While the general perception of people who are impulsive in nature is that they are self-centered, new research appearing in the journal Psychological Science suggests that the reality is actually quite different.

In fact, the study authors report that when impetuous individuals are faced with a decision that involves either giving up their own time and energy to help a loved one or worrying more about themselves, they are more likely to sacrifice for others, according to The Telegraph.

"For decades psychologists have assumed that the first impulse is selfish and that it takes self-control to behave in a pro-social manner," explained lead researcher Dr. Francesca Righetti of Amsterdam's VU University. "We did not believe that this was true in every context, and especially not in close relationships."

To test their theory, Dr. Righetti and her colleagues conducted a study in which they told couples that they would have to approach twelve strangers and ask them embarrassing questions. They did not have to follow through with the task, but were not informed of that in advance.

The minds of murderers who kill impulsively, often out of rage, and those who carefully carry out premeditated crimes differ markedly both psychologically and intellectually, according to a new study by Northwestern Medicine® researcher Robert Hanlon.

"Impulsive murderers were much more mentally impaired, particularly cognitively impaired, in terms of both their intelligence and other cognitive functions," said Hanlon, senior author of the study and associate professor of clinical psychiatry and clinical neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

"The predatory and premeditated murderers did not typically show any major intellectual or cognitive impairments, but many more of them have psychiatric disorders," he said.

A new study from researchers at Uppsala University and University of Havana uses mathematic modeling and experiments on ants to show that a group is capable of developing flexible resource management strategies and characteristic responses of its own. The results are now published in Physical Review Letters.

Group-living animals are led to regulate their activity and to make decisions on how to manage resources, under the action of a variety of environmental stimuli and of their intrinsic interactions. The latter are typically cooperative, in the sense that the activity of a single animal increases nonlinearly with the number of already active ones.

The researchers monitored experimentally and using mathematical modeling the activity profile of food-searching ants in a natural environment. The number of ants entering in or exiting the nest was recorded as well as the local temperature over several days.

The study shows that the group is capable of developing flexible resource management strategies and characteristic responses of its own. This is achieved by operating in an aperiodic fashion close to a regime of chaos, where nonlinearity is especially pronounced and offers the group more options than just following passively the day/night temperature cycle.

Divorce has a bigger impact on child-parent relationships if it occurs in the first few years of the child's life, according to new research. Those who experience parental divorce early in their childhood tend to have more insecure relationships with their parents as adults than those who experience divorce later, researchers say.

"By studying variation in parental divorce, we are hoping to learn more about how early experiences predict the quality of people's close relationships later in life," says R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Psychologists are especially interested in childhood experiences, as their impact can extend into adulthood, but studying such early experiences is challenging, as people's memories of particular events vary widely. Parental divorce is a good event to study, he says, as people can accurately report if and when their parents divorced, even if they do not have perfect recollection of the details.

In two studies published today in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Fraley and graduate student Marie Heffernan examined the timing and effects of divorce on both parental and romantic relationships, as well as differences in how divorce affects relationships with mothers versus fathers. In the first study, they analyzed data from 7,735 people who participated in a survey about personality and close relationships through yourpersonality.net. More than one-third of the survey participants' parents divorced and the average age of divorce was about 9 years old.

The researchers found that individuals from divorced families were less likely to view their current relationships with their parents as secure. And people who experienced parental divorce between birth and 3 to 5 years of age were more insecure in their current relationships with their parents compared to those whose parents divorced later in childhood.

Our imagination may affect how we experience the world around us more than was previously thought, for instance, what we imagine seeing or hearing in our head can alter our actual perception, according to new research by a team from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

The finding, published in the journal Current Biology, explores the historic question in neuroscience and biology about how our brains puts together information from all the different senses.

Christopher Berger, doctoral student at the Department of Neuroscience and lead author of the study explained:

"We often think about the things we imagine and the things we perceive as being clearly dissociable. However, what this study shows is that our imagination of a sound or a shape changes how we perceive the world around us in the same way actually hearing that sound or seeing that shape does. Specifically, we found that what we imagine hearing can change what we actually see, and what we imagine seeing can change what we actually hear."

The study included a series of experiments that used illusions in which sensory information from one sense distorts or changes a person's perception of another sense. The experiments consisted of 96 healthy volunteers.

New York - The idea that consciousness arises from quantum mechanical phenomena in the brain is intriguing, yet lacks evidence, scientists say.

Physicist Roger Penrose, of the University of Oxford, and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, of the University of Arizona, propose that the brain acts as a quantum computer - a computational machine that makes use of quantum mechanical phenomena (like the ability of particles to be in two places at once) to perform complex calculations. In the brain, fibers inside neurons could form the basic units of quantum computation, Penrose and Hameroff explained at the Global Future 2045 International Congress, a futuristic conference held here June 15-16.

The idea is appealing, because neuroscience, so far, has no satisfactory explanation for consciousness - the state of being self-aware and having sensory experiences and thoughts. But many scientists are skeptical, citing a lack of experimental evidence for the idea.

While men tend to match their partners' emotions during mutual cooperation, woman may have the opposite response, according to new research.

Cooperation is essential in any successful romantic relationship, but how men and women experience cooperation emotionally may be quite different, according to new research conducted at the University of Arizona.

Ashley Randall, a post-doctoral research associate in the UA's John & Doris Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences and the UA's department of psychiatry, has been interested for some time in how romantic partners' emotions become coordinated with one another. For example, if someone comes home from work in a bad mood we know their partner's mood might plummet as well, but what are the long-term implications of this on their relationship?

Randall wondered how the act of cooperating, a beneficial relationship process, might impact emotional coordination between partners.

"Cooperation - having the ability to work things out with your partner, while achieving mutually beneficial outcomes - is so important in relationships, and I wondered what kind of emotional connectivity comes from cooperating with your partner?" she said.

What she found in her recent study - published in SAGE's Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and featured in the journal's podcast series, Relationship Matters - were surprising gender differences.

Psychological research on how a simple (nonsexual) touch can increase compliance, helping behaviour, attraction, and signal power.

To get around in the world, we mainly rely on our eyes and ears. Touch is a sense that's often forgotten.

But touch is also vital in the way we understand and experience the world. Even the lightest touch on the upper arm can influence the way we think. To prove it, here are 10 psychological effects which show just how powerful nonsexual touch can be.

1. Touch for money

A well-timed touch can encourage other people to return a lost item. In one experiment, users of a phone booth who were touched were more likely to return a lost dime to an experimenter (Kleinke, 1977). The action was no more than a light touch on the arm.

People will do more than that though; people will give a bigger tip to a waitress who has touched them (Crusco & Wetzel, 1984).

(Stop giggling at the back there!)

Are bearded men good with babies? Are beards attractive to women? In a fight, do beards help or hinder?

If you're having trouble telling men from women, here's a clue. Men are the ones with hair sprouting from their faces (alright more hair sprouting from their faces).

Some men attempt to cover up the effect of all those androgens by shaving off their beards. Others prefer to send out manly signals in all directions (well, either that or they can't be bothered to shave).

Who is right? What signal does the beard really send? Here are four very important beard-related facts that every man, woman and child should know.

Researchers who tracked 1,500 people over 80 years have come to some surprising conclusions and the factors linked to longevity. Much of what we've been taught about how to live a long life may be mistaken.

In 1921, just over 1,500 Californian children were selected to participate in a study led by a Stanford University psychologist, Dr. Lewis Terman. An enormous amount of data on the children was collected and archived. More remarkably, the 1,500 individuals were tracked over decades, with every detail about their lives, and their deaths, duteously noted by Dr. Terman's team. Even after Dr. Terman's own death in 1956, the Terman participants continued to be tracked, with the study lasting over 80 years. Dr. Terman's original intention was to explore the nature of intelligence, but modern day researchers realized that this treasure trove of data could provide unusual insight into the factors associated with longevity.

When contemporary researchers, Dr. Howard S. Friedman and Dr. Leslie R. Martin, completed their analysis and number crunching, they came to some extraordinary conclusions. Their findings, outlined in a 2011 book (The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight Decade Study), challenge many of our common assumptions about aging.

According to Longevity Project authors, much of what we've been taught about longevity is wrong. Here are seven popular beliefs about longevity that may in fact be misconceptions: