The vulnerability of our children transformed human relationships, argues Dacher Keltner, and made compassion essential to our survival.

Charles Darwin was the beloved and engaged dad of a really rambunctious group of children. When one of his daughters died at age 10, Darwin started to have these deep insights about the place of suffering and compassion in human experience.

That led him to write, in The Descent of Man, that "sympathy is our strongest instinct, stronger than self-interest," and he argued that it would spread through natural selection, for "the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring."

This point was totally forgotten by evolutionary science for quite some time. Well, given all the awful things humans do to each other, how could you make the case that sympathy is our strongest instinct?

The answer lies in the dependence and vulnerability of our children. Little baby chimpanzees eat by themselves; human babies can't. Baby chimpanzees sit up on their own; you sit up a human baby, and they go, "Watch out, man, my head's really big!" Boom!

Their heads are so big because their brains are so big. To fit their big heads through the human birth canal - which narrowed as we started to walk upright on the African savanna - our babies were born profoundly premature and dependent upon people to take care of them.

In fact, our babies are the most vulnerable offspring on the face of the Earth. And that simple fact changed everything. It rearranged our social structures, building cooperative networks of caretaking, and it rearranged our nervous systems. We became the super caregiving species, to the point where acts of care improve our physical health and lengthen our lives. We are born to be good to each other.

A psychologist probes how altruism, evolution and neurobiology mean that we can succeed by not being cutthroat.

Why do people do good things? Is kindness hardwired into the brain, or does this tendency arise via experience? Dacher Keltner, director of the Social Interaction Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, investigates these questions from multiple angles and often generates results that are both surprising and challenging. In his recent book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (W. W. Norton, 2009), Keltner weaves together scientific findings with personal narrative to uncover human emotion's innate power to connect people with one another, which he argues is the path to living the good life. Here Keltner discusses altruism, neurobiology and the practical applications of his findings with David DiSalvo.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND: What, in a nutshell, does the term "born to be good" mean to you?

DACHER KELTNER: "Born to be good" means that our mammalian and hominid evolution has crafted a species - us - with remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice, which are vital to the classic tasks of evolution - survival, gene replication and smoothly functioning groups. These tendencies are felt in the wonderful realm of emotion - feelings such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment and mirth. Recent studies have revealed that our capacity for caring, play, reverence and modesty is built into our brains, bodies, genes and social practices.

Sanatana Dharma is an ancient code of conduct originating with the Vedic culture some 8,000+ years ago. The Sanskrit word 'dharma', while not easily translated into English, due to its complex, multi-level meaning can be interpreted as 'the collection of natural and universal laws that uphold, sustain, or uplift'. In effect, dharma is a law of being, a law of nature, individual nature, prescribed duty, social and personal duties, a moral code, civil law, a code of conduct, morality, a way of life, a practice, an observance, justice, righteousness, religion, religiosity and harmony.

Rather than a set of man-made rules, Sanatana Dharma is more akin to a document of the observable laws of physics. The word 'karma', meaning 'action' is used to indicate the cause-effect relationship between action and consequence. Moral judgement is an attitude that applies in relation to the dharmic value produced by the cause-effect of actions, but the laws, themselves are as morally neutral as the non-dual monism of Vedic philosophy that first began to examine and discuss the nature of existence. Karma, when understood as 'work' in the sense that it is used in physics, does not categorise any action as inherently good or bad. Instead, any and all actions and intentions 'that uphold, sustain, or uplift' life are good, while those actions that suppress or destroy life are bad. This is purely a rational position that hinges on the assumption that there is consensus will to live and let live and that that will is firmly founded on the understanding that all life forms are inextricably integrated, interdependent and of equal value to the whole. The recognition of equality cannot be gained by a mind incapable of empathy, which is rooted in ahimsa, a tenet of Sanatana Dharma. The word 'ahimsa' translates into 'non-violence', but encompasses all acts of violence from harsh words to killing insects.

Certain brain regions in people with major depression are smaller and less dense than those of their healthy counterparts. Now, researchers have traced the genetic reasons for this shrinkage.

A series of genes linked to the function of synapses, or the gaps between brain cells crucial for cell-to-cell communication, can be controlled by a single genetic "switch" that appears to be overproduced in the brains of people with depression, a new study finds.

"We show that circuits normally involved in emotion, as well as cognition, are disrupted when this single transcription factor is activated," study researcher Ronald Duman, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University, said in a statement.

Transcription factors are proteins that help control which genetic instructions from DNA will be copied, or transcribed, as part of the process of building the body's proteins.

Research done at Pitt shows that decision-making memories are stored in a mysterious area of the brain known to be involved with vision and eye movements.

The sought-after equanimity of "living in the moment" may be impossible, according to neuroscientists who've pinpointed a brain area responsible for using past decisions and outcomes to guide future behavior. The study, based on research conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and published today in the professional journal Neuron, is the first of its kind to analyze signals associated with metacognition - a person's ability to monitor and control cognition (a term cleverly described by researchers as "thinking about thinking.")

"The brain has to keep track of decisions and the outcomes they produce," said Marc Sommer, who did his research for the study as a University of Pittsburgh neuroscience faculty member and is now on the faculty at Duke University. "You need that continuity of thought," Sommer continued. "We are constantly keeping decisions in mind as we move through life, thinking about other things. We guessed it was analogous to working memory, which would point toward the prefrontal cortex."

Sommer predicted that neuronal correlates of metacognition resided in the same brain areas responsible for cognition, including the frontal cortex - a part of the brain linked with personality expression, decision making, and social behavior. Sommer worked with Paul G. Middlebrooks, who did his research for the study at Pitt before he received his Pitt PhD in neuroscience in 2011; Middlebrooks is now a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University. The research team studied single neurons in vivo in three frontal cortical regions of the brain: the frontal eye field (associated with visual attention and eye movements), the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (responsible for motor planning, organization, and regulation), and the supplementary eye field (SEF) involved in the planning and control of saccadic eye movements, which are the extremely fast movements of the eye that allow it to continually refocus on an object.

Many of the long term goals people strive for - like losing weight - require us to use self-control and forgo immediate gratification. And yet denying our immediate desires in order to reap future benefits is often very hard to do.

In a new article in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers Kentaro Fujita and Jessica Carnevale of The Ohio State University propose that the way people subjectively understand, or construe, events can influence self-control.

Research from psychological science suggests that categorizing things abstractly into broad categories (called high-level construal) allows us to psychologically distance ourselves from the pushes and pulls of the immediate moment. This, in turn, makes us more sensitive to the broad implications of our behavior and leads us to show greater consistency between our values and our behavior.

We're often told to 'count our blessings' and be grateful for what we have. And research shows that doing so makes us happier. But will it actually change our behavior towards others?

A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that thinking about what we've given, rather than what we've received, may lead us to be more helpful toward others.

Researchers Adam Grant of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Jane Dutton of The Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan wanted to understand how reflection, in the form of expressive writing, might influence prosocial behavior. They observed that when we reflect on what we've received from another person, we might feel an obligation to help that person, but the motivation to help doesn't necessarily extend to other people. And reflecting on what we've received from others may even cause us to feel dependent and indebted.

The researchers wondered whether thinking about times when we have given to others might be more effective in promoting helping. They hypothesized that reflecting on giving could lead a person to see herself as a benefactor, strengthening her identity as a caring, helpful individual and motivating her to take action to benefit others.

Stressed and non-stressed people use different brain regions and different strategies when learning. This has been reported by the cognitive psychologists PD Dr. Lars Schwabe and Professor Oliver Wolf from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in the Journal of Neuroscience. Non-stressed individuals applied a deliberate learning strategy, while stressed subjects relied more on their gut feeling. "These results demonstrate for the first time that stress has an influence on which of the different memory systems the brain turns on," said Lars Schwabe.

The experiment: Stress due to ice-water

The data from 59 subjects were included in the study. Half of the participants had to immerse one hand into ice-cold water for three minutes under video surveillance. This stressed the subjects, as hormone assays showed. The other participants had to immerse one of their hands just in warm water. Then both the stressed and non-stressed individuals completed the so-called weather prediction task. The subjects looked at playing cards with different symbols and learned to predict which combinations of cards announced rain and which sunshine. Each combination of cards was associated with a certain probability of good or bad weather. People apply differently complex strategies in order to master the task. During the weather prediction task, the researchers recorded the brain activity with MRI.

Anyone who has tried to remember a ten-digit phone number or a nine-item grocery list knows that we can only hold so much information in mind at a given time. Our working memory capacity is decidedly finite - it reflects our ability to focus and control attention and strongly influences our ability to solve problems.

In a new article in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Jennifer Wiley and Andrew Jarosz of the University of Illinois at Chicago explore the role of working memory capacity in both mathematical and creative problem solving.

Converging evidence from many psychological science studies suggests that high working memory capacity is associated with better performance at mathematical problem-solving. In fact, decreased working memory capacity may be one reason why math anxiety leads to poor math performance. Overall, working memory capacity seems to help analytical problem-solvers focus their attention and resist distraction.

Having close relationships with friends and family as a child makes people happier in later life, a new study has found.

New research has shown how positive social relationships in childhood and adolescence are key to adult well-being, while academic achievement has little effect.

Scientists do not know much about how aspects of childhood and adolescent development - such as academic and social-emotional function - affect adult well-being.

They define well-being as a mixture of sense of coherence, positive coping strategies, social engagement and self-perceived strengths.

Researchers analysed data for 804 people, followed up for 32 years, who participated in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (DMHDS) in New Zealand.