You're in search of a new coffee maker, and the simple quest becomes, well, an ordeal. After doing copious amounts of research and reading dozens of consumer reviews, you finally make a purchase, only to wonder: "Was this the right choice? Could I do better? What is the return policy?"

Reality check: Is this you?

If so, new research from Florida State University may shed some light on your inability to make a decision that you'll be happy with.

Joyce Ehrlinger, an assistant professor of psychology, has long been fascinated with individuals identified among psychologists as "maximizers." Maximizers tend to obsess over decisions - big or small - and then fret about their choices later. "Satisficers," on the other hand, tend to make a decision and then live with it.

Happily.

Of course, there are shades of gray. In fact, there's a whole continuum of ways people avoid commitment without really avoiding it.

Ehrlinger's latest research on decision making was published in the peer-reviewed journal Personality and Individual Differences. The paper, "Failing to Commit: Maximizers Avoid Commitment in a Way That Contributes to Reduced Satisfaction," was co-authored with her graduate student, doctoral candidate Erin Sparks, and colleague Richard Eibach, a psychology assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. It examines whether "maximizers show less commitment to their choices than satisficers in a way that leaves them lesssatisfied with their choices."

Shortcoming also may help explain how propaganda has contributed to torture and genocide.

A father in Louisiana bludgeoned and beheaded his disabled 7-year-old son last August because he no longer wanted to care for the boy.

For most people, such a heinous act is unconscionable.

But it may be that a person can become callous enough to commit human atrocities because of a failure in the part of the brain that's critical for social interaction. A new study by researchers at Duke University and Princeton University suggests this function may disengage when people encounter others they consider disgusting, thus "dehumanizing" their victims by failing to acknowledge they have thoughts and feelings.

This shortcoming also may help explain how propaganda depicting Tutsi in Rwanda as cockroaches and Hitler's classification of Jews in Nazi Germany as vermin contributed to torture and genocide, the study said.

The ability to trust, love, and resolve conflict with loved ones starts in childhood - way earlier than you may think. That is one message of a new review of the literature in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. "Your interpersonal experiences with your mother during the first 12 to 18 months of life predict your behavior in romantic relationships 20 years later," says psychologist Jeffry A. Simpson, the author, with University of Minnesota colleagues W. Andrew Collins and Jessica E. Salvatore. "Before you can remember, before you have language to describe it, and in ways you aren't aware of, implicit attitudes get encoded into the mind," about how you'll be treated or how worthy you are of love and affection.

While those attitudes can change with new relationships, introspection, and therapy, in times of stress old patterns often reassert themselves. The mistreated infant becomes the defensive arguer; the baby whose mom was attentive and supportive works through problems, secure in the goodwill of the other person.

Here's a new version of the old question "Do you dream in color?" What color are the people in your dreams?

A new study finds that the racial makeup of dreams tends to match up with the proportion of different races people run into in their daily lives. A person's own race matters as well, said study researcher Steve Hoekstra, a psychologist at Kansas Wesleyan University.

"If you are, say, a black student at a predominately white school in a predominately white community, yes, you dream more about whites than do other black people in other communities," Hoekstra told LiveScience. "But you also dream more about blacks than most people do in your same community."

The idea for the study quite literally came in a dream. Hoekstra's wife, Anne, noted in a lucid dreaming moment that there was an Asian person in the dream she was having. When she woke up, Anne, who is white, told her husband how odd it was that she didn't dream about Asian people more often, especially because she has an adopted sister who was born in Korea.

"We got to wondering: The race of people in dreams, to what degree does it reflect reality?" Hoekstra said. "Are people even aware of the race of people in their dreams, and if so, does it map onto either the racial composition of places where they live or to their own family?"

Especially when they're not working, why do we maintain the status quo, whether it be health systems, social systems or political and government systems? Why do we resist change even when the system is failing, corrupt or unjust? A new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, illuminates the conditions under which we're motivated to defend our systems--a process called "system justification."

System justification isn't the same as acquiescence, explains Aaron C. Kay, a psychologist at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, who co-authored the paper with University of Waterloo graduate student Justin Friesen. "It's pro-active. When someone comes to justify the status quo, they also come to see it as what should be."

In this lapse of values like equality and fairness, no one can now stay behind personally comfortable walls with people like ourselves and ask someone else - politicians and other "leaders" - to solve the problems that we all let fester, thinking we were immune to catastrophes that only affected others. The cooperation and compromises we need for change will not happen until "we the people" demonstrate that it can be done in our local communities. Wherever we live, we must model it before we demand it of others.

Contrary to what many psychological scientists think, people do not all have the same set of biologically "basic" emotions, and those emotions are not automatically expressed on the faces of those around us, according to the author of a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. This means a recent move to train security workers to recognize "basic" emotions from expressions might be misguided.

"What I decided to do in this paper is remind readers of the evidence that runs contrary to the view that certain emotions are biologically basic, so that people scowl only when they're angry or pout only when they're sad," says Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University, the author of the new paper.

The commonly-held belief is that certain facial muscle movements (called expressions) evolved to express certain mental states and prepare the body to react in stereotyped ways to certain situations. For example, widening the eyes when you're scared might help you take in more information about the scene, while also signaling to the people around you that something dangerous is happening.

But Barrett (along with a minority of other scientists) thinks that expressions are not inborn emotional signals that are automatically expressed on the face. "When do you ever see somebody pout in sadness? When it's a symbol," she says. "Like in cartoons or very bad movies." People pout when they want to look sad, not necessarily when they actually feel sad, she says.

Whether the public blames Wall Street or its bankers for bad decisions depends a lot on the group's level of cohesion as well as its mindfulness, or ability to "think," suggests a new study.

The researchers wanted to find out how people choose to blame large collectives, such as a major corporation, political party, governmental entity, professional sports team or other organization, while still treating members of those groups as unique individuals. They found that the more people judge a united group as having a "mind" - the ability to think, intend or plan - the less they judge each member as having their own capacity to complete acts requiring such a mind. The opposite also held.

"We thought there might be certain cases where instead of attributing mind to individuals, people actually attribute mind to the group," study researcher Liane Young, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, said in a statement.

Young gives a political example of a group mind. "If you're a Democrat, you might think that the Republican Party has an agenda, a mind of its own, but that each individual Republican is just following the crowd, incapable of independent thought," Young said. "That's the trade-off we're after, between group mind and member mind."

Lying - like it or not - is a part of everyday life. Most of us will bend the truth every now and then, with even the most honest person telling the occasional "white lie" to avoid hurting someone else's feelings.

Yet some people, called pathological liars, utter untruths constantly and for no clear reason. Their behavior confounds scientists and oftentimes themselves.

"Pathological liars have a pattern of frequent, repeated and excessive lies or lying behavior for which there is no apparent benefit or gain for the liar," said Charles Dike, clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University and medical director of the Whiting Forensic Division of Connecticut Valley Hospital.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are those rare individuals who might be described as "pathological truth-tellers." These people forego socially convenient and appropriate fibs to speak the unvarnished, upsetting truth.

Intriguingly, this "lying handicap" is a common feature of the developmental disorder high-functioning autism and Asperger's Syndrome.

"People with Asperger's have a tendency to be very blunt and direct - they can be honest to a fault," said Tony Attwood, professor of psychology at Minds & Hearts, an Asperger's and autism clinic in Brisbane, Australia

Psychology and neuroscience have provided clues as to why some people lie up a storm while others have difficulty dissembling or detecting it in others. These contrasting extremes can help us learn about the default human mode of lying on a daily basis to avoid insult, get out of trouble or exploit others.

"If you define lying as 'statements intended to deceive,' then yes we all do lie, every day," said Dike.

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt adapted from the book, People Will Talk: The Surprising Science of Reputation, by John Whitfield (Wiley, 2011).

People who don't care - or don't need to care - what others think of them show how crucial reputation is to civilization. Understanding it could reduce crime, improve ethical behavior and rein in Wall Street excesses

About one in every 100 people doesn't care what others think of him. These people are hard to spot. They are usually physically healthy, and their intelligence is often above average. Yet, in the words of one psychiatrist, they lie without compunction, cheat, steal, and casually violate any and all norms of social conduct whenever it suits their whim. They have no concern for others' suffering, no remorse when caught, and punishment does little to change them. They are called psychopaths.

Mental-health professionals have usually treated psychopathic behavior as a disorder - a large proportion of the prison population, after all, has been diagnosed with some version of the trait. But viewed from an evolutionary angle, psychopathy looks more like a feature than a bug. Most people are cooperative, trusting and generous. This pays off in the long term. It also creates an opening for those who would rather prey on society than join it.

A psychopath's deceitful, manipulative, and callous nature equips him (it's several times more likely to be a "him") to fill this niche. Psychopaths' deficit is in empathy, not reason. They understand morality, but they are immune to other people's emotions. There aren't many openings for psychopaths, because if there were lots of them, there would be no society to plunder. Evolutionary biologists call this frequency dependence: it means that the rarer a trait becomes, the more it pays off. This advantage when rare makes the trait more common, which reduces its advantage. The effect is to keep multiple traits in balance. Sex is one example of frequency dependence: if males were more common than females, they would be less likely to find a mate, so it would pay to have female offspring, pushing the sex ratio back toward equality. Similarly, mathematical models suggest that if antisocial behavior is rare enough, it can prosper.

From the moment they're born, babies are highly attuned to communicate and motivated to interact. And they're great listeners.

New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that during the first year of life, when babies spend so much time listening to language, they're actually tracking word patterns that will support their process of word- learning that occurs between the ages of about 18 months and two years.

"Babies are constantly looking for language clues in context and sound," says Jill Lany, assistant professor of psychology and director of Notre Dame's baby lab, where she conducts studies on how babies acquire language.

"My research suggests that there are some surprising clues in the sound stream that may help babies learn the meanings of words. They can distinguish different kinds of words like nouns and verbs by information in that sound stream."