Why do some children succeed while others fail? A new book, How Children Succeed, says cognitive skill - the kind of intelligence that is measured in IQ scores and exam results and that includes the ability to read, write and count numbers - is an important factor, but the qualities children really need are persistence, curiosity conscientiousness, grit and optimism - collectively known as character.

American author Paul Tough says there is growing evidence parents are worrying too much about their children's academic achievements and not doing enough to help develop character-forming traits.

Too many children, he says, lead coddled sub-urban lives, shielded from adversity, and knocked sideways when they have to confront real problems in adulthood.

"In the past couple of decades we've focused way too much on cognitive skills and intelligence as the one predictor of success and I think we've ignored this other set of skills," he says.

"The scientists and teachers that I am writing about in this book are showing evidence, both in the classroom and in the data, that character skills are at least as important as IQ in terms of a child's ultimate success and are quite likely more important."

Scientists have historically relied on neuroimaging - but not electrophysiological - data when studying the human default mode network (DMN), a group of brain regions with lower activity during externally-directed tasks and higher activity if tasks require internal focus. Recently, however, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine recorded electrical activity directly from a core DMN component known as the posteromedial cortex (PMC) during both internally- and externally-directed waking states - specifically, autobiographical memory and arithmetic calculation, respectively. The data they recorded showed an inverse relationship - namely, the degree activation during memory retrieval predicted the degree of suppression during arithmetic calculation - which they say provides important anatomical and temporal details about DMN function at the neural population level.

Drs. Josef Parvizi, Brett L. Foster, and Mohammad Dastjerdi faced a range of challenges when recording intracranially from the human posteromedial cortex. "A key challenge in specifically studying the electrical activity of this region is that unlike much of the brains outer cerebral cortex, the posteromedial cortex is not superficially visible," Foster tells Medical Xpress. Rather, he illustrates, it is part of the cerebral cortex that is hidden from view, which wraps over into the middle space between the left and right brain hemispheres "like the inner walls of a glacier crevasse."

This is a two-fold problem, he continues. "Not only does this hidden location make it very difficult to record this regions electrical activity from outside the skull on the scalp - a common technique - but also, even if one gets the opportunity to record more closely from inside the skull, one still needs to access this hidden cortex within the narrow space between the two hemispheres." Importantly, the ability to do so in the human brain only arises out of a unique clinical opportunity, where neurosurgeons have diligently placed electrodes onto the cortical walls of this inter-hemispheric space to monitor epileptic seizure activity as part of surgical planning. "The findings reported in our study are all derived from this unique opportunity, which allowed for direct recordings of electrical neural activity from the posteromedial cortex."

You were abducted by aliens, you saw Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, and then you went up in a balloon. Didn't you? Laura Spinney on our remembrance of things past.

Alan Alda had nothing against hard-boiled eggs until last spring. Then the actor, better known as Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, paid a visit to the University of California, Irvine. In his new guise as host of a science series on American TV, he was exploring the subject of memory. The researchers showed him round, and afterwards took him for a picnic in the park. By the time he came to leave, he had developed a dislike of hard-boiled eggs based on a memory of having made himself sick on them as a child - something that never happened.

Alda was the unwitting guinea pig of Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychologist who has been obsessed with the subject of memory and its unreliability since Richard Nixon was sworn in as president. Early on in her research, she would invite people into her lab, show them simulated traffic accidents, feed them false information and leading questions, and find that they subsequently recalled details of the scene differently - a finding that has since been replicated hundreds of times.

More recently, she has come to believe that lab studies may underestimate people's suggestibility because, among other things, real life tends to be more emotionally arousing than simulations of it. So these days she takes her investigations outside the lab. In a study soon to be published, she and colleagues describe how a little misinformation led witnesses of a terrorist attack in Moscow in 1999 to recall seeing wounded animals nearby. Later, they were informed that there had been no animals. But before the debriefing, they even embellished the false memory with make-believe details, in one case testifying to seeing a bleeding cat lying in the dust.

"We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big."

You're waiting in the reception area of your doctor's office. The magazines are uninteresting. The pictures on the wall are dull. The second hand on the wall clock moves so excruciatingly slowly that you're sure it must be broken. You feel depleted and irritated about being stuck in this seemingly endless moment. You want to be engaged by something - anything - when a thought, so familiar from childhood, comes to mind: "I'm bored!"

Although boredom is often seen as a trivial and temporary discomfort that can be alleviated by a simple change in circumstances, it can also be a chronic and pervasive stressor that can have significant consequences for health and well-being.

Boredom at work may cause serious accidents when safety depends on continuous vigilance, as in medical monitoring or long-haul truck driving. On a behavioral level, boredom has been linked with problems with impulse control, leading to overeating and binge eating, drug and alcohol abuse, and problem gambling. Boredom has even been associated with mortality, lending grim weight to the popular phrase "bored to death."

New study shows fear is hard to extinguish from the developing teenage brain, which may explain why anxiety and depression spikes during adolescence.

A new study by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers shows that adolescents' reactions to threat remain high even when the danger is no longer present. According to researchers, once a teenager's brain is triggered by a threat, the ability to suppress an emotional response to the threat is diminished which may explain the peak in anxiety and stress-related disorders during this developmental period.

The study, published Sept. 17 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the first to decode fear acquisition and fear "extinction learning," down to the synaptic level in the brains of mice, which mirror human neuronal networks. Also, through human and rodent experiments, the study finds that acquired fear can be difficult to extinguish in some adolescents. By contrast, the study shows that adults and children do not have the same trouble learning when a threat is no longer present.

"This is the first study to show, in an experiment, that adolescent humans have diminished fear extinction learning," says the study's lead author, Dr. Siobhan S. Pattwell, a postdoctoral fellow at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell. "Our findings are important because they might explain why epidemiologists have found that anxiety disorders seem to spike during adolescence or just before adolescence. It is estimated that over 75 percent of adults with fear-related disorders can trace the roots of their anxiety to earlier ages."

Childhood obesity is a growing health concern in the public sphere, but for many of us, it also hits close to home. But while public health campaigns have singled in on parents providing children with unhealthy nutrition options and with poor examples of healthy eating, new research indicates that some of the problem may lie with fast food companies and their overly effective marketing campaigns.

A study has found that fast-food logos are branded into the minds of children from an early age.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood obesity has more than tripled over the past 30 years. And perhaps more damning, the government bureau reports that "[the] percentage of children aged 6-11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 20% in 2008. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12-19 years who were obese increased from 5% to 18% over the same period."

The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Kansas Medical Center, showed children 60 logos from popular food brands, like Rice Krispies and KFC and 60 logos from popular non-food brands, like BMW and FedEx. The children were aged between 10 and 14. Then, using a functional MRI scanner, which measures blood flow to different areas in the brain, they watched the brains of these children react to the different logos.

If approached in the right way, citizens are willing to change their behaviour and do more to help themselves and others, according to research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project, carried out jointly at the universities of Manchester and Southampton, experimented with different intervention techniques which encourage citizen participation and explored people's motivations for community involvement.

The researchers focused on comparing the effectiveness of 'nudge' techniques, where people are offered incentives to change their behaviour, and 'think' techniques, which takes a planned approach where people are given information, the opportunity to discuss and debate a subject, and then opportunity to act. Overall, they found that while the nudge interventions yielded better results, these were not always sustained in the long term.

Individuals responded well to nudge techniques such as doorstep canvassing, receiving feedback on their actions and to public recognition of their contribution. For example, in a recycling experiment, there was a ten per cent increase in household recycling as a result of doorstep canvassing - a nudge technique. Unfortunately, this effect did not last and after three months the increase was just four per cent.

In another experiment people were asked to pledge used books to their local library. When the donors were told that their names would be made public, another nudge technique, donations went up by 22 per cent.

The 'think' technique experiments, though less successful, offered unexpected results. On-line debate forums where people were given information on a topic and the opportunity to discuss it resulted in modest changes in their policy positions. However, this approach failed to encourage participation among people that were not already politically engaged.

We've all heard the racial phrase "they all look alike." For many individuals it is a common remark that people use to describe a different race. New research has finally revealed why many individuals have a hard time recognizing others from a different race.

In a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers suggests if individuals of one race identify themselves as a part of the same group it can improve their memory of members of a different race.

Co-author of the new study Jay Van Bavel, of New York University, and William Cunningham, of the University of Toronto, and colleagues conducted three experiments.

"One of the most robust phenomena in social perception is the finding that people are better at remembering people from their own race. This effect - called the own-race bias - is often interpreted as the consequence of perceptual expertise, whereby people spend more time with members of their own race and therefore have difficulty differentiating members of other races," Van Bavel said.

"Instead, we show that people are better at differentiating members of their own race because they simply pay more attention to who is in their own group, regardless of their race."

There may be a link between the cold, callous personality traits associated with psychopaths and sense of smell, according to a new study.

The research, published in the journal Chemosensory Perception, showed that people who scored high on a test of psychopathy also had more problems with being able to tell different smells apart, not to mention identifying smells.

The study included 79 adults who didn't have a criminal background. The researchers conducted a number of experiments to test their ability to smell and tell smells apart, and also had them take a test that measured their levels of psychopathic traits like callousness, manipulation, the urge to commit criminal acts, and leading an erratic lifestyle.

"Our findings provide support for the premise that deficits in the front part of the brain may be a characteristic of non-criminal psychopaths," the researchers, from Macquarie University, said in a statement. "Olfactory measures represent a potentially interesting marker for psychopathic traits, because performance expectancies are unclear in odor tests and may therefore be less susceptible to attempts to fake good or bad responses."

One in every two cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers remains undiagnosed. This is the conclusion reached by a working group led by Hans-Ulrich Wittchen et al. They report their study in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2012; 109(35): 559), which is a special issue focusing on the prevalence of psychological stress in German army soldiers. In a second original article, results reported by Jens T Kowalski and colleagues show that more female soldiers contact the psychosocial support services provided by Germany's armed forces than their male colleagues (Dtsch Arztbl Int 2012; 109 (35): 559).