New research shows that babies not only pick up on their mother's stress, they also show corresponding physiological changes.

"Our research shows that infants 'catch' and embody the physiological residue of their mothers' stressful experiences," says lead researcher Sara Waters, postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco.

The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"For many years now, social scientists have been interested in how emotions are transmitted from one person to another," says senior author Wendy Berry Mendes, the Sarlo/Ekman Associate Professor of Emotion at UCSF. Indeed, research in the social sciences has shown that emotions can be "contagious" and that there is emotional synchrony between romantic partners.

Waters, Mendes, and colleague Tessa West of New York University, wanted to extend this research by looking at emotional synchrony in the context of another close relationship: that between mother and child.

"Our earliest lessons about how to manage stress and strong negative emotions in our day-to-day lives occur in the parent-child relationship," Waters explains.

Human beings are emotional creatures whose state of mind can usually be observed through their facial expressions.

A commonly-held belief, first proposed by Dr Paul Ekman, posits there are six basic emotions which are universally recognised and easily interpreted through specific facial expressions, regardless of language or culture. These are: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust.

New research published in the journal Current Biology by scientists at the University of Glasgow has challenged this view, and suggested that there are only four basic emotions.

Their conclusion was reached by studying the range of different muscles within the face - or Action Units as researchers refer to them - involved in signalling different emotions, as well as the time-frame over which each muscle was activated.

This is the first such study to objectively examine the 'temporal dynamics' of facial expressions, made possible by using a unique Generative Face Grammar platform developed at the University of Glasgow.

The team from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology claim that while the facial expression signals of happiness and sadness are clearly distinct across time, fear and surprise share a common signal - the wide open eyes - early in the signalling dynamics.

Young adults who care for an animal may have stronger social relationships and connection to their communities, according to a paper published online today in Applied Developmental Science.

While there is mounting evidence of the effects of animals on children in therapeutic settings, not much is known about if and how everyday interactions with animals can impact positive youth development more broadly.

"Our findings suggest that it may not be whether an animal is present in an individual's life that is most significant but rather the quality of that relationship," said the paper's author, Megan Mueller, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist and research assistant professor at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. "The young adults in the study who had strong attachment to pets reported feeling more connected to their communities and relationships."

New research suggests children have a strong sense they existed before they were conceived.

We've all ruminated about the possibility of life after death. But what about the notion of life before birth - or even conception?

While Christian theology denies such a thing is possible, the concept that life precedes physical fertilization is a given for people who believe in reincarnation. But is such an idea learned? Or is it based on an innate feeling about our own immortality?

Newly published research that analyzes answers given by two groups of children - one urban, one rural - suggests the latter. It finds youngsters intuitively believe that their own existence, at least in the form of feelings and wants, pre-dated their conception.

"Even kids who had biological knowledge about reproduction still seemed to think that they had existed in some sort of eternal form," lead author Natalie Emmons, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Boston University, told the institution's news service. "And that form really seemed to be about emotions and desires."

Oxytocin, also known as the "love molecule," is an appropriately many splendored thing. The naturally occurring brain chemical helps form sexual arousal, bonds between parents and children and even encourages generosity. On the other hand, oxytocin also reinforces social bonds at the expense of strangers - research indicates that oxytocin encourages ethnocentric favoritism.

A new study published in today's Nature Neuroscience states that oxytocin, so crucial to strengthening social bonds, can also strengthen traumatic memories and raise future fear and social anxiety. Confirming the suspicion of notebook-scribbling bedroom poets everywhere, loving and being hurt, in terms of brain chemistry, are closely related.

The researchers at Northwestern University found that oxytocin activates part of the brain to intensify the memory in stressful situations, a significant finding, as oxytocin is being tested as a possible anti-anxiety medication.

"Oxytocin is usually considered a stress-reducing agent based on decades of research," said Yomayra Guzman, a doctoral student at Northwestern and the study's lead author. "We showed how it enhances fear rather than reducing it and where the molecular changes are occurring in our central nervous system."

Abby Martin speaks with BTS producer Manuel Rapalo about the top five characteristics of a liar, including body language and verbal signals, using past presidents as prime examples.

When it comes to love and intimate relationships, one neurohormone gets more press than anything else. Its name is oxytocin, and it often gets called the "love hormone" (N.B. sometimes it acts like a hormone and sometimes it acts like a neurotransmitter, which is why I call it a neurohormone). Your brain/body releases oxytocin to strengthen relationships. Oxytocin gets released during light caresses, sex, when someone shows they trust you, and sometimes even simply with talking. When released, oxytocin increases feelings of attachment for another person, as well as feelings of trust. It also decreases feelings of stress, fear and pain. Sounds pretty good to me. But unfortunately it's not all rainbow sprinkles and unicorns for everyone. Turns out that if you didn't have a good relationship with your parents then it's harder to harness the positive effects of oxytocin.

One recent study looked at women and their response to hearing a baby cry (I assume the researchers had a recording of a baby crying and didn't actually make a baby cry each time they ran the experiment). These women were also given puffs of oxytocin while being asked to intermittently squeeze a bar or relax their grip (Bakermans-Kranenburg et al 2012). It turns out their response to oxytocin differed by their relationship with their parents. Women who had not been disciplined harshly as children relaxed their grip when they heard the baby cry, presumably as preparation to comfort the baby in a gentle way. However, women who had been disciplined harshly as children did not relax their grip. This demonstrates that your experience with your parents shapes your oxytocin system. If the relationship contained harsh discipline then future oxytocin does not automatically create conditions for warm gentle interactions.

Going to the supermarket when I'm really hungry, and without a shopping list, is a recipe for disaster. It will take an act of iron will to avoid returning without some kind of junk food. Later, after eating, I'll wonder how I could have bought junk food but forgotten healthy staples like rice and pasta.


Why should this be? After all, I know very well what sort of food I should buy; I've been hungry in the supermarket before and bought junk food and regretted it later. The reason is that in the moment, when I'm hungry at the supermarket, I'm out of touch with my future emotional self - something that psychologists have confirmed experimentally.

Empathy failure

Research has shown that we can have considerable difficulty predicting our future requirements because our current emotional states override them. This is called the projection bias and it occurs despite the fact that we have plenty of experience of the problem and its undesirable consequences.

A recent study from University of Virginia researchers supports a finding that's been gaining science-fueled momentum in recent years: the human brain is wired to connect with others so strongly that it experiences what they experience as if it's happening to us.

This would seem the neural basis for empathy - the ability to feel what others feel - but it goes even deeper than that. Results from the latest study suggest that our brains don't differentiate between what happens to someone emotionally close to us and ourselves, and also that we seem neurally incapable of generating anything close to that level of empathy for strangers.

To find this out, researchers had to get a bit medieval. They had participants undergo fMRI brain scans while threatening to give them electrical shocks, or to give shocks to a stranger or a friend. Results showed that regions of the brain responsible for threat response - the anterior insula, putamen and supramarginal gyrus - became active under threat of shock to the self; that much was expected. When researchers threatened to shock a stranger, those same brain regions showed virtually no activity. But when they threatened to shock a friend, the brain regions showed activity nearly identical to that displayed when the participant was threatened.

The advice to "just breathe" when you're stressed may be a cliché of Godzilla-sized proportions, but that doesn't make it untrue. The substance behind the saying is research-tested - and not only to manage stress.

Breathing is an unusual bodily function in that it is both involuntary and voluntary. Other major functions - take digestion and blood flow, for example - occur without conscious influence, and for the most part we couldn't influence them if we tried. They are involuntarily managed in the vast processing system of the unconscious mind.

Breathing is also managed in the unconscious, but at any moment we can grab the controls and consciously change how we breathe. We can make our breathing shallow or deep, fast or slow, or we can choose to stop breathing altogether (until we pass out and the unconscious takes over again).