After having worked in a residential treatment facility for abused and neglected girls for 8 years, I observed that the phenomenon of learned helplessness had become an all-to-common denominator for these children. It was very rare that an abused child was placed with us for a single incident of abuse. By the time these children reached our facility, many of them had already been physically or sexually abused numerous times throughout their childhood and adolescence.

Many times these children had been abused not by a single perpetrator but by several different people, including members of their families and outsiders from the community or in their schools, even after they had been removed from danger. One might assume that once children have been delivered from such abuse, they would immediately take advantage of their sanctum by staying away from dangerous situations, choosing more trustworthy friends and safer boyfriends. Yet again and again, these victims of abuse continued to find themselves with partners that would ultimately perpetrate on them or take advantage of them in some way. Once children are taught they have no control in their lives, it is extremely difficult to learn they can ever have it or that they even deserve to have any control at all.

Adults have more difficulty recognizing faces that belong to people of another race, and this deficit appears to start early.

New research indicates that by the time they are 9 months old, babies are better able to recognize faces and emotional expressions of people who belong to the group they interact with most, than they are those of people who belong to another race.

Babies don't start out this way; younger infants appear equally able to tell people apart, regardless of race.

"These results suggest that biases in face recognition and perception begin in preverbal infants, well before concepts about race are formed. It is important for us to understand the nature of these biases in order to reduce or eliminate [the biases]," said study researcher Lisa Scott, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in a statement.

Awake mental replay of past experiences is essential for making informed choices, suggests a study in rats. Without it, the animals' memory-based decision-making faltered, say scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers blocked learning from, and acting on, past experience by selectively suppressing replay -- encoded as split-second bursts of neuronal activity in the memory hubs of rats performing a maze task.

"It appears to be these ripple-like bursts in electrical activity in the hippocampus that enable us to think about future possibilities based on past experiences and decide what to do," explained Loren Frank, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, a grantee of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). "Similar patterns of hippocampus activity have been detected in humans during similar situations."

Frank, Shantanu Jadhav, Ph.D., and colleagues, report on their discovery online in the journal Science on May 3, 2012.

The brain's neurons are coupled together into vast and complex networks called circuits. Yet despite their complexity, these circuits are capable of displaying striking examples of collective behavior such as the phenomenon known as "neuronal avalanches," brief bursts of activity in a group of interconnected neurons that set off a cascade of increasing excitation. In a paper published in the American Institute of Physics' journal Chaos, an international team of researchers from China, Hong Kong, and Australia explores connections between neuronal avalanches and a model of learning - a rule for how neurons "choose" to connect among themselves in response to stimuli. The learning model, called spike time-dependent plasticity, is based on observations of real behavior in the brain.

Long before they are ready to hatch, baby birds are awake and their brains churning, a new study suggests.

As for what wakes them up, the researchers found loud, meaningful sounds, like the squawks of other chickens, will rouse the sleeping embryos once they are more than 80 percent gestated.

"This work showed that embryo brains can function in a waking-like manner earlier than previously thought - well before birth," study researcher Evan Balaban of McGill University said in a statement.

"Like adult brains, embryo brains also have neural circuitry that monitors the environment to selectively wake the brain up during important events."

During this same time period - the last 20 percent of embryonic life - sleeplike brain patterns also emerge, the researchers said.

"Unfortunately, no one yet understands exactly what sleep-brain activity patterns are controlling, and why they exist," Balaban told LiveScience. "Once embryo brains reach this state, we found that they could be awakened; we think the waking-like" pattern of activity is an immature version of what is seen in awake animals after birth."

London - Time, arguably our most precious nonrenewable resource, has a slippery nature in our minds. Sometimes it flows quickly. In other situations, it trickles at an unbearably slow pace. And, to the horror of many, it speeds as we age.

Why should something as reliable as a ticking clock be perceived with such inconsistency? Claudia Hammond, science author and broadcaster, explores this question in her new book, Time Warped (Canongate Books Ltd, 2012), out today (May 3).

She presented some of her findings at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference here in April, where she won the Society's Public Engagement and Media Award.

The present

Humans are remarkably good at measuring time in general. That is, when asked to estimate the length of, say, an hour, minute or second, we tend to be accurate, although scientists have yet to find a neuronal clock helping us with these measurements, Hammond said.

But our estimates can be greatly affected by psychological factors, including emotion.

In one experiment noted by Hammond, researchers asked people to mill about a room and socialize before telling the researchers, in confidence, which person they'd like as a partner in a subsequent task. Each participant was then individually taken behind closed doors and told one of two things: "We are sorry, but no one wants to be your partner; can you please work on your own?" or "Everyone chose you and now the only way to be fair is to have you work solo." The participants were then asked to estimate how much time they spent on the given task.

If the subjects thought popularity caused their seclusion, time seemed to pass very quickly. But for those who felt rejected, time stretched on and on.

Attention and memory also have powerful effects on time perception, Hammond said. For instance, novel experiences, because they require more mental processing, seem to last longer than familiar situations.

"This is why walking somewhere new seems to take longer than the walk back," she said.

London - A prevalent understanding, particularly in the 1980s, was that boys and girls are born cognitively the same. It was the way parents and society treated them that made them different.

Since then, a preponderance of research has called this belief into question. The majority of today's psychologists agree that some of the differences exhibited by male and female brains are innate.

"We do socialize our boys and girls differently, but the contribution of biology is not zero," said Diane Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California, who has been studying cognitive gender differences for 25 years. Halpern was a keynote speaker at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference here last Thursday (April 19).

How much, rather than whether, biology contributes is where the unusually heated debate is now focused, she said.

Differences confirmed (so far)

Some of the many gender differences that float in popular consciousness have more support than others.

The ones that have been consistently found across cultures, life spans and even across species are the most likely - but by no means guaranteed - to have some biological underpinning.

Across age groups, species and nations, males tend to be better at various spatial skills. For example, male dominance in rotating an object in their minds, a quite large difference that has been reliably found for the last 35 years, has recently been documented in infants as young as 3 months old. Similarly, on average, males across cultures and species are better at judging angle orientation and navigating by cardinal direction.

Females, on the other hand, tend to have more verbal fluency and greater memory for objects - that is, "they are better at remembering where things are," Halpern said during her talk. Women and females from other species are more likely to navigate by using landmarks than cardinal direction.

"But you can get there using both," Halpern told LiveScience, pointing out that having different skills does not mean that men and women have different levels of intelligence. "There is not a smarter sex," she said.

In general, across a variety of tests, differences seem to fall particularly at the tails of distribution curves, with more males doing very poorly and more males doing exceedingly well.

We quickly sense how others view us and play up to these expectations.

A good exercise for learning about yourself is to think about how other people might view you in different ways. Consider how your family, your work colleagues or your partner think of you.

Now here's an interesting question: to what extent do you play up to these expectations about how they view you?

This idea that other people's expectations about us directly affect how we behave was examined in a classic social psychology study carried out by Dr Mark Snyder from the University of Minnesota and colleagues (Snyder et al., 1977). They had a hunch that people automatically sense how others view them and immediately start exhibiting the expected behaviours.

Working behind the counter at a futon store in Tacoma, Wash., is not the place you would expect to find a man some call a mathematical genius of unprecedented proportions.

Jason Padgett, 41, sees complex mathematical formulas everywhere he looks and turns them into stunning, intricate diagrams he can draw by hand. He's the only person in the world known to have this incredible skill, which he obtained by sheer accident just a decade ago.

A brain network associated with impulsivity is linked to teen drug abuse, new research finds.

Teens with diminished activity in a neural network in the front part of the brain are more likely to experiment with drugs, cigarettes and alcohol in early adolescence, the researchers found. Interestingly, this network is not the same one that is linked to the impulsivity of teens with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). That could mean that ADHD is not as much of a risk factor for drug abuse as researchers have worried.

"The take-home message is that impulsivity can be decomposed, broken down into different brain regions," study researcher Hugh Garavan of the University of Vermont said in a statement, "and the functioning of one region is related to ADHD symptoms, while the functioning of other regions is related to drug use."

Garavan and his colleagues scanned the brains of 1,896 14-year-olds as part of a large international project called IMAGEN. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they identified parts of the brain that were linked into networks by determining which areas became more active at the same time as one another. During the scans, the teens did a task that involved pressing a button and then having to keep themselves from pressing that button at a certain cue. This task requires the brain to inhibit behavior.