Parents turn their children into little narcissists by overvaluing them, a new study finds. It is better to concentrate on being emotionally warm towards children — this leads to higher self-esteem, not narcissism. Professor Brad Bushman, one of the study's authors, said:

"Children believe it when their parents tell them that they are more special than others. That may not be good for them or for society."

The study is the first of its kind to follow children over time to examine how narcissists evolve. The researchers followed 565 children in the Netherlands who were between 7 and 11 when the study started. This is the critical age when narcissists emerge.

The children were tested for typical personality traits of narcissists, like thinking you are better than other people. The children's parents were also asked about their children. Professor Bushman explained that his research had changed his own parenting style:

"When I first started doing this research in the 1990s, I used to think my children should be treated like they were extra-special. I'm careful not to do that now. It is important to express warmth to your children because that may promote self-esteem, but overvaluing them may promote higher narcissism."

Cleverly at work for the dark side, the corporate media isn't going into great detail about the recent discovery that the Chicago Police Department has for years been operating a secret, off-site, extra-judicial, unconstitutional detention and interrogation center in a nondescript warehouse on the West side of the Windy City. Americans, so the talking heads would have us believe, have more important things to busy ourselves with.

The protest against this outrage is growing, however, because at Homan Square, as it's known, the local police 'disappear' American citizens before charging them with any crime. They hide them there for hours or days without the knowledge of lawyers, family, or friends, interrogating, threatening, abusing and at times coming up with cleverly inhumane ways to torture them.

Think Gitmo, think Abu Ghraib. Think Pol Pot, think Mao. Pardon my French here, but, c'est quoi ce bordel?

This sort of thing has always been in the play books of imperialists and barbarians, but in just over a short decade in the 'land of the free,' torture has clawed its gory soul into mainstream ideology, and it's making the death march to becoming acceptable public policy for your local police goons. Who, by the way, are already up-armed to the teeth and better equipped than most of the world's national armies.

What happens in Vagus... may make or break compassion.
Is there a biological fingerprint for compassion?

Two scientific teams, one led by Zoe Taylor at Purdue and the other by Jenny Stellar at UC Berkeley, have found that the answer may lie in the Vagus nerve. That's the cranial nerve in the body with the widest reach, influencing speech, head positioning, digestion, and—importantly for these two studies—the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system's influence on the heart.

Students typically memorize the parasympathetic branch (PNS) as the "rest and digest" branch of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which controls bodily functions that we're not aware of when we're relaxed and feeling content. The PNS is also called the "feed and breed" branch—and recently, social psychologist Barbara Fredrickson added the label "tend and befriend" to the PNS, suggesting that it also supports functions that enable social engagement and nurturing behaviors.

These functionally descriptive labels for the PNS—"rest and digest," "feed and breed," and "tend and befriend"—directly relate to the Vagus nerve, which turns out to be something of an enforcer for the PNS when it comes to the heart and compassion.

Roughly 20 years ago, Steve Porges of the University of Chicago pioneered PolyVagal theory, which suggested that the Vagus nerve fundamentally drives human social affiliation—the motivations and behaviors involved in approaching others in trusting, affectionate, and cooperative ways. Since then, social science researchers have measured Vagal activity to examine how it relates to social affiliation, particularly related states like empathy, sympathy, and compassion.

Everyone knows change is hard. If you want to achieve your goals, you have to learn how to delay gratification, step out of your comfort zone and overcome resistance to change.

But what's even harder is making change stick. Saying no to a cigarette. Keeping the pounds off. Ignoring that website. That's the real challenge. Or is it?

You can make change stick by making it easier for yourself.

In one study, university students only got vaccinated after they had been given a map to the health center. That one little thing made a big difference in their behavior.

Four things can make a big difference when making new habits stick. These are how you prime yourself to act differently, the defaults you set up, the commitments you make, and the norms of those you surround yourself with (Dolan, 2014).

People in a society are bound together by a set of connections - a social network. Cooperation between people in the network is essential for societies to prosper, and the question of what drives the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental one.

What we know about other people in a network informs how much we are willing to cooperate with them. By conducting a series of online experiments, researchers explored how two key areas of network knowledge effect cooperation in decision-making: what we know about the reputation and social connections of those around us.

In most social contexts, knowledge about others' reputation - what we know about their previous actions - is limited to those we have immediate connections with: friends, neighbours and so on.

But the new study shows that if the reputation of everyone in a network is completely transparent - made common knowledge and visible to all - rather than limited to the individuals who are directly connected, the level of cooperation across the overall network almost doubles. The network also becomes denser and more clustered (so your connections tend to be connected with each other).

In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti, now director of the California Institute of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, discovered something potentially revolutionary about the ripple effects of child sexual abuse. He discovered it while trying to solve a very different health problem: helping severely obese people lose weight.

Felitti, a specialist in preventive medicine, was trying out a new liquid diet treatment among patients at a Kaiser Permanente clinic. And it worked really well. The severely obese patients who stuck to it lost as much as 300 pounds in a year.

"Oh yeah, this was really quite extraordinary," recalls Felitti.

But then, some of the patients who'd lost the most weight quit the treatment and gained back all the weight — faster than they'd lost it. Felitti couldn't figure out why. So he started asking questions.

First, one person told him she'd been sexually abused as a kid. Then another.

The human brain can select relevant objects from a flood of information and edit out what is irrelevant. It also knows which parts belong to a whole. If, for example, we direct our attention to the doors of a house, the brain will preferentially process its windows, but not the neighboring houses. Psychologists from Goethe University Frankfurt have now discovered that this also happens when parts of the objects are merely maintained in our memory.

"Perception and memory have mainly been investigated separately until now", explains Benjamin Peters, doctoral researcher at the Institute for Medical Psychology in the working group of Prof. Jochen Kaiser. There are close parallels, for in the same way as we can preferentially process external stimuli, we are also able to concentrate on the memory content that is currently the most important. These are essential skills of our brain, which are closely connected to intelligence and which are impaired in various psychiatric illnesses.

In their study, Peters and colleagues examined "object-based attention", a well-known phenomenon in perception research. This refers to the fact that we automatically extend our attention to the whole object when we attend only part of an object - like the front door and the windows. In the experiment the subjects were asked to direct their attention alternately to one of four screen positions, which formed the ends of each of two artificial objects. In accordance with the principle of object-based attention the subjects were able to shift their attention more quickly between two positions that belonged to the same object than between those that were part of different objects. It was discovered that this effect also occurred when the subjects envisaged these positions only in short-term memory.

Smartphones have made our lives easier and more efficient. They allow us to call people, find directions, and look up virtually anything we want to know within seconds - with a mere touch of the screen.

But are we too reliant on these devices to do things for us? New research indicates that there is a downside to all of this convenience: we are becoming lazier thinkers.

The study, from researchers at the University of Waterloo and published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggests that smartphone users who are intuitive thinkers — more prone to relying on gut feelings and instincts when making decisions — frequently use our device's search engine rather than our own brainpower.

In other words, smartphones allow some of us to be even lazier than we would otherwise be.

Scientists have long known that our ability to think quickly and recall information, also known as fluid intelligence, peaks around age 20 and then begins a slow decline. However, more recent findings, including a new study from neuroscientists at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), suggest that the real picture is much more complex.

The study, which appears in the journal Psychological Science, finds that different components of fluid intelligence peak at different ages, some as late as age 40.

"At any given age, you're getting better at some things, you're getting worse at some other things, and you're at a plateau at some other things. There's probably not one age at which you're peak on most things, much less all of them," says Joshua Hartshorne, a postdoc in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and one of the paper's authors.

"It paints a different picture of the way we change over the lifespan than psychology and neuroscience have traditionally painted," adds Laura Germine, a postdoc in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental genetics at MGH and the paper's other author.

There are two types of extroverts, each with distinct brain anatomies.

There are two different types of extroverts — 'agentic' and 'affiliative' — each with distinct brain structures, new research finds.

Agentic extroverts are 'go-getters': the kind of outgoing people who are persistent, assertive and focused on achievement.

The other kind of extroverts have a softer side.

Affiliative extroverts tend to be more affectionate, friendly and sociable.

Both types of extroverts share distinct brain anatomy as well as displaying distinct differences, the new research finds.

Dr Tara White, the study's first author, said that extroverts in general are keen to share:

"These are people just sharing with you how they tend to experience the world and what's important to them.

The fact that that's validated in the brain is really exciting. There's a deep reality there.

This is the first glimpse of a benchmark of what the healthy adult brain looks like with these traits."

Scanning extroverts

For the study, researchers scanned the brains of 83 people to look for similarities and differences in key areas of the brain.

They found that both types of extroverts had more gray matter in the medial orbitofrontal cortex.