In a recent Dove ad, an FBI forensic artist sketched a series of women based purely on the way they described themselves and again as others described them. The artist could only hear their voices, not see their faces.

A video about the experiment, which has been viewed on YouTube more than 22 million times and counting, revealed stark difference between the way the women saw themselves and the way others saw them. Across the board, the self-described portraits were the least attractive -- suggesting, according to the Dove marketing team, that we are all more beautiful than we think we are.

So, why can't we see ourselves as we really are?

Over the course of our lives, experts said, our sense of self-image develops through a complicated interplay between cultural ideals, life experiences and accumulated comments by others. The result is, inevitably, a distortion of reality.

"You could look at a photograph and you would always be able to pick yourself out because we all have internal representations of what we look like," said David Schlundt, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

"But all of your experiences, all the teasing you went through as a child, all the self-consciousness you had as a teenager, and all the worrying about whether you would be accepted as good enough or attractive enough are called forth in" how people think of themselves, Schlundt said. "It's not a perceptual thing. It's a combination of emotion, meaning and experience that builds up over our lifetime and gets packaged into a self-schema."

Apr. 24, 2013 - Prisoners who are psychopaths lack the basic neurophysiological "hardwiring" that enables them to care for others, according to a new study by neuroscientists at the University of Chicago and the University of New Mexico.
"A marked lack of empathy is a hallmark characteristic of individuals with psychopathy," said the lead author of the study, Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at UChicago. Psychopathy affects approximately 1 percent of the United States general population and 20 percent to 30 percent of the male and female U.S. prison population. Relative to non-psychopathic criminals, psychopaths are responsible for a disproportionate amount of repetitive crime and violence in society.

"This is the first time that neural processes associated with empathic processing have been directly examined in individuals with psychopathy, especially in response to the perception of other people in pain or distress," he added.

The results of the study, which could help clinical psychologists design better treatment programs for psychopaths, are published in the article, "Brain Responses to Empathy-Eliciting Scenarios Involving Pain in Incarcerated Individuals with Psychopathy," which appears online April 24 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Humpbacks pass on hunting tips.

Humpback whales are able to pass on hunting techniques to each other, just as humans do, new research has found.

A team of researchers, led by the University of St Andrews, has discovered that a new feeding technique has spread to 40 per cent of a humpback whale population.

The findings are published today (Thursday 25 April) by the journal Science.

The community of humpback whales off New England, USA, was forced to find new prey after herring stocks - their preferred food - crashed in the early 1980s.

The solution the whales devised - hitting the water with their tails while hunting a different prey - has now spread through the population by cultural transmission. By 2007, nearly 40 per cent of the population had been seen doing it.

Dr Luke Rendell, lecturer in the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews, said: "Our study really shows how vital cultural transmission is in humpback populations - not only do they learn their famous songs from each other, they also learn feeding techniques that allow them to buffer the effects of changing ecology."

The team - also including Jenny Allen from the University of St Andrews, Mason Weinrich of the Whale Center of New England and Will Hoppitt from Anglia Ruskin University - used a new technique called network-based diffusion analysis to demonstrate that the pattern of spread followed the network of social relationships within the population, showing that the new behaviour had spread through cultural transmission, the same process that underlies the diversity of human culture.

Sam Parnia practices resuscitation medicine. In other words, he helps bring people back from the dead - and some return with stories. Their tales could help save lives, and even challenge traditional scientific ideas about the nature of consciousness.

"The evidence we have so far is that human consciousness does not become annihilated," said Parnia, a doctor at Stony Brook University Hospital and director of the school's resuscitation research program. "It continues for a few hours after death, albeit in a hibernated state we cannot see from the outside."

Resuscitation medicine grew out of the mid-twentieth century discovery of CPR, the medical procedure by which hearts that have stopped beating are revived. Originally effective for a few minutes after cardiac arrest, advances in CPR have pushed that time to a half-hour or more.

New techniques promise to even further extend the boundary between life and death. At the same time, experiences reported by resuscitated people sometimes defy what's thought to be possible. They claim to have seen and heard things, though activity in their brains appears to have stopped.

It sounds supernatural, and if their memories are accurate and their brains really have stopped, it's neurologically inexplicable, at least with what's now known. Parnia, leader of the Human Consciousness Project's AWARE study, which documents after-death experiences in 25 hospitals across North America and Europe, is studying the phenomenon scientifically.

Parnia discusses his work in the new book Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. Wired talked to Parnia about resuscitation and the nature of consciousness.

Humans, when alone, see threats as closer than they actually are. But mix in people from a close group, and that misperception disappears.

In other words, there's safety in numbers, according to a new study by two Michigan State University scholars. Their research provides the first evidence that people's visual biases change when surrounded by members of their own group.

"Having one's group or posse around actually changes the perceived seriousness of the threat," said Joseph Cesario, lead author on the study and assistant professor of psychology. "In that situation, they don't see the threat quite so closely because they have their people around to support them in responding to the threat.'"

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study appears online in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The study was inspired by MSU zoologist Kay Holekamp's research with wild hyenas in Kenya. Holekamp and her team played recordings of hyenas from other parts of Africa and found the hyenas listening to the voices were more likely to approach the source of the sound when they were in groups and more likely to flee when they were alone.

Infants have a conscious experience of the world at as early as 5 months of age, new research finds.

New parents may raise an eyebrow at the idea that their baby might not be a conscious being, but scientists have, until now, not been able to clearly show that infants react with awareness rather than reflexively.

Even in adults, much of the brain's processing of the world occurs without conscious awareness, said Sid Kouider, a neuroscientist at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique in Paris and the Technical University of Denmark.

One odd phenomenon, "blindsight," occurs in people with damage to part of their visual cortex. Although they cannot consciously see, they're able to "guess" the location of a visual stimulus or even catch objects tossed at them. Blindsight reveals that even unconscious processing in the brain can result in seemingly goal-directed behavior.

So when babies look toward a face or grasp an object, they, too, might be doing so without a conscious experience of what they're seeing.

"Infants might be responding in a kind of automatic manner," Kouider told LiveScience. Unfortunately, since babies don't talk, scientists can't test consciousness by asking infants what they experience.

Antonio Zadra of the University of Montreal discusses his Lancet Neurology article.

Three myths about sleepwalking - sleepwalkers have no memory of their actions, sleepwalkers' behaviour is without motivation, and sleepwalking has no daytime impact - are dispelled in a recent study led by Antonio Zadra of the University of Montreal and its affiliated Sacré-Coeur Hospital. Working from numerous studies over the last 15 years at the hospital's Centre for Advanced Studies in Sleep Medicine at the Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal and a thorough analysis of the literature, Zadra and his colleagues have raised the veil on sleepwalking and clarified the diagnostic criteria for researchers and clinicians. Their findings were published in Lancet Neurology.

Journalists are welcome to use the following responses in their own reports. Interviews and further information (including the original French text of this document) can be obtained by contacting media relations at the University of Montreal. The University of Montreal is officially known as Université de Montréal.

Question: What are the causes and consequences of sleepwalking?

A.Z.: "Several indicators suggest that a genetic factor is involved. In 80% of sleepwalkers, a family history of sleepwalking exists. The concordance of sleepwalking is five times higher in monozygotic twins compared to non-identical twins. Our studies have also shown that lack of sleep and stress can lead to sleepwalking. Any situation that disrupts sleep can result in sleepwalking episodes in predisposed individuals."

A.Z.: "Most sleepwalking episodes are harmless. Apart from the fact that the deep slow-wave sleep of sleepwalkers is fragmented, wanderings are usually brief and pose no danger, or when they do, it is minimal. In rare cases, wandering episodes may be longer, and sleepwalkers may injure themselves and put themselves or others in danger: some have even gone as far as driving a car!"

Question: It is said that the sleep disorder mainly affects children. Is this true?

A.Z.: "Many children transitionally sleepwalk between 6 and 12 years of age. It is thought that passing from sleep to wakefulness requires a certain maturation of the brain. In some children, the brain may have difficulty making this transition. Often, the problem disappears after puberty. But sleepwalking may persist into adulthood in almost 25% of cases. It decreases with age, however, because the older you get, the fewer hours of deep slow-wave sleep you enjoy, which is the stage in which sleepwalking episodes occur."

Memory rehearsal during sleep can make a big difference in remembering later.

Why do some memories last a lifetime while others disappear quickly?

A new study suggests that memories rehearsed, during either sleep or waking, can have an impact on memory consolidation and on what is remembered later.

The new Northwestern University study shows that when the information that makes up a memory has a high value (associated with, for example, making more money), the memory is more likely to be rehearsed and consolidated during sleep and, thus, be remembered later.

Also, through the use of a direct manipulation of sleep, the research demonstrated a way to encourage the reactivation of low-value memories so they too were remembered later.

Delphine Oudiette, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychology at Northwestern and lead author of the study, designed the experiment to study how participants remembered locations of objects on a computer screen. A value assigned to each object informed participants how much money they could make if they remembered it later on the test.

"The pay-off was much higher for some of the objects than for others," explained Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern and co-author of the study. "In other words, we manipulated the value of the memories -- some were valuable memories and others not so much, just as the things we experience each day vary in the extent to which we'd like to be able to remember them later."

People believe they'll be happy in the future, even when they imagine the many bad things that could happen, because they discount the possibility that those bad things will actually occur, according to a new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"I've always been fascinated by the changeability of people's perceptions of happiness," says psychological scientist Ed O'Brien of the University of Michigan. "On some days our futures seem bright and exciting, but on other days the same exact future event can feel stressful and terrifying."

With this new research, O'Brien wanted to explore whether fluency - how easy or difficult it feels to think about different events - might play a role in how people think about well-being.

He conducted five studies, asking participants to complete online surveys with questions that addressed past and possible future experiences and perceptions of well-being.

In line with previous research, fluency amplified the effects of past events on participants' reports of well-being: The easier it was for people to generate positive past experiences, the happier they said they were in those times. Likewise, the easier it was to come up with negative past experiences, the more unhappy people said they were.

In the highly-competitive, multi-million dollar advertising industry, science is increasingly becoming an important tool in determining exactly what kinds of marketing campaigns and products appeal to a potential consumer - so much so that there is an emerging field dedicated solely to getting inside our brains to figure out what we really want.

This hybrid of science and advertising is known as neuromarketing, and according to Alex Hannaford of The Telegraph, it has actually been around for more than two decades.

Experts, such as Steve Sands of El Paso, Texas, use electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eye-tracking technology to help measure biological changes experienced by a person in response to marketing-related stimuli, he explained. The technology measures an individual's brain signals, changes in blood flow and other physiological reactions to determine what really interests people on a subconscious level.

Sands uses his equipment to monitor people's reactions to a test-screening of Super Bowl commercials each year. He recruits approximately 30 people, has them don eye-tracking glasses and hooks them up to an EEG machine to monitor their brain waves as they watch the ads scheduled to air during the most expensive time slots in the advertising industry, Hannaford said.