There is more than a literal truth to the saying that "you never get a second chance to make a first impression," suggests emerging international research. Experts have discovered that new experiences that contradict a first impression become "bound" to the context in which they were made, whereas first impressions still dominate in other contexts.

"Imagine you have a new colleague at work and your impression of that person is not very favorable," said lead author Bertram Gawronski. "A few weeks later, you meet your colleague at a party and you realize he is actually a very nice guy. Although you know your first impression was wrong, your gut response to your new colleague will be influenced by your new experience only in contexts that are similar to the party. However, your first impression will still dominate in all other contexts."

According to Gawronski, our brain stores expectancy-violating experiences as exceptions-to-the-rule, such that the rule is treated as valid except for the specific context in which it has been violated.

We all want an apology when someone does us wrong. But a new study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people aren't very good at predicting how much they'll value an apology.

Apologies have been in the news a lot the last few years in the context of the financial crisis, says David De Cremer of Erasmus University in the Netherlands. He cowrote the study with Chris Reinders Folmer of Erasmus University and Madan M. Pillutla of London Business School. "Banks didn't want to apologize because they didn't feel guilty but, in the public eye, banks were guilty," De Cremer says. But even when some banks and CEOs did apologize, the public didn't seem to feel any better. "We wondered, what was the real value of an apology?"

Dreaming could have begun as a form of survival in the wild, according to evolutionary psychologists. Some people credit their dreams for helping solve real-life problems.

No one really knows what dreams are for. But evolutionary psychologists theorize that humans started dreaming to promote survival by "rehearsing" adaptive responses to challenges.

"In prehistory it was, 'How do I get away from saber-toothed tigers?'" says Sandy Ginsberg, an Encino psychotherapist who leads a weekly dream group and says she's had, and heard, her own share of recession dreams of late. "We're still dreaming about how to survive."

About two-thirds of people surveyed say they've solved a practical problem in dreams, adds Deirdre Barrett, a clinical psychologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School - perhaps because "out of the box" solutions, shown visually, can eclipse the closed circles in which our logical minds travel.

Among such people are some eminent scientists who have credited breakthroughs to the options they saw in dreams.

Lassie could always sense when Timmy was in trouble. Black Beauty knew the bridge was out.

Now two-thirds of Ameri­can pet owners said they can relate -- their pets have a sixth sense about bad weath­er. Forty-three percent say the same about bad news, ac­cording to an Associated Press-Petside.com poll.

Seventy-two percent of dog owners said they've got­ten weather warnings from their pets, compared with 66 percent of cat owners.

For bad news, 47 percent of dog owners and 41 percent of cat owners said they've been alerted by their pets, according to the poll con­ducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Com­munications.

Jim Fulstone said his farm dog, a pomeranian named Austin, gives warn­ings about 15 minutes before earthquakes and 45 minutes before thunderstorms.

"He'll run around in cir­cles and look at you. If you sit down, he'll sit down with you. If you are outside, he will come up to you, run around, look off, sniff your leg, just kind of be there. He's a lot more active," said Fulstone, 65, of Wellington, Nevada. "For the quakes, he was very alert and started bark­ing and doing his run-around routine."

The reason? Hard to know.

1929: Martin Luther King Jr. is born. Though his work for civil rights and peace will become widely known, he will also deliver an important warning on the perils of technological amorality.

King delivered a lecture at the University of Oslo, Norway, on Dec. 11, 1964, the day after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. He argued that progress in science and technology has not been equaled by "moral progress" - instead, humanity is suffering from a "moral and spiritual lag."

At 35, King was then the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was recognized for using nonviolent methods, including civil disobedience and the boycott (as well as the power of his oratory), to fight racial segregation and advance the civil rights movement in the United States.

Dr Kluft is in private practice of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Bala Cynwyd, Pa, and is clinical professor of psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia. He has published extensively in the areas of trauma, dissociation, and hypnosis. He reports no conflicts of interest concerning the subject matter of this article

Few subjects in psychiatry elicit more profound, visceral, and polarized reactions than incest - the occurrence of sexual behaviors between closely related individuals - behaviors that violate society's most sacred and guarded taboos. Furthermore, few circumstances confront the psychiatrist with more complex, painful, and potentially problematic clinical dilemmas and challenges than the treatment of the incest victim and/or the management of situations in which incest has been suspected or alleged by one member of a family, and denied, often with both pain and outrage, by the accused and/or other members of that family.

The study of incest as an actual phenomenon rather than as a fantasy is a relatively recent event. In 1975, an authoritative text proclaimed that the incidence of father-daughter incest in the United States was 1 in a million families.¹ Crucial contributions by feminist authors and traumatologists rapidly sensitized the profession to the frequency and importance of incest and its association with psychopathology.^2-4 By 1986, Russell⁵ wrote that some form of father-daughter incestuous activity, ranging from minimal to brutal and aggressive, was found in approximately 1 in 20 families that included daughters and their natural fathers, and 1 in 7 families in which daughters resided with a stepfather. By the early 1990s, feminists, traumatologists, and contributors from the emerging study of dissociative disorders were engaged in a vigorous study of incest and the treatment of incest victims.

However, during this time, there emerged a trend of calling into question the recollections of those who reported incestuous abuse, mounting militant defenses of accused perpetrators. The rising number of incest accusations was attributed to faulty practices on the part of therapists who worked with patients who recalled incest, especially if the recollections had been absent from memory for some time and emerged either in the context of therapy or with the patient's exposure to certain media, books, and practices. Clinicians were accused of suggesting abuse that had never occurred and of causing their patients' memories to be contaminated with information and/or ideas that had planted erroneous ideas in their minds. Certain books and media were accused of encouraging false reports.

Within any romantic relationship, conflicts inevitably occur. And, as most of us are well aware, the fighting evokes intense emotions.

New research now suggests that how each person perceives the other partner's emotion during a conflict greatly influences different types of thoughts, feelings and reactions in themselves.

Baylor University's Keith Sanford, Ph.D., and his research team studied 105 college students in romantic relationships communicating through different arguments over an eight-week period.

Sanford focused on how emotion changed within each person across episodes of relationship conflict. He and his colleagues found demonstrated links between different types of emotion, different types of underlying concern, and different types of perceived partner emotion.

Students can combat test anxiety and improve performance by writing about their worries immediately before the exam begins, according to a University of Chicago study published Friday in the journal Science.

Researchers found that students who were prone to test anxiety improved their high-stakes test scores by nearly one grade point after they were given 10 minutes to write about what was causing them fear, according to the article, "Writing about Testing Boosts Exam Performance in the Classroom." The article appears in the Jan. 14 issue of Science and is based on research supported by the National Science Foundation.

Oxytocin has been described as the hormone of love. This tiny chemical, released from the hypothalamus region of the brain, gives rat mothers the urge to nurse their pups, keeps male prairie voles monogamous and, even more remarkable, makes people trust each other more.

Yes, you knew there had to be a catch. As oxytocin comes into sharper focus, its social radius of action turns out to have definite limits. The love and trust it promotes are not toward the world in general, just toward a person's in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood. Psychologists trying to specify its role have now concluded it is the agent of ethnocentrism.

A principal author of the new take on oxytocin is Carsten K. W. De Dreu, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. Reading the growing literature on the warm and cuddly effects of oxytocin, he decided on evolutionary principles that no one who placed unbounded trust in others could survive. Thus there must be limits on oxytocin's ability to induce trust, he assumed, and he set out to define them.

New studies show people can anticipate future events.

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that in her land, "memory works both ways." Not only can the Queen remember things from the past, but she also remembers "things that happened the week after next." Alice attempts to argue with the Queen, stating "I'm sure mine only works one way...I can't remember things before they happen." The Queen replies, "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

How much better would our lives be if we could live in the White Queen's kingdom, where ours memory would work backwards and forewords? For instance, in such a world, you could take an exam and then study for it afterwards to make sure you performed well in the past. Well, the good news is that according to a recent series of scientific studies by Daryl Bem, you already live in that world!

Dr. Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of studies that will soon be published in one of the most prestigious psychology journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to "see into the future" is often referred to as psi phenomena.