The evidence suggests that corporations might encourage people to think and act more anti-socially. What does owning stock do to our brains?

It's conventional wisdom in business circles today that corporate directors should "maximize shareholder value." Corporations supposedly exist to serve shareholders' interests, and not (or at least, not directly) those of executives, employees, customers, or the community. However, this shareholder-value dogma begs a fundamental question. What, exactly, do shareholders value?

Most shareholder-value advocates assume that shareholders care only about their own wealth. But it is increasingly accepted that the homo economicus model of purely selfish behavior doesn't always apply. This possibility provides a challenge to the dominant business paradigm of "maximizing shareholder value:" the concept of the prosocial shareholder.

Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.

The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.


"Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves," explains Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study's lead author.

"In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward," adds co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who helped direct the research.

The paper includes four separate experiments, conducted in the United States and Germany, with each study involving an average of 160 college students. The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires, Ryan says. The results also support the more modern self-determination theory, developed by Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester, which links controlling parenting to poorer self-acceptance and difficulty valuing oneself unconditionally.

Really, really liking yourself may give you the edge in your next job interview, a new study suggests.

That's because narcissists, known to be obnoxiously high on self-esteem, are better able to talk about and promote themselves, which projects confidence and expertise to interviewers, University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers explained.

In their two-part study, narcissists scored much higher in a simulated job interview than equally qualified non-narcissists.

"This is one setting where it's OK to say nice things about yourself and there are no ramifications. In fact, it's expected," study co-author Peter Harms, an assistant professor of management, said in a university news release. "Simply put, those who are comfortable doing this tend to do much better than those who aren't."

What is the human stress response and why is it important?

When we talk about stress today, we are usually referring to the pressures we experience in daily life. These can be the pressures to earn a living, pay our bills, meet the demands of raising a family, live up to the expectations of people around us or care for aging parents. They can be daily pressures, such as a traffic jam, disrespectful co-workers or being asked to do things we're not good at. They can come from the environment - poor lighting or noise - and from our minds.

We experience stress when we perceive something as threatening. The threat may be to our life or well-being, but it can just as easily be a threat to an important relationship or our standing at work.

People are unique in that in addition to physical threats, we can experience social and psychological threats as stressful. And this is important. The human stress response developed as a survival mechanism. If you've ever been threatened and felt that rush of strength and energy that made you more physically capable than you have been at other times, then you've experienced the body's stress response. We hear about it in news stories about people who rescue someone by lifting a heavy object, like a car.

To help us survive physical threats, our bodies send extra amounts of energy to our muscles. During a stress response, our senses can become sharper and we can gain physical strength and power. The problem with the human stress response today is that it is so often activated when we are sitting in traffic, on the phone, behind a desk or in some other way inactive. Our bodies prepare for action, but action isn't required by most of the stressors we face today.

Chicago - As any high school senior staring down the SAT knows, when the stakes are high, some test-takers choke. A new study finds that activity in distinct parts of the brain can predict whether a person will remain cool or crumble under pressure.

The results, presented April 1 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, offer some great new clues that may help scientists understand how the brain copes with stressful situations, says psychologist Thomas Carr of Michigan State University in East Lansing. "Sometimes you come across a study you wish you'd done yourself," he says "This is such a study."

In the study, Andrew Mattarella-Micke and Sian Beilock, both of the University of Chicago, had volunteers perform math problems, some easy, some hard, while undergoing a functional MRI scan. These two-step calculations were designed to tap into a person's working memory: Participants had to hold an intermediate number in mind to correctly calculate the final answer.

After volunteers had performed about 25 minutes of low-stakes math, the researchers ratcheted up the pressure. Participants were told that their performance had been monitored the whole time, and if they improved, they would get 60 bucks instead of the 30 they had been promised. In addition to raising the financial stakes, the researchers added social pressure, too. They told volunteers that if the participants failed to improve, a teammate would lose money.

Sleep plays a powerful role in preserving our memories. But while recent research shows that wakefulness may cloud memories of negative or traumatic events, a new study has found that wakefulness also degrades positive memories. Sleep, it seems, protects positive memories just as it does negative ones, and that has important implications for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.

"The study of how sleep helps us remember and process emotional information is still young," says Alexis Chambers of the University of Notre Dame. Past work has focused on the role of negative memories for sleep, in particular how insomnia is a healthy biological response for people to reduce negative memories and emotions associated with a traumatic event.

Two new studies presented this week at a meeting of cognitive neuroscientists in Chicago are exploring the flip side: how sleep treats the positive. "Only if we investigate all the possibilities within this field will we ever fully understand the processes underlying our sleep, memory, and emotions," Chambers says.

Protecting the positive

To test how sleep affects positive memories, Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her colleagues split 70 young adults into two groups, one that got to sleep overnight and one that had to stay awake. Both groups viewed images of positive items, such as puppies and flowers, and neutral items, such as furniture or dinner plates. The researchers then tested the participants' memories of and emotional reactions to the images 12 hours later, after either the period of sleep or wake.

In the film Amèlie, the main character is a young eccentric woman who attempts to change the lives of those around her for the better. One day Amèlie finds an old rusty tin box of childhood mementos in her apartment, hidden by a boy decades earlier. After tracking down Bretodeau, the owner, she lures him to a phone booth where he discovers the box. Upon opening the box and seeing a few marbles, a sudden flash of vivid images come flooding into his mind. Next thing you know, Bretodeau is transported to a time when he was in the schoolyard scrambling to stuff his pockets with hundreds of marbles while a teacher is yelling at him to hurry up.

We have all experienced this: a seemingly insignificant trigger, a scent, a song, or an old photograph transports us to another time and place. Now a group of neuroscientists have investigated the fascinating question: Can a few neurons trigger a full memory?

In a new study, published in Nature, a group of researchers from MIT showed for the first time that it is possible to activate a memory on demand, by stimulating only a few neurons with light, using a technique known as optogenetics. Optogenetics is a powerful technology that enables researchers to control genetically modified neurons with a brief pulse of light.

To artificially turn on a memory, researchers first set out to identify the neurons that are activated when a mouse is making a new memory. To accomplish this, they focused on a part of the brain called the hippocampus, known for its role in learning and memory, especially for discriminating places. Then they inserted a gene that codes for a light-sensitive protein into hippocampal neurons, enabling them to use light to control the neurons.

Your brain talks over when listening to some boring speech, in order to make it more interesting to you, researchers from the University of Glasgow's Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology have found.

"You may think the brain need not produce its own speech while listening to one that is already available. But, apparently, the brain is very picky on the speech it hears. When the brain hears monotonously-spoken direct speech quotations which it expects to be more vivid, the brain simply 'talks over' the speech it hears with more vivid speech utterances of its own," said Dr Bo Yao, researcher at the University of Glasgow's Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology.

Psychopaths are "flourishing" at the top of the corporate ladder at a rate four times higher than the normal population, new research shows.

"They're rising because of bad economic times, and will prevent early solutions to the global financial crisis," Liza van Wyk, CEO of national management training company AstroTech said on Monday.

"The recent high profile resignation of Goldman Sachs trader, South African Greg Smith, who expressed disgust with management practices that were contemptuous of clients is an example of how traumatic such 'bosses' can be for their staff," Van Wyk added.

Quoting new research from Britain's Clive Boddy who developed the first diagnostic test for psychopathy in 1980, Van Wyk said: "Boddy believes that the 2007-2008 financial crisis has resulted in a proliferation of psychopathic personalities in the corner office.

"He says that as companies rely more on academic achievement scores and poach high-performing executives instead of encouraging long careers in their companies, more psychopaths are getting to the top."

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