Women who have experienced rape or other abuse have far higher rates of mental disorders and are up to 20 times more likely to attempt suicide than other females, an Australian study showed Wednesday.

The findings, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed a very strong association between exposure to gender-based violence and mental disorder, said study leader Susan Rees.

"Based on other studies, we expected there to be a correlation and an association, but the strength of it was particularly concerning," said Rees, from the School of Psychiatry at the University of New South Wales.

"Not only was there a higher rate (of mental disorder) but there was also a greater severity."

We accept that some people are born with a talent for music or art or athletics. But what about mathematics? Do some of us just arrive in the world with better math skills than others?

It seems we do, at least according to the results of a study by a team of Johns Hopkins University psychologists. Led by Melissa Libertus, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, the study -- published online in a recent issue of Developmental Science -- indicates that math ability in preschool children is strongly linked to their inborn and primitive "number sense," called an "Approximate Number System" or ANS.

Research reveals that "number sense" is basic to all animals, not just human beings. For instance, creatures that hunt or gather food use it to ascertain where they can find and procure the most nuts, plants or game and to keep track of the food they hunt or gather. We humans use it daily to allow us, at a glance, to estimate the number of open seats in a movie theater or the number of people in a crowded meeting. And it is measurable, even in newborn infants.

Though the link between ANS and formal mathematics ability already has been established in adolescents, Libertus says her team's is the first study to examine the role of "number sense" in children too young to already have had substantial formal mathematics instruction.

How a broken heart can really break your heart, violent games can ease your stress, and the lowest-stress job around.

1. Think about money, work, economic outlook, family, and relationships. Feeling anxious? In a 2010 American Psychological Association survey [pdf], those five factors were the most often cited sources of stress for Americans.
2. Stress is strongly tied to cardiac disease, hypertension, inflammatory diseases, and compromised immune systems, and possibly to cancer.
3. And stress can literally break your heart. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or "broken heart syndrome," occurs when the bottom of the heart balloons into the shape of a pot (a tako-tsubo) used in Japan to trap octopus. It's caused when grief or another extreme stressor makes stress hormones flood the heart.

Psychopaths are fascinating, in a repugnant sort of way. Whether we read about Ted Bundy or Paul Bernardo or see psychopaths depicted in fictional characters such as Hannibal Lecter, we are forced to wonder how a human being could ever do such horrible things. We are also forced to wonder whether we ourselves could ever do those things - whether such darkness possibly exists deep within us all.

As a sensitive human being, I was always baffled by psychopaths until I studied the topic of psychopathy, especially as understood by its foremost expert, Robert Hare, the psychiatrist who developed the Psychopathy Checklist, now the standard tool for diagnosing people with psychopathy. But it was as a philosopher that I experienced a kind of awakening. This is because I not only came to understand what makes psychopaths tick, but I began to see the wider significance of psychopaths - connections with areas of inquiry that experts such as Hare (let alone philosophers) did not seem to see. (I am a "What is x ?" philosopher, the kind who takes science seriously, the kind who believes that it is not wisdom to ignore evidence.)

In this article, I shall focus on three areas of wider significance: postmodernism, morality, and theology. It is perhaps astonishing that the human phenomenon of psychopathy can teach us anything about these three fields, but as we shall see, it actually has a lot to teach us.

First we need to be reasonably clear on what psychopathy is. Following the work of Hare in his must-read Without Conscience (1995), psychopathy is not a form of insanity or even a mental illness, given the clinical meanings of these terms. Nor need psychopaths be lacking in rationality. Conceivably a psychopath could have the genius of an Einstein and function quite well in the world. There is no twisted logic necessarily involved with psychopathy, no warped thinking that is so obvious in the mentally ill and insane, no hallucinations, no depression, no dysfunctionality necessarily.

Psychopaths are defined in terms of something else - a cluster of features, most of which are deficiencies. This means that psychopathy is a matter of degree. Many of us might score relatively high in one or more of these defining characteristics, but that does not necessarily mean that we are psychopaths. On the other hand, there are those who score so high on the Psychopathy Checklist that they are considered full-fledged psychopaths. They are, so to speak, the interesting ones.

An 8-week course of stress-reducing Transcendental Meditation resulted in a 50% reduction in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) symptoms among Iraq/Afghanistan veterans, researchers reported in Military Medicine. The pilot study involved five veterans aged 25 to 40 years with PTSD symptoms - they had all served between 10 and 24 months and had been involved in moderate or heavy moderate combat.

The researchers, from Georgetown University Medical School, explained that Transcendental Meditation resulted in considerable reductions in stress and depression, and clear relationships improvements. The participants' overall quality of life improved.

Have you ever been approached by someone whose face you recognize but whose name you can't remember? Neuroscientists at the University of Bristol have identified the reasons behind why we are, at times, unable to link a face to a name.

The research, led by Dr Clea Warburton and Dr Gareth Barker in the University's School of Physiology and Pharmacology and published in the Journal of Neuroscience, has investigated why we can recognise faces much better if we have extra clues as to where or indeed when we encountered them in the first place.

The study found that when we need to remember that a particular object, for example a face, occurred in a particular place, or at a particular time, multiple brain regions have to work together - not independently.

It has been known for some time that three brain regions appear to have specific roles in memory processing. The perirhinal cortex seems to be critical for our ability to recognise whether an individual object is novel or familiar, the hippocampus is important for recognising places and for navigation, while the medial prefrontal cortex is associated with higher brain functions.

A significant number of Americans believe that memory is more powerful, objective and reliable than it actually is, a new survey finds. Some memory myths are so pervasive that up to 83 percent of people believe them.

The survey, published online today (Aug. 3) in the journal PLoS ONE, queried a nationally representative sample of 1,500 Americans about a variety of common beliefs about memory. The survey found that almost two-thirds of Americans believe that memory works like a video camera, accurately recording events for later review.

In fact, study researchers said, scientific data suggests that even confident eyewitnesses to an event are wrong about what happened 30 percent of the time.

A leading criminologist says teenage killer Joshua Davies may have battered 15-year-old Rebecca Aylward to death because he "did not want to lose face".

And David Wilson, professor of criminology and director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University, says 16-year-old Davies has shown at least some signs of being a psychopath.

Davies was found guilty at Swansea Crown Court on Wednesday of luring popular "Becca", of Maesteg, to woods near his home in Aberkenfig.

The trial judge Mr Justice Lloyd Jones decided to lift Davies' anonymity as a juvenile because of the seriousness of what he did and because of the "deterrent effect".

For months, Davies launched a verbal and internet hate campaign against his former girlfriend Rebecca.

Psychopaths are viciously destructive in action. They obfuscate with lies and charm. They persist only when their actions are unrecognized; 95% of the population reject such criminal destruction (here and here).

US political and economic "leadership" are psychopaths because their central policies are viciously destructive, as the following links explain, document, and prove. "Leadership" obfuscate with lies, charm, and US corporate media complicity.

Calling this behavior psychopathic is perfect because it neither understates nor overstates the facts. Use this academic term at your command. I also suggest Princeton professor Frankfurt's academic term for the type of lies that "leadership" uses: bullshit.

I always wondered why some people - particularly politicians - are cruel to the extent of committing genocide and wanting to inflict more pain on humanity until a friend introduced me to the term ponerology - a term coined by Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski to describe the study of the causes of periods of social injustice.

Ponerology seeks to explain phenomena that include aggressive war, ethnic cleansing, genocide and police states (Wikipedia). Studies in this discipline have shown a tight link between social injustice and psychopathy - the ability to lie, steal, cause great harm or kill with virtually no remorse.

To understand what animal a psychopath is, Lobaczewski in Political Ponerology: A Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes says: "Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members.

"Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.

"And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.