The cold, calculating psychopath, the narcissist or the game-playing, manipulative Machiavellian.


According to clinical psychologist-turned-author, Oliver James, these are the three main types of people that can be found in your office.

Children of survivors of extremely stressful life events face adjustment challenges of their own, as has been most carefully studied among the children of Nazi Death Camp survivors. This "intergenerational" transmission of stress response has been studied predominately from the psychological perspective. However, recent research points to biological contributions as well.

Indeed, a new study just published in Biological Psychiatry demonstrates that offspring born to stressed mothers show stress-induced changes at birth, with altered behavior and gender-related differences that continue into adulthood.

"The notion that biological traits that are not coded by the sequence of DNA can be transmitted across generations is the focus of a field of research called epigenetics. This new paper implicates epigenetic regulation of a well-studied contributor to stress response, CRF1, in the intergenerational transmission of patterns of stress response," said Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry.

The researchers, led by Dr. Inna Gaisler-Salomon at University of Haifa in Israel, were interested in how stress modulates behavior and gene expression across generations. Previous studies in both humans and animals have shown that females exposed to stress even before they conceive can affect their children and even grandchildren.

A new study from the University of Toronto Scarborough shows that people who are aware of and their own thoughts and emotions are less affected by positive feedback from others.

The study, authored by UTSC PhD candidate Rimma Teper, finds that individuals high in trait mindfulness show less neural response to positive feedback than their less mindful peers.

"These findings suggest that mindful individuals may be less affected by immediate rewards and fits well with the idea that mindful individuals are typically less impulsive" says Teper.

Trait mindfulness is characterized by an ability to recognize and accept one's thoughts and emotions without judgment. Mindful individuals are much better at letting their feelings and thoughts go rather than getting carried away.

Joshua Greene, who teaches psychology at Harvard, is a leading contributor to the recently salient field of empirical moral psychology. This very readable book presents his comprehensive view of the subject, and what we should make of it.

The grounds for the empirical hypotheses that he offers about human morality are of three types: psychological experiments, observations of brain activity, and evolutionary theory. The third, in application to the psychological properties of human beings, is necessarily speculative, but the first and second are backed up by contemporary data, including many experiments that Greene and his associates havecarried out themselves.

But Greene does not limit himself to factual claims. He also asks how our moral beliefs and attitudes should be affected by these psychological findings. Greene began his training and research as a doctoral student in philosophy, so he is familiar from the inside with the enterprise of ethical theory conceived not as a part of empirical psychology but as a direct first-order investigation of moral questions, and a quest for systematic answers to them.

His book is intended as a radical challenge to the assumptions of that philosophical enterprise. It benefits from his familiarity with the field, even if his grasp of the views that he discusses is not always accurate.

People suffering from mental disorders such as schizophrenia appear to have a higher rate of left-handedness than the general population, according to a new study.

About 10 percent of people are left-handed. But the results of this study found that 40 percent of people suffering from psychotic disorders were left-handed.

The authors admit the survey size was small, only 107 people who were being treated for psychological problems.

But the numbers are still significant, say the researchers.

"Our results show a strikingly higher prevalence of left-handedness among patients presenting with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, compared to patients presenting for mood symptoms such as depression or bipolar disorder," wrote the researcers.

Conservative Christians see themselves as the last defenders of traditional marriage. Yet many don't quite live up to the ideal.

Conservative Christians think of themselves as the last line of defense for a time-honored and holy tradition, marriage. In the conservative Christian view, marriage is a sacred union ordained by God. It binds one man and woman together so that the "two become one flesh" until they are parted by death.

This view of marriage is unbiblical, to be sure. See Captive Virgins, Polygamy, Sex Slaves: What Marriage Would Look Like If We Actually Followed The Bible. But hey, who actually reads the Bible? Surely, what God meant to say is that marriage should take the form that is most familiar and traditional to us: One male plus one female who is given to the male by her father--that part is biblical--for life.

In this worldview, Christian marriage is under assault by an anti-trinity of powerful and dark forces: feminism, homosexuality and godlessness. Faith, on the other hand, saves both souls and marriages. When I was young, a slogan made its way around my church: The family that prays together stays together. Tom Ellis, former chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention's Council on the Family boldly claimed that "born-again Christian couples who marry...in the church after having received premarital counseling...and attend church regularly and pray daily together... experience only 1 divorce out of nearly 39,000 marriages."

But then came data. According to research by the Barna Research Group over a decade ago, American divorce rates were highest among Baptists and nondenominational "Bible-believing" Christians and lower among more theologically liberal Christians like Methodists, with atheists at the bottom of the divorce pack. When the findings were made public, George Barna took some heat because Christians expected the difference to be more dramatic and to favor believers. Ellis suggested that maybe Barna had sampled badly. Perhaps some people who called themselves born again had never really devoted their lives to Christ. But Barna held his ground, saying, "We rarely find substantial differences" [in the moral behavior of Christians and non-Christians].

Fancy that.

Siblings routinely pick on one another, but when does bickering become bullying - and what can parents do about it?

Sibling relationships can be difficult, and never more so than in childhood. But society often regards the scrapping and squabbling, the play fighting and not-so-playful fighting as a normal part of growing up.

"The public brushes off aggression between siblings as just rivalry," says Corinna Tucker of the University of New Hampshire.

Tucker is the lead author of a new study on the issue for the journal Pediatrics. Almost a third of the 3,600 children questioned said they had been the victim of some sort of sibling aggression in the past 12 months. The included a range of acts from theft and psychological abuse to physical assault, either mild or severe. In comparison, research suggests that up to a quarter of children are victims of schoolyard aggression every year.

Corinna Tucker uses the term "sibling aggression" in her study, but psychologists are increasingly reaching for a familiar label for the bad stuff that goes on between brothers and sisters - bullying. This is defined by experts as intentional acts of aggression, repeated over a period of time, where an individual or group is in a position of power over someone.

So sibling relationships would seem the perfect breeding ground for bullying, since children live together for a long period of time and there is usually an intellectual and physical power imbalance. Although there might not be an outright malevolence, there is often reason for jealousy.

Did the American Psychiatric Association (APA) change the classification of pedophilia to a "sexual orientation" or did the American Family Association (AFA) make a false accusation to stir up fear among Christians?

As it turns out, neither.

Charisma News originally reported the AFA's shocking revelation that the APA's latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) now classifies pedophilia as a sexual orientation or preference instead of a disorder.

Our investigation into the report and statement reveals that the AFA and its American Family Radio Network talk show host Sandy Rios were not fear mongering. Text associated with the DSM did indeed use the words "sexual orientation."

In response to media calls, including queries from Charisma News, the APA admitted there was an error in the DSM and announced plans to correct its manual to make it clear that it does not classify pedophilia as a sexual orientation.

How a belief in "pure evil" shapes people's thinking

Justice Antonin Scalia and Keyser Soze agree: the greatest trick the devil could ever pull is convincing the world he didn't exist. Fortunately for them, the devil does not seem to be effectively executing this plan. Some 70 percent of Americans, according to a 2007 Gallup Poll, believe in his existence. This personification of evil has implications beyond the supernatural, influencing how we think about what it means for people to be "pure evil." And as we prepare to playfully celebrate the wicked and depraved on Halloween night, it's worth pausing to reflect on some of the psychological and behavioral consequences of these beliefs.

Evil has been defined as taking pleasure in the intentional inflicting of harm on innocent others, and ever since World War II social psychologists have been fascinated by the topic. Many of the formative thinkers in the field - Kurt Lewin, Stanley Milgram , Solomon Asch - were inspired by their experiences with, and observations of, what appeared to most people at the time to be the indisputable incarnation of pure evil. But what many saw as a clear demonstration of unredeemable and deep-seated malice, these researchers interpreted as more, in the words of Hannah Arendt, banal. From Milgram's famous studies of obedience to Zimbardo's prison study, psychologists have argued for the roots of evil actions in quite ordinary psychological causes. This grounding of evil in ordinary, as opposed to extraordinary, phenomena have led some to describe the notion of "pure evil" as a myth. A misguided understanding of human nature deriving both from specific socio-cultural traditions as well as a general tendency to understand others' behavior as a product solely of their essence, their soul, as opposed to a more complicated combination of environmental and individual forces.

In February, 1891, the first few advertisements started appearing in papers: Ouija, the Wonderful Talking Board, boomed a Pittsburgh toy and novelty shop, describing a magical device that answered questions "about the past, present and future with marvelous accuracy" and promised "never-failing amusement and recreation for all the classes," a link "between the known and unknown, the material and immaterial." Another advertisement in a New York newspaper declared it "interesting and mysterious" and testified, "as Proven at Patent Office before it was allowed. Price, $1.50."

This mysterious talking board was basically what's sold in board game aisles today: A flat board with the letters of the alphabet arrayed in two semi-circles above the numbers 0 through 9; the words "yes" and "no" in the uppermost corners, "goodbye" at the bottom; accompanied by a "planchette," a teardrop-shaped device, usually with a small window in the body, used to maneuver about the board. The idea was that two or more people would sit around the board, place their finger tips on the planchette, pose a question, and watch, dumbfounded, as the planchette moved from letter to letter, spelling out the answers seemingly of its own accord. The biggest difference is in the materials; the board is now usually cardboard, rather than wood, and the planchette is plastic.

Though truth in advertising is hard to come by, especially in products from the 19th century, the Ouija board was "interesting and mysterious"; it actually had been "proven" to work at the Patent Office before its patent was allowed to proceed; and today, even psychologists believe that it may offer a link between the known and the unknown.

The real history of the Ouija board is just about as mysterious as how the "game" works. Ouija historian Robert Murch has been researching the story of the board since 1992; when he started his research, he says, no one really knew anything about its origins, which struck him as odd: "For such an iconic thing that strikes both fear and wonder in American culture, how can no one know where it came from?"