Children as young as 3 apparently can tell the difference between whining and when someone has good reason to be upset, and they will respond with sympathy usually only when it is truly deserved, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

"The study provides the first evidence that 3-year-olds can evaluate just how reasonable another person's distressed reaction is to a particular incident or situation, and this influences whether they are concerned enough to try to do something to help," said the study's lead author, Robert Hepach, MRes, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The study was published online in the APA journal Developmental Psychology.

The experiment involved 48 children, split evenly between girls and boys, from 36 to 39 months old. Researchers recorded reactions of each child as he or she witnessed an adult acting upset in one of three contexts: when the distress was justified, when it was unjustified and when the cause of the distress was unknown, the study said.

For the experiment, two adults met with each child and engaged in various situations in which one of the adults would display distress by frowning, whimpering or pouting. Their distress was in response to specific incidents of apparent physical harm, material loss or unfairness. In each case, the child witnessed the adult either experiencing something that should cause distress or reacting to something that occurred in a similar context but was much less serious. Children who witnessed the adult being upset due to a real harm or injustice showed concern for him, intervened on his behalf and checked on him when he later expressed distress out of their view.

Choosing to ignore advertising may lend it greater power, reveals a new book which explores how we process advertising - at both a subconscious and semi-conscious level.

Dr Robert Heath, a pioneer in the field of brand communications from the University of Bath's School of Management, explains the hidden power of advertising using the latest research in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

His book, entitled Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising exposes how much advertising affects our everyday decisions and how little we realise it is happening.

Dr Heath explains why the most successful advertising campaigns are not those we love or hate or those with messages that are interesting or new, but campaigns that are able to effortlessly slip under our radar and influence our behaviour without us knowing.

Dr Heath said: "It may seem counter-intuitive, but the best way to avoid advertising affecting us this way is to embrace it. The more attention you give it, the more you can counter-argue what you see and hear, and the less it will affect you."

"It may be tedious, it may be annoying, and it may make your life a bit uncomfortable. But at least you'll know you haven't been subconsciously seduced."

Many elderly people spend their last years alone. Spouses pass and children scatter. But being lonely is much more than a silent house and a lack of companionship. Over time, loneliness not only takes a toll on the psyche but can have a serious physical impact as well.

Feeling lonely has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, depression and even premature death. Developing effective treatments to reduce loneliness in older adults is essential, but previous treatment efforts have had limited success.

What to do? Researchers at UCLA now report that a simple meditation program lasting just eight weeks reduced loneliness in older adults. Further, knowing that loneliness is associated with an increase in the activity of inflammation-related genes that can promote a variety of diseases, the researchers examined gene expression and found that this same form of meditation significantly reduced expression of inflammatory genes.

In the current online edition of the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, senior study author Steve Cole, a UCLA professor of medicine and psychiatry and a member of the Norman Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA, and colleagues report that the two-month program of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), which teaches the mind to simply be attentive to the present and not dwell in the past or project into the future, successfully reduced the feelings of loneliness.

A previously unrecognized system that drains waste from the brain at a rapid clip has been discovered by neuroscientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center. The findings were published online August 15 in Science Translational Medicine.

The highly organized system acts like a series of pipes that piggyback on the brain's blood vessels, sort of a shadow plumbing system that seems to serve much the same function in the brain as the lymph system does in the rest of the body - to drain away waste products.

"Waste clearance is of central importance to every organ, and there have been long-standing questions about how the brain gets rid of its waste," said Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., senior author of the paper and co-director of the University's Center for Translational Neuromedicine. "This work shows that the brain is cleansing itself in a more organized way and on a much larger scale than has been realized previously.

"We're hopeful that these findings have implications for many conditions that involve the brain, such as traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, and Parkinson's disease," she added.

Nedergaard's team has dubbed the new system "the glymphatic system," since it acts much like the lymphatic system but is managed by brain cells known as glial cells. The team made the findings in mice, whose brains are remarkably similar to the human brain.

Scientists have known that cerebrospinal fluid or CSF plays an important role cleansing brain tissue, carrying away waste products and carrying nutrients to brain tissue through a process known as diffusion. The newly discovered system circulates CSF to every corner of the brain much more efficiently, through what scientists call bulk flow or convection.

"It's as if the brain has two garbage haulers - a slow one that we've known about, and a fast one that we've just met," said Nedergaard. "Given the high rate of metabolism in the brain, and its exquisite sensitivity, it's not surprising that its mechanisms to rid itself of waste are more specialized and extensive than previously realized."

While the previously discovered system works more like a trickle, percolating CSF through brain tissue, the new system is under pressure, pushing large volumes of CSF through the brain each day to carry waste away more forcefully.

New research from New Zealand's University of Otago is casting doubt on a landmark US study that suggested infants as young as six months old possess an innate moral compass that allows them to evaluate individuals as 'good' or 'bad'.

The 2007 study by Yale University researchers provided the first evidence that 6- and 10-month-old infants could assess individuals based on their behaviour towards others, showing a preference for those who helped rather than hindered another individual.

Based on a series of experiments, researchers in the Department of Psychology at Otago have shown that the earlier findings may simply be the result of infants' preferences for interesting and attention grabbing events, rather than an ability to evaluate individuals based on their social interactions with others.

The Otago study was recently published in PLoS One, an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online journal.

Lead author Dr Damian Scarf says that the Yale study caused an international sensation when it was published in the leading journal Nature.

"The paper received a lot of attention when it was first published, including coverage in the New York Times. It has received well over 100 citations since 2007, a phenomenal number over such a short period. The paper was initially brought to our attention by one of the PhD students in our lab.

The head of the lab, Professor Harlene Hayne, suggested that a group of us read the paper together and then meet to discuss it. Our original motivation for reading the paper was merely interest. Obviously, the idea that morality is innate is extremely interesting and, if true, would raise questions about which components of our moral system are innate and also have implications for the wider issue of the roles that nature and nurture play in development," says Dr Scarf.

The term "psychopath" is often a misunderstood one; although people frequently refer to alleged mass killers like Colorado shooter James Holmes or the Tucson, Ariz., shooter Jared Loughner as psychopaths, that doesn't mean these men fit the description of this mental health disorder.

In the last week, a psychiatric evaluation report was released stating that after months of receiving treatment for schizophrenia, 23-year-old Loughner seemed to understand that he was agreeing to a guilty plea for the 2011 shooting rampage that killed six people and wounded 13 others, including then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Holmes announced they believe the 24-year-old suffers from mental illness, though they haven't yet determined the exact nature of his illness. Weeks before the shooting, Holmes' psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, University of Colorado professor who specializes in schizophrenia, had alerted university police about Holmes' behavior.

In 1714, the British government held a contest. They offered a large cash prize to anyone who could solve the vexing "longitude problem" - how to determine a ship's east/west position on the open ocean - since none of their naval experts had been able to do so.

Lots of people gave it a try. One of them, a self-educated carpenter named John Harrison, invented the marine chronometer - a rugged and highly precise clock - that did the trick. For the first time, sailors could accurately determine their location at sea.

A centuries-old problem was solved. And, arguably, crowdsourcing was born.

Crowdsourcing is basically what it sounds like: posing a question or asking for help from a large group of people. Coined as a term in 2006, crowdsourcing has taken off in the internet era. Think of Wikipedia, and its thousands of unpaid contributors, now vastly larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Research shows not all feedback is good for you.

People who give positive encouragement and constructive criticism could be wasting their breath according to the latest research from a psychology expert at Queen Mary, University of London.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, found that when people received either positive or negative feedback about their performance on complex decision-making tasks, it made their decision making worse.

Study author Dr Magda Osman explained: "The kind of task people had to perform was difficult and demanding. So, when people received positive or negative feedback, it overloaded them with too much information and distracted them from making a good decision.

"We found that people's performance got worse when they had to make sense of the feedback they were given while also performing the main task.

"The role of feedback is overemphasised. People typically think that any form of feedback should improve performance in many tasks, and the more frequently it is given the better performance will be.

"However what needs to be considered is how complex the task is in the first place, because this will determine how much feedback will actually interfere with rather than facilitate performance."

The study involved about 100 people who were given the task of choosing how best to either predict or control the state of health of a baby, revealing that feedback can play a negative role in a particularly complex decision-making scenario.

It's all about social status, a UC Berkeley study finds.

Researchers have long known that people are very frequently overconfident - that they tend to believe they are more physically talented, socially adept, and skilled at their job than they actually are. For example, 94% of college professors think they do above average work (which is nearly impossible, statistically speaking). But this overconfidence can also have detrimental effects on their performance and decision-making. So why, in light of these negative consequences, is overconfidence still so pervasive?

The lure of social status promotes overconfidence, explains Haas School Associate Professor Cameron Anderson. He co-authored a new study, "A Status-Enhancement Account of Overconfidence," with Sebastien Brion, assistant professor of managing people in organizations, IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Haas School colleagues Don Moore, associate professor of management, and Jessica A. Kennedy, now a post-doctoral fellow at the Wharton School of Business. The study will be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (forthcoming).

"Our studies found that overconfidence helped people attain social status. People who believed they were better than others, even when they weren't, were given a higher place in the social ladder. And the motive to attain higher social status thus spurred overconfidence," says Anderson, the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair in Leadership and Communication II at the Haas School.

Social status is the respect, prominence, and influence individuals enjoy in the eyes of others. Within work groups, for example, higher status individuals tend to be more admired, listened to, and have more sway over the group's discussions and decisions. These "alphas" of the group have more clout and prestige than other members. Anderson says these research findings are important because they help shed light on a longstanding puzzle: why overconfidence is so common, in spite of its risks. His findings suggest that falsely believing one is better than others has profound social benefits for the individual.

Moreover, these findings suggest one reason why in organizational settings, incompetent people are so often promoted over their more competent peers. "In organizations, people are very easily swayed by others' confidence even when that confidence is unjustified," says Anderson. "Displays of confidence are given an inordinate amount of weight."

After the death of his old friend, Albert Einstein said "Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us ... know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

New evidence continues to suggest that Einstein was right - death is an illusion.

Our classical way of thinking is based on the belief that the world has an objective observer-independent existence. But a long list of experiments shows just the opposite. We think life is just the activity of carbon and an admixture of molecules - we live awhile and then rot into the ground.

We believe in death because we've been taught we die. Also, of course, because we associate ourselves with our body and we know bodies die. End of story. But biocentrism - a new theory of everything - tells us death may not be the terminal event we think. Amazingly, if you add life and consciousness to the equation, you can explain some of the biggest puzzles of science. For instance, it becomes clear why space and time - and even the properties of matter itself - depend on the observer. It also becomes clear why the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be exquisitely fine-tuned for the existence of life.

Until we recognize the universe in our heads, attempts to understand reality will remain a road to nowhere.

Consider the weather 'outside': You see a blue sky, but the cells in your brain could be changed so the sky looks green or red. In fact, with a little genetic engineering we could probably make everything that is red vibrate or make a noise, or even make you want to have sex like with some birds. You think its bright out, but your brain circuits could be changed so it looks dark out. You think it feels hot and humid, but to a tropical frog it would feel cold and dry. This logic applies to virtually everything. Bottom line: What you see could not be present without your consciousness.