After conducting the largest online intelligence study on record, a Western University-led research team has concluded that the notion of measuring one's intelligence quotient or IQ by a singular, standardized test is highly misleading.

The findings from the landmark study, which included more than 100,000 participants, were published today in the journal Neuron. The article, "Fractionating human intelligence," was written by Adrian M. Owen and Adam Hampshire from Western's Brain and Mind Institute (London, Canada) and Roger Highfield, Director of External Affairs, Science Museum Group (London, U.K).

Utilizing an online study open to anyone, anywhere in the world, the researchers asked respondents to complete 12 cognitive tests tapping memory, reasoning, attention and planning abilities, as well as a survey about their background and lifestyle habits.

"The uptake was astonishing," says Owen, the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging and senior investigator on the project. "We expected a few hundred responses, but thousands and thousands of people took part, including people of all ages, cultures and creeds from every corner of the world."

The results showed that when a wide range of cognitive abilities are explored, the observed variations in performance can only be explained with at least three distinct components: short-term memory, reasoning and a verbal component.

Universal emotions like anger, sadness and happiness are expressed nearly the same in both music and movement across cultures, according to new research.

The researchers found that when Dartmouth undergraduates and members of a remote Cambodian hill tribe were asked to use sliding bars to adjust traits such as the speed, pitch, or regularity of music, they used the same types of characteristics to express primal emotions. What's more, the same types of patterns were used to express the same emotions in animations of movement in both cultures.

"The kinds of dynamics you find in movement, you find also in music and they're used in the same way to provide the same kind of meaning," said study co-author Thalia Wheatley, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth University.

The findings suggest music's intense power may lie in the fact it is processed by ancient brain circuitry used to read emotion in our movement.

"The study suggests why music is so fundamental and engaging for us," said Jonathan Schooler, a professor of brain and psychological sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. "It takes advantage of some very, very basic and, in some sense, primitive systems that understand how motion relates to emotion."

Las Vegas - Watching excessive amounts of online pornography can adversely affect a person's short-term memory and decision-making ability.

In the first study of its kind, German scientists linked the brain's ability to complete a task, reason, and understand concepts with people's viewing of pornographic images. The 28 heterosexual men in the University of Duisburg-Essen study were tasked with viewing a combination of pornographic and non-pornographic pictures while also trying to keep their order straight.

The men - an average age of 26 - viewed the pictures and were asked to touch a "yes" or "no" key to indicate whether the mixed sexual and non-sexual images had been seen four slides before. The study found a significantly greater amount of wrong answers from the men who viewed more of the pornographic images.

The men who saw slideshows of clean images scored an average of 80 percent correctly, while men who were viewing the pornographic images only scored 67 percent correctly.

Chronic use of alcohol and marijuana during youth is associated with poorer neural structure, function, and metabolism, as well as worsened neurocognitive abilities into later adolescence and adulthood. This may be due to biological and psychosocial transitions occurring during adolescence that impart increased vulnerability to neurotoxic influences. A study of longitudinal changes in fiber tract integrity associated with adolescent alcohol and marijuana use during 1.5 years supports previous findings of reduced white-matter integrity in these youth.

Results will be published in a special online issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

A group of scientists from the University of Granada's Group of Neuropsychology and Clinical Psychoneuroimmunology has discovered a connection between levels of the hormone cortisol in a person's saliva and their ability to make good decisions in high-stress situations, highlighting yet another link between mind and body.

The researchers study, titled "Can decision-making skills affect responses to psychological stress in healthy women?"was recently published in the academic journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Cortisol - known to medical professionals as hydrocortisone or simply 'the stress hormone' - is a steroid hormone that is produced in our adrenal glands in response to stress. Cortisol is released in the last step of a cascade of hormones that begins when the brain's hypothalamus triggers a chain-reaction in response to psychological or social stress. The hormone directly affects a number of body systems and functions, including the regulation of blood sugar levels, the build-up of muscle and bone, the suppression and activation of the immune system, and the metabolism of fats, carbohydrates and proteins.

To determine whether 'psychosocial stress' affects a person's decision-making abilities, the researchers exposed a group of 40 female participants to stressful situations using a hi-tech virtual reality system. The participants were asked to perform the so-called Iowa Gambling Task, a psychological card game that is commonly used to study human decision making.

You can. But it helps to think well of yourself in the first place

The link between mind and body is terrain into which many medical researchers, fearing ridicule, dare not tread. But perhaps more should do so. For centuries, doctors have recognised the placebo effect, in which the illusion of treatment, such as pills without an active ingredient, produces real medical benefits. More recently, respectable research has demonstrated that those who frequently experience positive emotions live longer and healthier lives. They have fewer heart attacks, for example, and fewer colds too.

Why this happens, though, is only slowly becoming understood. What is needed is an experiment that points out specific and measurable ways in which such emotions alter an individual's biology. And a study published in Psychological Science, by Barbara Fredrickson and Bethany Kok at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, does precisely that.

Dr Fredrickson and Dr Kok concentrated their attentions on the vagus nerve. This nerve (illustrated right, in an early anatomical drawing) starts in the brain and runs, via numerous branches, to several thoracic and abdominal organs including the heart. Among its jobs is to send signals telling that organ to slow down during moments of calm and safety.

How effectively the vagus nerve is working can be tracked by monitoring someone's heart rate as he breathes in and out. Healthy vagal function is reflected in a subtle increase in heart rate while breathing in and a subtle decrease while breathing out. The difference yields an index of vagal tone, and the value of this index is known to be connected with health. Low values are, for example, linked to inflammation and heart attacks.

What particularly interested Dr Fredrickson and Dr Kok was recent work that showed something else about the vagal-tone index: people with high tone are better than those with low at stopping bad feelings getting overblown. They also show more positive emotions in general. This may provide the missing link between emotional well-being and physical health. In particular, the two researchers found, during a preliminary study they carried out in 2010, that the vagal-tone values of those who experience positive emotions over a period of time go up. This left them wondering whether positive emotions and vagal tone drive one another in a virtuous spiral. They therefore conducted an experiment on 65 of the university's staff, to try to find out.

Being a good partner may make you a better parent, according to a new study. The same set of skills that we tap to be caring toward our partners is what we use to nurture our children, researchers found.

The study sought to examine how caregiving plays out in families - "how one relationship affects another relationship," says Abigail Millings of the University of Bristol, lead author of the work published online this week in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. "We wanted to see how romantic relationships between parents might be associated with what kind of parents they are."

Previous research had looked at similar caregiving processes within romantic relationships or between parents and children, but rarely for both groups. "Our work is the first to look at romantic caregiving and parenting styles at the same time," Millings says.

Looking at 125 couples with children aged 7 to 8 years, the study, carried out at the University of East Anglia, examined a few factors: the way the couples are attached toward each other; the parenting styles they use with their children; and their "caregiving responsiveness." Caregiving responsiveness is the "capacity to be 'tuned in' to what the other person needs," Millings says. "In romantic relationships and in parenting, this might mean noticing when the other person has had a bad day, knowing how to cheer them up, and whether they even want cheering up." And, she says, it's not "just about picking you up when you're down, it's also about being able to respond appropriately to the good stuff in life."

It is true, all we need is love. But do we really know what love is? Love is a word that is sung about in songs, written in poems, talked about a lot and it is something many people long for one way or the other, mostly in the form of a partner. We hear it a lot these days: "Be heart-centered" and "Be love", "Love is the answer, because love always wins!", "Send Love and Light!" and so on. People use it casually in conversations in their every day lives. It is seen as the solution to all the world problems. All you need is Love!

If that's so easy, how come nothing has changed fundamentally on planet earth despite the obvious technological progress? We still see genocide, oppression and wars happening. Hundreds of thousands of children and civilians have died in the Middle East and around the world because of the war machine under the control of psychopathic leaders who couldn't care less about anyone who holds up a peace sign with a proclamation of love as the force for change. Looking at it more closely we can see that "Love" is one of the most abused and misunderstood words.

Stories of kindly grandmothers giving all their money away to nefarious confidence tricksters are unfortunately all too common. Now, researchers have suggested one reason why older people often seem to fall victim to financial fraud¹ - our ability to judge the trustworthiness of people's faces diminishes with age, finds a US study².

Shelley Taylor, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues examined how people in two age groups perceived photos of faces that had been pre-rated for trustworthiness and approachability. The faces conveyed known cues of trustworthiness⁴, such as a direct gaze and a sincere smile which turns fully upwards towards the eyes.

Although both age groups perceived faces rated as 'trustworthy' or 'neutral' as equally trustworthy and approachable, the older adults (aged 55 - 84, mean age 69) rated 'untrustworthy' faces as significantly more trustworthy and approachable than did the younger adults (aged 20 - 42, mean age 23).

"They missed facial cues that are pretty easily distinguished," says Taylor, adding that "most" of the older adults showed the effect. The results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences².

If you just can't ever get your hair to look right, take heart: At least you're less likely to be a psychopath.

A study led by Nicholas Holtzman and Michael Strube at Washington University in St. Louis found that people with personality traits known as the "Dark Triad" -- narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy -- were better than others at using clothing, makeup and hairstyles to make themselves look attractive, Scientific American reported Tuesday.

Psychopathy is characterized by varying blends of certain personality traits, which may include egocentricity, manipulativeness, superficial charm, high stress tolerance, lack of fear, lack of empathy and lack of guilt or remorse.