Psychological research on how a simple (nonsexual) touch can increase compliance, helping behaviour, attraction, and signal power.

To get around in the world, we mainly rely on our eyes and ears. Touch is a sense that's often forgotten.

But touch is also vital in the way we understand and experience the world. Even the lightest touch on the upper arm can influence the way we think. To prove it, here are 10 psychological effects which show just how powerful nonsexual touch can be.

1. Touch for money

A well-timed touch can encourage other people to return a lost item. In one experiment, users of a phone booth who were touched were more likely to return a lost dime to an experimenter (Kleinke, 1977). The action was no more than a light touch on the arm.

People will do more than that though; people will give a bigger tip to a waitress who has touched them (Crusco & Wetzel, 1984).

(Stop giggling at the back there!)

Are bearded men good with babies? Are beards attractive to women? In a fight, do beards help or hinder?

If you're having trouble telling men from women, here's a clue. Men are the ones with hair sprouting from their faces (alright more hair sprouting from their faces).

Some men attempt to cover up the effect of all those androgens by shaving off their beards. Others prefer to send out manly signals in all directions (well, either that or they can't be bothered to shave).

Who is right? What signal does the beard really send? Here are four very important beard-related facts that every man, woman and child should know.

Researchers who tracked 1,500 people over 80 years have come to some surprising conclusions and the factors linked to longevity. Much of what we've been taught about how to live a long life may be mistaken.

In 1921, just over 1,500 Californian children were selected to participate in a study led by a Stanford University psychologist, Dr. Lewis Terman. An enormous amount of data on the children was collected and archived. More remarkably, the 1,500 individuals were tracked over decades, with every detail about their lives, and their deaths, duteously noted by Dr. Terman's team. Even after Dr. Terman's own death in 1956, the Terman participants continued to be tracked, with the study lasting over 80 years. Dr. Terman's original intention was to explore the nature of intelligence, but modern day researchers realized that this treasure trove of data could provide unusual insight into the factors associated with longevity.

When contemporary researchers, Dr. Howard S. Friedman and Dr. Leslie R. Martin, completed their analysis and number crunching, they came to some extraordinary conclusions. Their findings, outlined in a 2011 book (The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight Decade Study), challenge many of our common assumptions about aging.

According to Longevity Project authors, much of what we've been taught about longevity is wrong. Here are seven popular beliefs about longevity that may in fact be misconceptions:

Pathology Education teaches that pathological partners come in all levels of social and economic success.

Survivors say, "He's a doctor" to which I respond "SO?" So what. Doctors, attorneys, clergy, law enforcement---it's not the job that's pathological--- it's the character and personality disorders underneath.

Pathologicals flock to all types of careers. Those with high levels of narcissism and psychopathy flock to areas where they are experts, heroes, or are able to climb high up the career ladder. These disorders 'want' adoration. You don't get a lot of that on the back end of garbage truck as a worker.

Paul Babiak and Robert Hare wrote about this in their book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. The book examines the rise of white collar psychopathy in our country and in the work place. Some forms of pathology hide very well within their careers and success. A subconscious belief system is "If they are successful, they must be ok."

A degree from Yale means he's smart. It doesn't mean he's safe. A doctor that saves 'others lives' doesn't mean he won't take yours. Clergy who will pray for others souls doesn't mean he isn't soul-deadening in a personal relationship.

We quickly sense how others view us and play up to these expectations.

A good exercise for learning about yourself is to think about how other people might view you in different ways. Consider how your family, your work colleagues or your partner think of you.

Now here's an interesting question: to what extent do you play up to these expectations about how they view you?

This idea that other people's expectations about us directly affect how we behave was examined in a classic social psychology study carried out by Dr Mark Snyder from the University of Minnesota and colleagues (Snyder et al., 1977). They had a hunch that people automatically sense how others view them and immediately start exhibiting the expected behaviours.

Paper by Dr. Colin A. Ross explains how to measure the eyes electromagnetic energy

Noted psychiatrist and author Colin A. Ross, M.D., has published experimental data that supports his scientific hypothesis that the eyes emit energy that can be captured and measured. Dr. Ross paper, 'The Electrophysiological Basis of Evil Eye Belief', is published in the current issue of Anthropology of Consciousness, a journal of the American Anthropological Association. The full paper is available here.

Although nearly everyone has experienced the sense of being stared at only to find that a person or animal really was looking, Western science has long rejected that the human eye can emit any form of energy. Dr. Ross says his findings move human ocular extramission, which he also refers to as an eyebeam, from the realm of superstition to science.

Malcolm Gladwell has good news for underdogs: There probably is a way to win. But it's definitely not the easy way.

"Most people who are running a weak team would rather do the easy thing and lose than do the hard thing and win," Gladwell said Wednesday at Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference in Phoenix.

The author gave a preview of the themes from his upcoming book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants - in which he finds that advantages in life aren't always ... advantageous.

Case in point: A successful tech executive named Vivek who, in coaching his 12-year-old daughter's basketball team, had several things going against him. First, he was coaching a team of girls who were far from top athletes. And more importantly, he knew nothing about basketball, having grown up in Mumbai.

But Vivek's outsider status made him see basketball in a way most people didn't.

"He decided the way Americans play basketball is completely mindless," Gladwell said.

Yes, mom may really be pushing you into marching band because she always wanted to be drum major. New research finds that, consistent with what kids may believe, parents really do hope to live out unfulfilled ambitions through their children.

Parents are more likely to hope that their child fulfills their own broken dreams when they see their kid as part of themselves, according to the study, which appears online today (June 19) in the journal PLOS ONE.

"The child's achievements may come to function as a surrogate for parents' own unfulfilled ambitions," said study researcher Eddie Brummelman, a doctoral psychology student at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "In this way, a sense of oneness with their children may compel parents to transfer their unfulfilled ambitions on to them.

People in dim light are better at solving creative insight problems
Those in normal light are no more creative than those in bright light
And we can become more creative just by thinking about being in dim light

Dimming the lights can increase your creativity levels, new research reveals.

German researchers found that people sitting in dim light are significantly better able to solve creative insight problems than those working under normal or bright lights.

However, people working under normal lights are no more creative than those in very bright light.

How much of this world does your mind actually see? Potentially more than you think, according to series of studies on a blind man whose brain can still record and respond to the facial expressions from others without him being aware of it. These observations, published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest the existence of visual brain pathways that register hostile or unhappy visages without our conscious knowledge.

The man in question, who the study's authors refer to as Patient TN, suffered two strokes in 2003 that almost completely eradicated his primary visual cortex. This brain region, located at the back of the skull, is responsible for processing visual input from the eyes and shipping it to the rest of the brain. Thus, Patient TN's blindness is caused by a faulty brain circuitry rather than eye damage. Indeed, one could assume that his eyes are still transmitting visual information to his brain, but "nobody is home" to collect the message.

Without his primary visual cortex, you might have predicted that Patient TN should be utterly blind, but follow-up experiments at the University of Geneva suggested the contrary.

In 2005, neuropsychologist Dr. Alan Pegna and colleagues placed a series of pictures with facial expressions in front of Patient TN's eyes and asked him to guess the emotions being portrayed in the photos.

Amazingly Patient TN could accurately distinguish between happy and angry faces 60 percent of the time, which is a success rate that could not be attributed to mere chance.