Borderline personality disorder is thought to affect between 1% and 6% of the population.

It is more common in women than men.

The most telling sign of borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a long history of instability in personal relationships.

This is partly caused by unstable and impulsive emotions.

At one time people with borderline personality disorder can idolise someone else, and soon after they hate them.

Research shows that writing leads to an increase in conceptual understanding, application and retention.

My son is 18 months old, and I've been reading books with him since he was born. I say "reading", but I really mean "looking at" - not to mention grasping, dropping, throwing, cuddling, chewing, and everything else a tiny human being likes to do. Over the last six months, though, he has begun not simply to look but also to recognise a few letters and numbers. He calls a capital Y a "yak" after a picture on the door of his room; a capital H is "hedgehog"; a capital K, "kangaroo"; and so on.

Reading, unlike speaking, is a young activity in evolutionary terms. Humans have been speaking in some form for hundreds of thousands of years; we are born with the ability to acquire speech etched into our neurones. The earliest writing, however, emerged only 6,000 years ago, and every act of reading remains a version of what my son is learning: identifying the special species of physical objects known as letters and words, using much the same neural circuits as we use to identify trees, cars, animals and telephone boxes.

Even when people try to be different from each other, they may end up conforming with the majority around them, a new model suggests.

Breaking the stranglehold of conformity only depends on a few extreme outliers, say the authors of a new paper published today in the Royal Society journal Open Science.

"Conformity is 'doubly hard' to beat -- it can obviously happen when people imitate one another, but it can also set in even when folks are trying to be distinct," says mathematical social scientist Professor Joshua Epstein of Johns Hopkins University.

"You have to be creative if you want to resist it, reverse it or interrupt it."

Epstein says previous attempts to model conformity in social systems have focused on how it results from some kind of imitation.

In their model, he and colleague Dr Paul Smaldino of the University of California, Davis did something different. They allowed for people wanting to be a bit different from the average.

Each individual in the model had a starting position -- it could be a political view or a fashion statement -- that was measured in standard deviations from the mean.

And they had a preferred position, which might be different from this starting position. As the model ran, an individual would move in the direction of their preferred position (towards or away from the mean). But as each individual moved, this changed the mean and also changed the movement of all other individuals.

"There's this constant feedback between people's positions and their objectives."

The amazing thing was that the end point of this process was that all positions collapsed in to the average position.

"If all they [people] care about is moving in the direction of the goal, they all end up in the same darn position," says Epstein.

"It is a very counter-intuitive result ... Nobody had really thought that you could get conformity out of people trying to be distinct."

Epstein says this could help explain phenomenon such as fashion cycles.

There's a big movement towards frugality afoot these days. It probably has something to do with our declining economy, record unemployment levels, and the increasing price of food, but only the wisest families are paying attention to these things. The rest of the folks are blithely going on as they always have, wondering why on earth they keep spending more money each week at the store.

If you are just beginning to move towards a thriftier lifestyle, you might be looking at the big picture. You could be asking yourself things like, "How can I save money on my car?" or "How can I pay less for that new laptop?" These are all fine things to do - paying less is great, but shopping for a bargain is actually not the key to a frugal lifestyle.

Living a life of thrift and frugality is all about the little habits. It's about your mindset. Saving money on enormous expenditures is great, but it is the small daily actions that add up and change your life.
Truly frugal people absolutely LOVE saving money. Embrace these daily habits and make them your own. You'll soon see an incredible difference in the way you look at pretty much everything.

Shouldn't researchers examine societal and cultural variables that are making us depressed and suicidal?

For nearly two decades, Big Pharma commercials have falsely told Americans that mental illness is associated with a chemical brain imbalance, but the truth is that mental illness and suicidality are associated with poverty, unemployment, and mass incarceration. And the truth is that American society has now become so especially oppressive for young people that an embarrassingly large number of American teenagers and young adults are suicidal and depressed.


In November of 2014, the U.S. government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) issued a press release titled Nearly One in Five Adult Americans Experienced Mental Illness in 2013. This brief press release provides a snapshot of the number of Americans who are suicidal, depressed, and mentally ill, and it bemoans how many Americans are not in treatment. However, excluded from SAMHSA's press release—yet included in the lengthy results of SAMHSA's national survey—are economic, age, gender, and other demographic correlates of serious mental illness, depression, and suicidality (serious suicidal thoughts, plans, or attempts). It is these demographic correlates that have political implications.

Scientists have discovered a group of neurones that enable one monkey to predict what another monkey is about to do - the first-known instance of neurones calculating another animal's behaviour.

The discovery may be fundamental for understanding social behaviour and could lead to better treatments for conditions like autism spectrum disorder.

US neuroscientists got pairs of monkeys to play a game based on classic game theory known as 'the prisoner's dilemma.'

Their findings are published today in the journal Cell.

Decisions... decisions

In the game, the monkeys sit side by side facing a computer screens. They can choose either to cooperate (signified by pressing a hexagon on their screen) or to be selfish (by pressing a triangle).

Although they are well aware of each other's presence, neither monkey can see the other's facial expressions, nor can they see the choice the other monkey makes as they make it, explains study co-author neuroscientist Dr Keren Haroush of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA.

Their reward depends on their combined choices. If one monkey chooses to be selfish and the other to cooperate, the selfish monkey wins hands down, getting six drops of juice as a reward while the other (cooperative) monkey gets only one drop.

But if they both choose the selfish option they get just two drops each. Both deciding to cooperate, however, wins them each four drops of juice.

"The only follow-up was at the end of the trial: once they had both made their selections, they got to see what the other one chose." says Haroush.

Not only could they see the choice the other monkey made, they could also hear the drops of juice that it got as a reward.

My son recently asked me if it was possible that we lived on a speck of dust in a much larger universe. He explained that he had just watched Horton Hears a Who again and it had him thinking. I, ever eager to promote the impossible, said I don't see why not. And he walked about blissfully conjuring the possibilities.

What is it about fantastic speculation that makes it so compelling a past time? Many of us read science fiction, or watch documentaries about aspects of our world that we will never experience, and yet we love it. We love to hear that there may be parallel universes or ways to go back in time. I recently read an article (link is external) in National Geographic magazine that argued that we may live in the center of a black hole, created in a multiverse, where black holes that experience just the right conditions expand into universes like our own—as if they were flowers. I felt like I had taken mescal after reading that article. I walked around for a week just smiling at everything.

But why?

To my knowledge, no other species cares if we live inside or outside of a blackhole. No other species considers it interesting that quantum probability requires something to collapse the wave function (like consciousness) or else that there are many worlds, infinite and ever increasing parallel universes in which every possibility happens. All of these theories are like drugs—like mind-expanding mushrooms that open Huxley's doors of perception. They each carry with them such a fantastic vision of reality that we are forced to rethink our place in the universe and thereby the limits of who we are as individuals, as a species, and as life itself.

What is it that makes this capacity for wonder possible?

The answer lies in part in how we understand ourselves.

Ruminating about something bad that happened to you can make it feel like the event happened 'just yesterday', say researchers.

Their new study gives insight into a concept known as 'psychological distance', and could help in the treatment of conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

"If you're constantly having intrusive unwanted thoughts about an emotional event it really makes it feel like it's just happened yesterday, or last week," says research team member, Dr Tom Denson of the University of New South Wales' School of Psychology.

Previous research has found that when we remember events or places that are associated with particular feelings we experience them as having a certain psychological distance.

"Depending on our emotional state we tend to see things as either closer or further away," says Denson.

For example a country which is home to enemies we fear may seem closer than it actually is.

But how do emotions affect our psychological sense of time?

Men with conscientious personality traits and those who are open to experience live longer, a new study finds. For women, those who are more agreeable and emotionally stable enjoy a longer life.

The kicker is that it's your friends — not you — who are better at judging these personality traits from the outside.

The results, published in the journal Psychological Science, come from one of the longest studies in history, spanning 75 years (Jackson et al., 2015).

Dr Joshua Jackson, the study's first author, said:

"You expect your friends to be inclined to see you in a positive manner, but they also are keen observers of the personality traits that could send you to an early grave."

The researchers used data from research that began in the 1930s, following a group of couples then in their mid-20s.

Almost all were about to be married and tests of their personality traits were conducted on the engaged couples and their friends also reported on the couple's personalities.

The scientific research on the benefits of so-called expressive writing is surprisingly vast. Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person's health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory.

Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness.

The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn't get it completely right. Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health.

It may sound like self-help nonsense, but research suggests the effects are real.