How well a person recovers from traumatic events may depend on in part on their self-esteem, according to researchers who examined the effects of a major earthquake on the survivors' brains.

The researchers had conducted brain scans of university students for a study before the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in 2011. After the earthquake, they repeated the scans on 37 of the same people, and tracked stress-induced changes in their brains in the following months.

"Most importantly, what these findings show, is that the brain is dynamic - that it's responding to things that are going on in our environment, or things that are part of our personality," said Rajita Sinha, professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, who wasn't involved in the study.

In the brain scans taken immediately after the incident, the researchers found a decrease in the volume of two brain regions, the hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex, compared with the scans taken before the incident.

One year later, the researchers repeated the scans and found that the hippocampus continued to shrink, and people's levels of depression and anxiety had not improved.

However, other changes in the brain had reversed, the researchers found: The volume of the orbitofrontal cortex had increased. Moreover, this increase was correlated with survivors' self-esteem scores soon after the earthquake, according to the study published today (April 29) in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

In a study of 14,000 U.S. children, 40 percent lack strong emotional bonds - what psychologists call "secure attachment" - with their parents that are crucial to success later in life, according to a new report. The researchers found that these children are more likely to face educational and behavioral problems.

In a report published by Sutton Trust, a London-based institute that has published more than 140 research papers on education and social mobility, researchers from Princeton University, Columbia University, the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Bristol found that infants under the age of three who do not form strong bonds with their mothers or fathers are more likely to be aggressive, defiant and hyperactive as adults. These bonds, or secure attachments, are formed through early parental care, such as picking up a child when he or she cries or holding and reassuring a child.

"When parents tune in to and respond to their children's needs and are a dependable source of comfort, those children learn how to manage their own feeling and behaviors," said Sophie Moullin, a joint doctoral candidate studying at Princeton's Department of Sociology and the Office of Population Research, which is based at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "These secure attachments to their mothers and fathers provide these children with a base from which they can thrive."

Written by Moullin, Jane Waldfogel from Columbia University and the London School of Economics and Political Science and Elizabeth Washbrook from the University of Bristol, the report uses data collected by the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative U.S. study of 14,000 children born in 2001. The researchers also reviewed more than 100 academic studies.

Their analysis shows that about 60 percent of children develop strong attachments to their parents, which are formed through simple actions, such as holding a baby lovingly and responding to the baby's needs. Such actions support children's social and emotional development, which, in turn, strengthens their cognitive development, the researchers write. These children are more likely to be resilient to poverty, family instability, parental stress and depression. Additionally, if boys growing up in poverty have strong parental attachments, they are two and a half times less likely to display behavior problems at school.

Researchers believe psychedelic mushrooms may help alleviate psychological and spiritual distress for patients with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.

Survival rates for cancer patients have improved dramatically in recent years with improvements to diagnosis and treatment, but physicians sometimes struggle to address patients' psychological needs.

A recent study suggests psilocybin - the psychoactive drug in magic mushrooms - may help patients with the anxiety, depression, anger, social isolation, and hopelessness they may experience while undergoing cancer treatment.

The hallucinogen treatment, which is currently seeking additional participants, has been shown to induce a mystical or spiritual experience in patients and offers a unique therapeutic approach to reduce anxiety in terminal cancer patients, researchers said.

"Mystical or peak consciousness states in cancer patients have been associated with a number of benefits including improved psychological, spiritual, and existential well-being," said study co-author Anthony Bossis, of the New York University College of Dentistry.

The changes are so strong they can even influence a man's grandchildren

They make the offspring more prone to conditions like bipolar disorder

© AlamyWhen a man is traumatised changes occur in his sperm which are passed on to his children

The children of people who have experienced extremely traumatic events are more likely to develop mental health problems.

And new research shows this is because experiencing trauma leads to changes in the sperm.

These changes can cause a man's children to develop bipolar disorder and are so strong they can even influence the man's grandchildren.

Psychologists have long known that traumatic experiences can induce behavioural disorders that are passed down from one generation to the next.

However, they are only just beginning to understand how this happens.

Researchers at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich now think they have come one step closer to understanding how the effects of traumas can be passed down the generations.

The researchers found that short RNA molecules - molecules that perform a wide range of vital roles in the body - are made from DNA by enzymes that read specific sections of the DNA and use them as template to produce corresponding RNAs.

This week on SOTT Talk Radio we're interviewing Stephen Braude, philosopher, academic, parapsychologist, author and pianist. Braude is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and former Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, past President of the Parapsychological Association, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.

A lifelong student of psychic phenomena, Braude has written extensively on the central issues in parapsychology, publishing over 60 philosophical essays, along with 5 books, including: Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life After Death, ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Examination, and The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations. Stephen's sixth book, to appear summer 2014, is titled: Crimes of Reason (Rowman & Littlefield).

Broadly speaking, parapsychology is the study of mediums, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and other supernatural and paranormal phenomena. Tune in from 2-4pm EST (11am-1pm PST, 8-10pm CET) as we venture into the broader reality Official Science is scared to explore!

Running Time: 02:01:00

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Have you ever had a sudden impulse to jump under a train, stab your partner with a knife or perform some other unthinkable act?

Many see these as signs of mental disturbance but, according to new research from around the world, fully 94% of people have experienced unwanted, intrusive thoughts or impulses.

The phenomenon is not confined solely to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder and other problematic thinking patterns.

The research comes from Concordia University in Canada and 15 other institutions in different countries, including France, Hong Kong, Sierra Leone and Australia (Moulding et al., 2014).

They found that across 777 participants, almost all of them had experienced intrusive thoughts or images in the last three months.

Scientists have developed an "off-switch" for the brain to effectively shut down neural activity using light pulses.

In 2005, Stanford scientist Karl Deisseroth discovered how to switch individual brain cells on and off by using light in a technique he dubbed 'optogenetics'.

Research teams around the world have since used this technique to study brain cells, heart cells, stem cells and others regulated by electrical signals.

However, light-sensitive proteins were efficient at switching cells on but proved less effective at turning them off.

Now, after almost a decade of research, scientists have been able to shut down the neurons as well as activate them.

Mr Deisseroth's team has now re-engineered its light-sensitive proteins to switch cells much more adequately than before. His findings are presented in the journal Science.

Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which funded the study, said this improved "off" switch will help researchers to better understand the brain circuits involved in behavior, thinking and emotion.

Some of the world's nastiest behavior grows out of spite, the dark art of hurting an opponent even when it comes at a price to yourself.

Divorcing couples often go out of their way to hurt each other and even their kids, skirting the more peaceful path to moving on.

Tax evaders can grow so vengeful over a penalty that they'll double down on their cheating.

Terrorists can be so keen to hurt their enemies, they commit suicide in the process.

Spitefulness can even elevate a small slight, like lurking in wait for a parking space, into a vengeance worthy transgression.

Red makes us more attractive, blue more alert, while pink can sap a man's strength. Once dismissed as hippyish, the science of colour is finally being taken seriously

If you give the patient one pill, he perks up. If you give him another pill, he calms down. That might not surprise you. What might, though, is that it still works even when the pills contain no actual medicine.

Studies show that red pills are more effective stimulants than blue pills; blue pills are more effective as sleeping tablets than orange tablets. Green, white or blue pills aren't as effective as red ones as painkillers. But these were all placebos, administered in a series of experiments in the Sixties and Seventies, looking at how our perception of colour affects our minds and bodies. There was no painkiller, there was no stimulant.

The idea that colours affect our mood - red makes us angry, or sexually receptive; blue soothes us, or saddens us; that sort of thing - seems vaguely hippyish. Alternative medicine types push "chromotherapy", treating unwellness with colour; an odd amalgam of Victorian pseudoscience and cod-eastern mysticism. But now, the body of scientific research into colour is growing. And it all points to one thing: our perception of colour really does affect our minds, and our bodies. A 2004 study found that football teams wearing red were statistically more likely to win than teams in other colours. Another, in 2008, found that male volunteers shown photos of averagely attractive women on red and white backgrounds rated the women on red as more good-looking. Meanwhile, an experiment in the Seventies found that male prison inmates became physically weaker when they were housed in pink-painted cells.

Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks - research shows that taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Walk into any university lecture hall and you're likely to see row upon row of students sitting behind glowing laptop screens. Laptops in class have been controversial, due mostly to the many opportunities for distraction that they provide (online shopping, browsing Reddit, or playing solitaire, just to name a few). But few studies have examined how effective laptops are for the students who diligently take notes.

"Our new findings suggest that even when laptops are used as intended - and not for buying things on Amazon during class - they may still be harming academic performance," says psychological scientist Pam Mueller of Princeton University, lead author of the study.

This is a photo of a student taking notes by hand.Mueller was prompted to investigate the question after her own experience of switching from laptop to pen and paper as a graduate teaching assistant:

"I felt like I'd gotten so much more out of the lecture that day," says Mueller, who was working with psychology researcher Daniel Oppenheimer at the time. "Danny said that he'd had a related experience in a faculty meeting: He was taking notes on his computer, and looked up and realized that he had no idea what the person was actually talking about."

Mueller and Oppenheimer, who is now at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, conducted a series of studies to investigate whether their intuitions about laptop and longhand note-taking were true.