The brain processes visual input to the level of understanding its meaning even if we never consciously perceive that input, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The research, led by Jay Sanguinetti of the University of Arizona, challenges currently accepted models about how the brain processes visual information.

Sanguinetti, a doctoral candidate in the UA's department of psychology in the College of Science, showed study participants a series of black silhouettes, some of which contained recognizable, real-world objects hidden in the white spaces on the outsides.

Working with John Allen, Distinguished Professor of psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience at the University of Arizona, Sanguinetti monitored subjects' brainwaves with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, while they viewed the objects.

Sociable people have bigger brains, according to research produced by the University of Oxford.

People who possess lots of friends have six parts of the brain which are larger and better connected than those who are less sociable or who have smaller friendship groups, the study found.

Presenting her research on Tuesday, lead researcher MaryAnn Noonan told the Society for Neuroscience annual conference: "Human beings are naturally social creatures.

"Yet we know surprisingly little about how the brain manages our behavior within our increasingly complex social lives - or which parts of the brain falter when such behavior breaks down in conditions such as autism and schizophrenia."

After examining a series of brain scans, Dr Noonan and her team found the more friends a person has, the larger these regions become.

The study asked 18 men and women how many friends they had made contact with in the last month to determine the size of the their social network. The majority of participants had contacted around 20 people, although some had been in touch with more than 40.

Training before age 7 has bigger impact on brain anatomy; improvisation can rewire brain.

New findings show that extensive musical training affects the structure and function of different brain regions, how those regions communicate during the creation of music, and how the brain interprets and integrates sensory information. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2013, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.

These insights suggest potential new roles for musical training including fostering plasticity in the brain, an alternative tool in education, and treating a range of learning disabilities.

Ten of the most influential social psychology studies.

"I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?" - Philip Zimbardo

Like eminent social psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo (author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil), I'm also obsessed with why we do dumb or irrational things. The answer quite often is because of other people - something social psychologists have comprehensively shown.

Over the past few months I've been describing 10 of the most influential social psychology studies. Each one tells a unique, insightful story relevant to all our lives, every day.

1. The Halo Effect: When Your Own Mind is a MysteryThe 'halo effect' is a classic finding in social psychology. It is the idea that global evaluations about a person (e.g. she is likeable) bleed over into judgements about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent). Hollywood stars demonstrate the halo effect perfectly. Because they are often attractive and likeable we naturally assume they are also intelligent, friendly, display good judgement and so on.

» Read on about the halo effect -»

Research presented at SfN Neuroscience 2013.

As any indignant teacher would scold, students must be awake to learn. But what science is showing with increasing sophistication is how the brain uses sleep for learning as well. At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego Nov. 10, 2013, Brown University researchers will discuss new research describing the neural mechanism by which the sleeping brain locks in learning of a visual task.

The mounting evidence is that during sleep the brain employs neural oscillations - brainwaves - of particular frequencies to consolidate learning in specific brain regions. In August, Brown scientists reported in the Journal of Neuroscience that two specific frequencies, fast-sigma and delta, that operated in the supplementary motor area of the brain were directly associated with learning a finger-tapping task akin to typing or playing the piano.

The new results show something similar with a visual task in which 15 volunteers were trained to spot a hidden texture amid an obscuring pattern of lines. It's a bit like an abstracted game of "Where's Waldo" but such training is not merely an academic exercise, said Takeo Watanabe, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown.

One of the many reasons parenting is an impossible job is that everyone is giving you advice, and much of it is rubbish.

Frankly, it's amazing we've all made it this far.

So, bucking the trend of random anecdote and superstition, here are ten recent psychology studies that every parent should know.

1. Parents are happier than non-parents

In recent years some studies have suggested that the pleasures of having children are outweighed by the pains.

"Ha!" said parents to themselves, secretly, "I knew it!"

Not so fast though: new research has found that, on average, parents feel better than non-parents each day and derive more pleasure from caring for their children than from other activities (Nelson et al.,. 2013).

Fathers, in particular, derive high levels of positive emotions and happiness from their children.

A woman goes into labor, and gives birth. The newborn is swaddled and placed to sleep in a nearby bassinet, or taken to the hospital nursery so that the mother can rest. Despite this common practice, new research published in Biological Psychiatry provides new evidence that separating infants from their mothers is stressful to the baby.

It is standard practice in a hospital setting, particularly among Western cultures, to separate mothers and their newborns. Separation is also common for babies under medical distress or premature babies, who may be placed in an incubator. In addition, the American Academy of Pediatrics specifically recommends against co-sleeping with an infant, due to its association with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS.

Humans are the only mammals who practice such maternal-neonate separation, but its physiological impact on the baby has been unknown until now. Researchers measured heart rate variability in 2-day-old sleeping babies for one hour each during skin-to-skin contact with mother and alone in a cot next to mother's bed. Neonatal autonomic activity was 176% higher and quiet sleep 86% lower during maternal separation compared to skin-to-skin contact.

Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented on the study's findings: "This paper highlights the profound impact of maternal separation on the infant. We knew that this was stressful, but the current study suggests that this is major physiologic stressor for the infant."

This research addresses a strange contradiction: In animal research, separation from mother is a common way of creating stress in order to study its damaging effects on the developing newborn brain. At the same time, separation of human newborns is common practice, particularly when specialized medical care is required (e.g. incubator care). "Skin-to-skin contact with mother removes this contradiction, and our results are a first step towards understanding exactly why babies do better when nursed in skin-to-skin contact with mother, compared to incubator care," explained study author Dr. Barak Morgan.

More research is necessary to further understand the newborn response to separation, including whether it is sustained response and whether it has any long-term neurodevelopmental effects.

In intimate relationships, danger starts with domination - a desperate grab for control by a person who is out of control.

This is how middle-school nurse Kimberly Lindsey ended up dead two weeks ago, shot by her ex-husband, a doctor who cut off her head and fingers.

This is how police say Watisha Wallace died three weeks ago, shot multiple times by a husband who had threatened to blow her face off.

This is how Dominique Flood lost her life at 21 from a single shot to the neck four weeks ago. The suspect: Her 18-year-old boyfriend.

Domestic violence is the No. 1 cause of injury to women in America.

It happens to men, too, of course. But 75 to 80 percent of victims are women - and it's a problem so big that State Attorney Dave Aronberg felt compelled to issue a warning at a news conference last Sunday, after Lindsey's ex-husband, Albert Lambert, was found dead, hours before he was to be charged with her gruesome murder.

"The most dangerous time is at the end of a relationship," Aronberg said.

When a person is deemed trustworthy, we perceive that person's face to be more similar to our own, according to a new study published in Psychological Science.

A team of scientists from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway University, found that feelings of similarity towards others extend beyond social closeness and into physical characteristics, using trust as the basis in this experiment.

Researchers showed volunteers images in which varying percentages of the volunteer's face were morphed with that of one of two other people, and asked them to decide whether each photo contained more of their face or more of the others.

The volunteers then took part in bargaining games with both of the other people - one in which trust was reciprocated, and in the other in which it was betrayed. After the game, the volunteers carried out the photo morph task again and it was found that participants judged the trustworthy player to be more physically similar to them than the untrustworthy one.

• Causes include degradation, humiliation, hurtful criticism and betrayal

• In some cases people can feel unclean for months after the trauma

• Stanley Rachman's therapy aims to untangle the association between fear and the source of the fear

'Out, damned spot! out, I say!', cried Lady Macbeth after she had murdered King Duncan.

400-years later and Lady Macbeths' torment are still echoed by huge numbers of people who feel dirty even when they are physically clean.

Often this is a result of physical and emotional trauma, according to Stanley Rachman, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.