from a reductionist scientific concept, where the disturbance of the whole person is seen as caused by something wrong with the parts. It's derived historically from Galileo's statement that, to make scientific progress, we must concentrate on things we can measure. But this is only half the story and it breaks down when applied to living creatures such as ourselves.

When a new whole emerges, this is a completely new reality, quite distinct from the parts that make it up. It's not explainable by simply analysing the parts. Once the new reality, for example of a person, emerges, the causal direction reverses. The new whole takes control over its parts - thus we have to take control of our behaviour, cells and biochemistry, and not the other way around.

This is why, in dealing with emotional problems, there is no therapy the psychiatrist or therapist can apply to the person to bring about real change. The person has to do the work of changing themselves, with the support and guidance of a therapist.

Scarlett made for a good target. The daughter of a Williamsburg artist, she wore funky clothing to her East Village school, had a mild learning disability and was generally timid and insecure. Lila, the resident "mean girl" in Scarlett's kindergarten class, started in immediately.

Scarlett, she sneered, couldn't read. Her Payless and Gap shoes weren't good enough. She wasn't "allowed" to play with certain girls. Lila was forming a band, and Scarlett couldn't be a part. One girl threatened to physically hurt her. During recess, Lila would loom over Scarlett, arms crossed, and say, "I'm watching you."

"I was in middle school before things got as awful as they did for Scarlett," said Scarlett's mother, Annelizabeth, who asked that her last name not be used to protect her daughter. "I understand that children are maturing much faster, but to see such hostility at this young age, wow. It was really shocking."

Oxford University professor Susan Greenfield is worried, very worried. As a leading -- and controversial -- neuroscientist and commentator on society and modern technology, she warns that society is facing the prospect of being robbed of its future Albert Einsteins and Isaac Newtons. Why? Today's brainiacs spend too much time fiddling with their iPhones or updating their Facebook pages.

Greenfield -- a regular visitor to Australia and former South Australian Thinker in Residence -- has written several books on the subject. She speaks widely, arguing that future generations are at risk of everything from desocialisation and autism to damaged cognitive functions such as the ability to think deeply and even read.

"Everyone knows that the human brain is sensitive to the environment," she tells Weekend Health. "Therefore, if the environment is now unprecedented and different, how can the brain stay the same?"

But what's the hard evidence that today's swarms of computers and gadgets, incessantly bleeping and buzzing with communication and information, are causing what Greenfield calls "mind change"?