Although newlyweds may not be completely aware of it, they may know whether their march down the aisle will result in wedded bliss or an unhappy marriage, according to new study led by a Florida State University researcher.

Associate Professor of Psychology James K. McNulty and his colleagues studied 135 heterosexual couples who had been married for less than six months and then followed up with them every six months over a four-year period. They found that the feelings the study participants verbalized about their marriages were unrelated to changes in their marital happiness over time. Instead, it was the gut-level negative evaluations of their partners that they unknowingly revealed during a baseline experiment that predicted future happiness.

"Although they may be largely unwilling or unable to verbalize them, people's automatic evaluations of their partners predict one of the most important outcomes of their lives - the trajectory of their marital satisfaction," the researchers wrote in a paper published in the Nov. 29 issue of the journal Science.

The paper, "Though They May Be Unaware, Newlyweds Implicitly Know Whether Their Marriages Will Be Satisfying," outlined two important findings. First, people's conscious attitudes, or how they said they felt, did not always reflect their gut-level or automatic feelings about their marriage. Second, it was the gut-level feelings, not their conscious ones, that actually predicted how happy they remained over time.

Using a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Freiburg University has discovered how brain cells that encode spatial information form "geotags" for specific memories and are activated immediately before those memories are recalled.

Their work shows how spatial information is incorporated into memories and why remembering an experience can quickly bring to mind other events that happened in the same place.

"These findings provide the first direct neural evidence for the idea that the human memory system tags memories with information about where and when they were formed and that the act of recall involves the reinstatement of these tags," said Michael Kahana, professor of psychology in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences.

The study was led by Kahana and professor Andreas Schulze-Bonhage of Freiberg. Jonathan F. Miller, Alec Solway, Max Merkow and Sean M. Polyn, all members of Kahana's lab, and Markus Neufang, Armin Brandt, Michael Trippel, Irina Mader and Stefan Hefft, all members of Schulze-Bonhage's lab, contributed to the study. They also collaborated with Drexel University's Joshua Jacobs.

Their study was published in the journal Science.

New research studying the pressures of sexting on adolescents has found that friends and romantic partners are the main source of social pressure, outweighing adolescents' own attitudes. This research examines the principal drivers of sexting, and suggests areas for educators to focus upon in order to highlight the potential risks involved in sexting.

The paper 'Under pressure to sext? Applying the theory of planned behavior to adolescent sexting', by Michel Walrave, Wannes Heirman & Lara Hallam, published in Behavior & Information Technology, studied the beliefs, social pressures, and predictors of sexting in adolescents.

Sexting is defined as the sharing of sexually explicit text messages or naked/semi-naked self-pictures using mobile phones. 26% of the teens surveyed had engaged in sexting in the two months preceding the survey.

Adolescents revealed that they sext for attention, to lower the chances of catching STDs, and to find a romantic partner. The concepts of receiving a bad reputation, or of being blackmailed, did not appear to influence their motivations. The authors note that "Remarkably, only the behavioral beliefs that expected positive outcomes of sexting were significant in predicting adolescents' willingness to engage in it."

Friends and romantic partners were found to be the only significant social pressures that affect an individual's motivation to sext: "The more positive the perceived social pressure that originates from these two categories of referents -- who mostly belong to the peer group -- the more adolescents will be inclined to engage in sexting." Negative pressures from parents and teachers did not affect motivations.

As shoppers across the nation prepare to pounce on Black Friday sales, researchers at UC Berkeley are looking at what happens to commerce when there's no set price tag. In an exhaustive study of consumer behavior, they found that shoppers spend more money when engaged in a chain of goodwill known as "Pay-it-forward" than when they can name their own price.

"It's assumed that consumers are selfish and always looking for the best deal, but when we gave people the option to pay for someone else, they always paid more than what they paid for themselves," said the study's lead author, Minah Jung, a doctoral student at the Haas School of Business and a Gratitude Dissertation Fellow at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center.

The results shed new light on the psychological and social forces - such as fairness, obligation, and reciprocity - that guide consumer decisions beyond getting the best deal. For example, the study found that people typically overestimate the financial generosity of others, until they learn what others have actually paid.

In the new research on 59 participants, those who were confirmed night owls (preferring late to bed and late to rise) had lower integrity of the white matter in various areas of the brain (Rosenberg et al., 2014).

Lower integrity in these areas has been linked to depression and cognitive instability.

This research doesn't tell us what the relationship is, but the authors guess that it may be related to 'social jet-lag'.

Social jet-lag comes about because night owls are forced to live - as most of us are - like early risers. Work, school and other institutions mostly require early rising, which, for night owls, causes problems.

As night owls find it difficult to get to sleep early, they tend to carry large amounts of sleep debt. In other words, they're exhausted all the time.

As a result, they tend to be larger consumers of caffeine and other stimulants, in order to counteract their sleep debt.

The following is the text of the address I made to the Seek, Speak and Spread Truth Conference in London yesterday, 23 November. Its main thrust is about the need for citizens to become politically engaged to make democracy work (before it's as dead as the two-state solution for Israel-Palestine) in order for our children and grandchildren to have the real prospect of a future worth having.

I want to start with a promise. I won't be disturbed and you won't be disturbed by my mobile 'phone because I don't have one. I have thrown mine away because I am trying to stay human.

That said I'll give you my one-sentence overview of the state of affairs on our small, fragile, endangered planet. Modern life is a de-humanizing process which has reduced us, most of us, to units of consumption, digits in corporate computers, figures on accountants' balance sheets.

What this suggests to me is that the prime task for each and every one of us is to claim back our humanity.

I'll be offering some thoughts on how we can do this, but first of all we have to address what I consider to be THE most important of all questions - the question of human nature.

What, really, is the quality of it?

One afternoon in October 2005, neuroscientist James Fallon was looking at brain scans of serial killers. As part of a research project at UC Irvine, he was sifting through thousands of PET scans to find anatomical patterns in the brain that correlated with psychopathic tendencies in the real world.

"I was looking at many scans, scans of murderers mixed in with schizophrenics, depressives and other, normal brains," he says. "Out of serendipity, I was also doing a study on Alzheimer's and as part of that, had brain scans from me and everyone in my family right on my desk."

"I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological," he says, noting that it showed low activity in certain areas of the frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality and self-control. Knowing that it belonged to a member of his family, Fallon checked his lab's PET machine for an error (it was working perfectly fine) and then decided he simply had to break the blinding that prevented him from knowing whose brain was pictured.

Television is a powerful agent of development for children, particularly those in preschool. But when could too much TV be detrimental to a young child's mind? A recent paper published in the Journal of Communication found that preschoolers who have a TV in their bedroom and are exposed to more background TV have a weaker understanding of other people's beliefs and desires.

Amy Nathanson, Molly Sharp, Fashina Aladé, Eric Rasmussen, and Katheryn Christy, all of The Ohio State University, interviewed and tested 107 children and their parents to determine the relationship between preschoolers' television exposure and their understanding of mental states, such as beliefs, intentions, and feelings, known as theory of mind. Parents were asked to report how many hours of TV their children were exposed to, including background TV. The children were then given tasks based on theory of mind. These tasks assessed whether the children could acknowledge that others can have different beliefs and desires, that beliefs can be wrong, and that behaviors stem from beliefs.

Success, in the Western world, means "gaining time," according to French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. The faster we do things - work, eat, sleep, read - the more time we "gain."

But this focus on time efficiency could be making the small things in life harder to enjoy.

A trio of Canadian researchers have discovered that simply being exposed to symbols of Western society's culture of convenience can undermine people's ability to find pleasure in everyday joys.

"It is ironic that technologies designed to improve well-being by minimizing time spent on mundane chores may ultimately undermine the surplus leisure time they permit. By instigating a sense of impatience, these technologies may prevent people from savoring the enjoyable moments life offers serendipitously," doctoral student Julian House and professors Sanford E. DeVoe and Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto wrote in the study.

The concept of emotional intelligence (EQ) has been recognized in the field of psychology, most especially in the school of thought established by the humanists. EQ is understood as the ability to identify, use, understand and manage emotions. When a person possesses an elevated or high EQ, they are able to use their abilities positively as a means to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse potential conflicts with others.

As stated above, EQ has been on the psychological scene for some time. The earliest known allusion to the concept dates back to the 1930s when Edward Thorndike offered a description of a concept he called 'social intelligence.' To Thorndike, this was simply the ability to get along with other people.

In the 1950s, psychologist Abraham Maslow, famous for his theory, 'The Maslow Hierarchy of Needs,' built upon the concept of social intelligence when he offered instruction on how people could successfully build emotional strength.

It wasn't until 1985 the term 'emotional intelligence' was actually introduced. The first known appearance of this term was presented in a doctoral dissertation entitled "A study of emotion: developing emotional intelligence; self-integration; relating to fear, pain and desire (theory, structure of reality, problem-solving, contraction/expansion, tuning in/coming out/letting go), written by then-PhD candidate Wayne Payne.