Night owls, people who stay up late at night, compared to early birds, people who wake up early in the morning, tend to be unmarried risk-takers.

Study author Dario Maestripieri, a professor in comparative human development at the University of Chicago, said women who are night owls share the same high propensity for risk-taking as men.

"Night owls, both males and females, are more likely to be single or in short-term romantic relationships versus long-term relationships, when compared to early birds," Maestripieri said in a statement. "In addition, male night owls reported twice as many sexual partners than male early birds."

The researchers used data from earlier research of more than 500 graduate students at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, which assessed financial risk aversion among male and female students and found men more willing to take financial risks than women.

However, men with high levels of the male hormone were more similar to men in financial risk-taking.

• Just three years of poor sleep could cause a decline in mental faculties
• Poor sleep is linked to a 50% increase in risk of a decline in faculties
• Sleep quality is more important than quantity in determining brain ageing

Sleeping badly could age you as much as five years, a study has revealed. Just three or four years of broken sleep patterns are linked to a loss of memory and concentration, American researchers found.

They say that poor quality sleep is increases the risk of of having impaired mental faculties by up to 50 per cent - equivalent to a five year increase in age.

Study leader Dr Terri Blackwell, of the California Pacific Medical Centre Research Institute, in San Francisco, said: 'It was the quality of sleep that predicted future cognitive decline in this study, not the quantity.

'With the rate of cognitive impairment increasing and the high prevalence of sleep problems in the elderly, it is important to determine prospective associations with sleep and cognitive decline.'

The study, published in the journal Sleep, involved 2,820 men with an average age of 76 years.

According to new research, too much homework is associated with academic stress, a lack of balance in children's lives and even physical health problems.

The new study into 4,317 students at 10 high-performing US high schools questions whether the average of 3 hours homework per night is really justified (Galloway et al., 2013).

The researchers asked students about the work they were doing and discovered that:

"Some of the students described the amount of homework each night as "overwhelming," "unmanageable," or "more than [they] could handle," with one describing the load as "an endless barrage of work.""

One student wrote:

"There's never a time to rest. There's always something more you should be doing. If I go to bed before 1:30 I feel like I'm slacking off, or just screwing myself over for an even later night later in the week... There's never a break. Never."

The poet Tennyson once said that humility is, "the highest virtue, the mother of them all." Yet society celebrates over-confidence, entitlement and a perpetual focus on the self. People are increasingly competitive, attention-seeking, narcissistic, obsessed with their appearance and entitled.

A new study, though, underlines eight ways in which being humble can help us improve our lives (Kesebir, 2014). The author of the study, psychologist Pelin Kesebir, explains that:

"Humility involves a willingness to accept the self's limits and its place in the grand scheme of things, accompanied by low levels of self-preoccupation." (Kesebir, 2014).

Humility - or 'a quiet ego' as she calls it - can be surprisingly powerful in a variety of different ways.

Researchers in the United States have discovered how we can convey a much wider range of emotions through facial expressions than previously thought

The six basic emotions - happy, sad, fearful, angry, surprised and disgusted - do not begin to cover the range of feelings we convey with our facial expressions, a study has found.

Using new computer software to observe and record people's faces, scientists mapped no fewer than 21 emotional states, including apparently contradictory examples such as "happily disgusted" and "sadly angry".

The research more than triples the number of known emotional facial expressions and could help medical specialists improve the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

A growing number of scientists are calling for a shift in scientific methods to acknowledge phenomena commonly experienced but difficult to study according to conventional methods.

Here's a look at some insights from scientists who explore paranormal phenomena or matters related to human consciousness. They discuss how science can move forward.

Dr. Gary Schwartz

Dr. Gary Schwartz received his doctorate from Harvard, taught psychiatry and psychology at Yale, and is now a professor at the University of Arizona. He has studied individuals who say they are able to predict the future.

"If you're going to test someone who claims to do extraordinary things, it's essential that you design the experiment to be as close as possible to what they actually do," said Dr. Schwartz on his website." And if you don't design an experiment around their actual skills, you can end up asking people to do things that they actually can't do or that don't really represent what they do."

Schwartz tailors the tests specifically to the individual abilities instead of imposing a cookie-cutter test of precognition. Not everyone who can predict the future can predict it in the same way, he says. He has found people he considers "the real deal."

Dr. Bernard Beitman

Dr. Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, proposes the establishment of a transdisciplinary study called "Coincidence Studies."

He wrote in a 2011 paper: "One of the biggest challenges in the development of the new discipline of Coincidence Studies is providing a systematic place in scientific research for subjectivity and for human consciousness. Meaningful coincidences depend upon the mind of the observer. The question of how to develop methods and an accompanying technical language that includes and respects the subjective element built into the fabric of coincidence needs to be answered."

New study finds that the conscious mind may hamper our abilities to detect lying.

It's remarkably difficult to tell when other people are lying.

That's not just my opinion, that's the result of many studies on lying conducted over the years.
As, Leanne ten Brinke, the author of a new study investigating lie detection, says:

"Our research was prompted by the puzzling but consistent finding that humans are very poor lie detectors, performing at only about 54% accuracy in traditional lie detection tasks."

Given that 50% is pure chance, this isn't much of an improvement.

What is the shelf life of a system that rewards confidence-gaming sociopaths rather than competence?

Let's connect the dots of natural selection and the pathology of power.

In his 2012 book The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, author Kevin Dutton described how the attributes of sociopathology are in a sense value-neutral: the sociopathological attributes that characterize a dangerous criminal may also characterize a cool, high-performing neurosurgeon.

As Dutton explains in his essay What Psychopaths Teach Us about How to Succeed (Scientific American):

Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless and focused. Yet, contrary to popular belief, they are not necessarily violent. Far from its being an open-and-shut case--you're either a psychopath or you're not--there are, instead, inner and outer zones of the disorder: a bit like the fare zones on a subway map. There is a spectrum of psychopathy along which each of us has our place, with only a small minority of A-listers resident in the "inner city."

While there is obviously a place for high-functioning sociopaths in professions which reward those characteristics, what about sociopaths who substitute deviousness and deception for competence? For some context, let's turn to the Pathology Of Power by Norman Cousins, published in 1988.

Money and parenting don't mix. That's according to new research that suggests that merely thinking about money diminishes the meaning people derive from parenting. The study is one among a growing number that identifies when, why, and how parenthood is associated with happiness or misery.

"The relationship between parenthood and well-being is not one and the same for all parents," says Kostadin Kushlev of the University of British Columbia. While this may seems like an obvious claim, social scientists until now have yet to identify the psychological and demographic factors that influence parental happiness.

New research being presented today at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference in Austin offers not only insight into the link between money and parental well-being but also a new model for understanding a variety of factors that affect whether parents are happier or less happy than their childless counterparts.

Money creates conflicting goals

Fascinated by research suggesting that parenting is linked to lower well-being, Kushlev and his adviser Elizabeth Dunn sought to determine which aspects of life might influence how much pleasure and pain people got out of being parents. They specifically looked at the influence of wealth on meaning in parenthood.

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."