A new study from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) revealed that "cool" kids in middle school had a tendency to participate in bullying more than others.

Bullying was defined as either "starting fights or pushing other kids around" or "spreading nasty rumors about other kids." The UCLA psychology study found that bullying could help improve an individual's social status and popularity among middle school students. In addition, students who were already considered popular utilized these forms of bullying.

The researchers believe that the findings of the study, which were recently published in the online edition of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, could help school administrators and anti-bullying programs improve their tactics for eliminating school bullying.

"The ones who are cool bully more, and the ones who bully more are seen as cool," explained the study's lead author Jaana Juvonen, a professor of psychology at UCLA. "What was particularly interesting was that the form of aggression, whether highly visible and clearly confrontational or not, did not matter. Pushing or shoving and gossiping worked the same for boys and girls."

In the project, the researchers observed 1,895 ethnically diverse students from 11 Los Angeles middle schools. The students were dispersed across 99 different classes, with investigators conducting surveys at the start of the seventh grade, the fall of eight grade, and the spring of eight grade. During each of the three surveys, the students filled out questionnaires asking them to name the students who were thought to be the "coolest," the students who usually started fights or pushed other students around, and those who spread mean rumors about other students.

In one of three studies, Pia Rosander carried out personality tests on 200 pupils in southern Sweden when they entered upper secondary school at 16. Three years later, when they received their final grades, she was able to observe a strong link between personality and grades.

In personality psychology one talks of "the big five" - the five most common personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These qualities influence how a person behaves and are relatively stable qualities, which means that they do not change greatly over time or in different situations.

One of the traits is clearly associated with high grades: Neuroticism, where pupils are driven by fear and worry, also led to high grades. Contrary to Pia Rosander's hypothesis, openness, or intellectual curiosity, did not lead to high grades.

"We have a school system in Sweden that favours conscientious and fear-driven pupils", says Pia Rosander. "It is not good for psychological well-being in the long term if fear is a driving force. It also prevents in-depth learning, which happens best among the open personality types who are driven by curiosity."

The moments just before deployment can be highly stressful for those in the military, but a study published in the journal Emotion finds that meditation improved mood and bolstered working memory during this period.

Working memory is the short-term memory system we tap into for managing information, controlling emotions, problem solving, and complex thought - sometimes in crisis situations. You can gain the same benefits when faced with stressful situations, whether planning your wedding, having your first child, preparing to undergo surgery, or getting ready to change jobs, according to lead study author Amishi P. Jha, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Playwright and poet William Congreve once said that "music has charms to soothe a savage beast". That certainly appears to be true, especially if that beast is a person's blood pressure. A pair of studies has found that playing music may lower people's blood pressure and improve their feeling of well-being.

A recent study conducted by researchers from Leiden University Medical Center examined the effect that music may have on blood pressure. According to the Pacific Standard, the study compared 25 musicians and 28 non-musicians between the ages of 18 and 30 years old.

The groups were matched for height, weight, level of physical activity and caffeine and alcohol consumption.

In fact, the only difference was that the group of musicians - which consisted of three guitarists, four flutists, five singers and six pianists - practiced their instruments over an average of 1.8 hours each day.

Emotional smarts and general intelligence may be more closely linked than previously thought, new research suggests.

In a group of Vietnam veterans, IQ test results and emotional intelligence, or the ability to perceive, understand and deal with emotion in oneself or in others, were linked. And in brain scans, the same regions of the brain seemed to perform both emotional and cognitive tasks, the study found. The findings were published in the journal Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience.

"Intelligence, to a large extent, does depend on basic cognitive abilities, like attention and perception and memory and language," said study coauthor Aron Barbey, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, in a statement.

"But it also depends on interacting with other people. We're fundamentally social beings and our understanding not only involves basic cognitive abilities but also involves productively applying those abilities to social situations so that we can navigate the social world and understand others."

In the past, scientists believed that emotional intelligence and general intelligence were distinct, and books and movies are rife with depictions of intellectually brilliant but socially clueless nerds.

A new study of 152 Vietnam veterans with combat-related brain injuries offers the first detailed map of the brain regions that contribute to emotional intelligence - the ability to process emotional information and navigate the social world.

The study found significant overlap between general intelligence and emotional intelligence, both in terms of behavior and in the brain. Higher scores on general intelligence tests corresponded significantly with higher performance on measures of emotional intelligence, and many of the same brain regions were found to be important to both. (Watch a video about the research.)

The study appears in the journal Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience.

"This was a remarkable group of patients to study, mainly because it allowed us to determine the degree to which damage to specific brain areas was related to impairment in specific aspects of general and emotional intelligence," said study leader Aron K. Barbey, a professor of neuroscience, of psychology and of speech and hearing science at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois.

A previous study led by Barbey mapped the neural basis of general intelligence by analyzing how specific brain injuries (in a larger sample of Vietnam veterans) impaired performance on tests of fundamental cognitive processes.

Misconduct occurs across the career spectrum, from trainees to senior scientists.

Male scientists are far more likely to commit fraud than females and the fraud occurs across the career spectrum, from trainees to senior faculty. The analysis of professional misconduct was co-led by a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and was published today in the online journal mBio.

"The fact that misconduct occurs across all stages of career development suggests that attention to ethical aspects of scientific conduct should not be limited to those in training, as is the current practice," said senior author Arturo Casadevall, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of microbiology & immunology and professor of medicine at Einstein, as well as editor-in-chief of mBio.

He added, "Our other finding - that males are overrepresented among those committing misconduct - implies a gender difference we need to better understand in any effort to promote the integrity of research."

In a previous study, Dr. Casadevall found that misconduct is responsible for two-thirds of all retractions of scientific papers. The finding was unexpected, since earlier research had suggested that errors account for the majority of retracted scientific papers.

Researchers embarked on the current study to better understand those who are guilty of scientific fraud. They reviewed 228 individual cases of misconduct reported by the United States Office of Research Integrity (ORI) from 1994 through 2012. ORI promotes the responsible conduct of research and investigates charges of misconduct involving research supported by the Department of Health and Human Services.

An analysis determined that fraud was involved in 215 (94 percent) of the 228 cases reported by the ORI. Of these, 40 percent involved trainees, 32 percent involved faculty members, and 28 percent involved other research personnel (research scientists, technicians, study coordinators, and interviewers).

Everyone knows lying is wrong. And most parents try to instill in their children that this behavior is unacceptable. But new research has shown a vast majority of parents will actually lie to their children in order to get them to behave.

Lead researcher Gail Heyman, of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has found certain variations in the way parents from the US and China use untruths and white lies when dealing with their kids. The research is published in the International Journal of Psychology.

Heyman and colleagues found the percentage of parents who reported lying to their children for the purpose of getting them to behave was higher in China (98 percent) than in the US (84 percent). The researchers believe the reason parents in China lie more in this manner is due to the fact that demand for compliance is greater in China than in the US, and parents will do whatever is necessary to make their kids conform.

Other types of lying, however, were similar between China and US parents. In both countries, parents seem to be comfortable lying to their kids to promote positive feelings and to support belief in the existence of fantasy characters, such as the Tooth Fairy.

Extraversion does not just explain differences between how people act at social events. How extraverted you are may influence how the brain makes choices - specifically whether you choose an immediate or delayed reward, according to a new study. The work is part of a growing body of research on the vital role of understanding personality in society.

"Understanding how people differ from each other and how that affects various outcomes is something that we all do on an intuitive basis, but personality psychology attempts to bring scientific rigor to this process," says Colin DeYoung of the University of Minnesota, who worked on the new study. "Personality affects academic and job performance, social and political attitudes, the quality and stability of social relationships, physical health and mortality, and risk for mental disorder."

DeYoung is one of several researchers presenting new work in a special session today about personality psychology at a conference in New Orleans. "DeYoung's research in biology and neuroscience aids in the development of theories of personality that provide explanations for persistent patterns of behavior and experience," says David Funder of the University of California, Riverside, who is the new president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). "The researchers presenting at this session represent just what personality psychology can achieve and its relevance for important social issues - from how personality affects health to guidance for the new DSM-5."

Personality to understand neural differences

In the new study, DeYoung and colleagues scanned people in an fMRI and asked them to choose between smaller immediate rewards or larger delayed rewards, for example $15 today versus $25 in three weeks. They then correlated their choices and associated brain activity to various personality traits.

The genetic data posted online seemed perfectly anonymous - strings of the billions of DNA letters from more than 1,000 people in a study. But all it took was a little clever sleuthing on the Web for a genetics researcher to zero in on the identities of five people he randomly selected. Not only that, he found their entire families, even though the relatives had no part in the study - identifying nearly 50 people.

"We are in what I call an awareness moment," said Eric D. Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

The genetic data are from an international study, the 1000 Genomes Project, that is collecting genetic information from people around the world and posting it online so researchers can use it freely. It also includes the ages of participants and the regions where they live. That information, a genealogy Web site and Google searches were sufficient to find complete family trees. While the methods for extracting relevant genetic data from the raw genetic sequence files were specialized enough to be beyond the scope of most laypeople, no one expected it would be so easy to zoom in on individuals.