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).

Concordia 20-year study shows childhood friends can forecast adulthood success.

Even on the playground, our friends know us better than we know ourselves. New research has revealed that your childhood peers from grade school may be able to best predict your success as an adult.

Lisa Serbin of the Department of Psychology at Concordia University and Alexa Martin-Storey, a recent Concordia graduate and a current post-doctoral student at the University of Texas - both members of the Concordia-based Centre for Research in Human Development - recently published a study online, which reveals that childhood peer evaluation of classmate personalities can more accurately predict adulthood success than self-evaluation at that age.

"This study, known as the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project, was started in 1976 by my colleagues in the Department of Psychology, Alex Schwartzman and Jane Ledingham, who is now at the University of Ottawa" says Serbin. "Over two years, Montreal students in grades 1, 4 and 7 completed peer evaluations of their classmates and rated them in terms of aggression, likeability and social withdrawal. The students also did self-evaluations."

Over the next 20 years, these children were closely followed as researchers used the exhaustive longitudinal study to track their progress into adulthood. A follow-up survey was conducted between 1999 and 2003 with nearly 700 of the participants from the initial study. The survey included measurement of adult personality traits, such as levels of neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Phobias, post-traumatic stress and panic attacks difficult to live with - can be erased from the human brain.

This research may represent a breakthrough in research on memory and fear, according to researchers from Uppsala University, Sweden

Thomas Ågren, a doctoral candidate at the Department of Psychology under the supervision of Professors Mats Fredrikson and Tomas Furmark, has shown, that it is possible to erase newly formed emotional memories from the human brain.

When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process.

In other words, it can be said that we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened.

By disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering, we can affect the content of memory.

A part of the brain usually associated with movement may also control our responses to rewards, according to new research that finds stimulation of the region with an opium-like chemical can make rats gorge on M&M candies.

The brain naturally produces opioids, or chemicals with similarities to the drug. One of these, enkephalin, induced hungry rats to pounce on chocolate treats faster the more of the chemical they produced, researchers report online today (Sept. 20) in the journal Current Biology.

When scientists dosed the rats with a big jolt of enkephalin in a brain region called the neostriatum, the rats became eating machines, downing the equivalent of a 150-pound (68 kilogram) person eating 7 to 8 pounds (3.1 to 3.5 kg) of M&Ms in an hour, said study researcher Alexandra DiFeliceantonio.

"This drug injection causes them to eat just obscene amounts of food," DiFeliceantonio, a graduate student in biopsychology at the University of Michigan, told LiveScience.

Do pacifiers harm boys? Popping a binky in a baby's mouth is a quick way to stop them from fussing, but for boys, it may also short-circuit their emotional growth.

Before a baby can talk, he or she relies on non-verbal cues, especially facial expressions, to communicate. Babies also mirror those cues, and in so doing, discover the emotions the cues are attached to. In a recent study published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology researchers from the University of Wisconsin scientists evaluated over 100 kids and found that that six and seven-year-old boys who had heavily used pacifiers were worse at mimicking emotions expressed by faces on a video. They also interviewed more than 600 college students and discovered that college-age men whose parents reported they had relied on pacifiers scored lower on tests measuring empathy and the ability to evaluate the moods of others. For girls and young women, the researchers found there was no difference in emotional maturity based on pacifier use.

"Females tend to be more precise both in both expressing and reading emotional cues," lead author Paula Niedenthal, PhD, tells Shine. "We don't exactly know how that occurs. One reason might be that be that society encourages girls to read emotions. They might work harder at it." She adds, "Parents talk to girls about emotional processing more than they do to boys. That's not a revolutionary statement." Since boys aren't expected to be as emotional, parents may not compensate for pacifier use by helping them learn in other ways.

Remember the telephone game where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It's been altered with each retelling.

Turns out your memory is a lot like the telephone game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.

Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time. The Northwestern study is the first to show this.

"A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event -- it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it," said Donna Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper on the study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. "Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval."

It is well known that when like-minded people get together, they tend to end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. The same kind of echo-chamber effect can happen as people get news from various media. Liberals viewing MSNBC or reading left-of-center blogs may well end up embracing liberal talking points even more firmly; conservative fans of Fox News may well react in similar fashion on the right.

The result can be a situation in which beliefs do not merely harden but migrate toward the extreme ends of the political spectrum. As current events in the Middle East demonstrate, discussions among like-minded people can ultimately produce violence.

The remedy for easing such polarization, here and abroad, may seem straightforward: provide balanced information to people of all sides. Surely, we might speculate, such information will correct falsehoods and promote mutual understanding. This, of course, has been a hope of countless dedicated journalists and public officials.

Unfortunately, evidence suggests that balanced presentations - in which competing arguments or positions are laid out side by side - may not help. At least when people begin with firmly held convictions, such an approach is likely to increase polarization rather than reduce it.

Indeed, that's what a number of academic studies done over the last three decades have found. Such studies typically proceed in three stages. First, the experimenters assemble a group of people who have clear views on some controversial issue (such as capital punishment or sexual orientation). Second, the study subjects are provided with plausible arguments on both sides of the issue. And finally, the researchers test how attitudes have shifted as a result of exposure to balanced presentations.

Without thinking, people act with more generosity than if they take some time to weigh the logic of their behavior.

Contrary to popular and pessimistic thought, the discovery suggests that, by default, our gut instincts lead us to be more helpful than selfish. That may explain why door-knocking and phone solicitations, which demand immediate responses, tend to bring in bigger donations than statistics-laden e-mail messages or direct mail, which puts people in a rational frame of mind and allows them to think for a while before deciding whether to give.

Likewise, people who commit heroic acts -- like the man who jumped onto New York City subway tracks in front of an oncoming train to save a young man having a seizure five years ago -- often make split-second decisions to do the altruistic thing.

"If you look at testimony of a lot of people like that describing their decisions, you can see they are heavily weighted towards intuitive thinking," said David Rand, a behavior scientist at Yale who conducted the new study while at Harvard. "People say, 'I didn't think about it. I just did it.'"

In a 2011 best-selling book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel-Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman argued that a lot of decision-making comes out of a tension between two types of brain processes. On the one hand, we have quick and intuitive thoughts, which are often emotional. The other mode is slower, allowing for more controlled and calculated thinking.

Until now, Rand said, researchers had yet to combine the two kinds of thought processes in a way that explained how people actually behaved.