A leading cause of post-traumatic stress disorder is guilt that troops experience because of moral dilemmas faced in combat, according to preliminary findings of a study of active-duty Marines.

The conflicts that servicemembers feel may include "survivor's guilt," from living through an attack in which other servicemembers died, and witnessing or participating in the unintentional killing of women or children, researchers involved in the study say.

"How do they come to terms with that? They have to forgive themselves for pulling the trigger," says retired Navy captain Bill Nash, a psychiatrist and study co-author.

The idea of "moral injury" as a cause of PTSD is new to psychiatry. The American Psychiatric Association is only now considering new diagnostic criteria for the disorder that would include feelings of shame and guilt, says David Spiegel, a member of the working group rewriting the PTSD section.

Traditionally, PTSD symptoms such as nightmares or numbness to the world have been linked to combat violence, fear of being killed or loss of friends.

Recently, I received a message from a someone who read Puzzling People and they asked me this question: "Why are ALL fairy tales about psychopaths and psychopathic behavior?"

Mythology and folklore are really an early form of psychology. In a pre-scientific era - it was the only means by which average people could anchor their frustration and warnings to others regarding the Consciousness Parasites and other pathological predators within the material world - without having to rely exclusively on supernatural-religious concepts such as demons, succubi and so on. This was probably to avoid charges of witchcraft and blasphemy. So rather than deal with purely religious motifs - from around the Middle Ages on - the psychopath entered into the world of children's fairy tale.

Just about all European fairy tales from this period on are about psychopaths and psychopathic behaviour. How to recognise their traits, and deal with them. This is not by accident - a collective folk memory was generated in the guise of children's stories of wicked stepmothers, wolves disguised as kindly and familiar people turning out to be killers. This repository of pathological awareness was essentially the only option available to a mainly illiterate population of the time. A powerful method to warn others in such a way that would be passed on and without risking ridicule and censure - by application of a linguistic folk art to develop changes in the collective consciousness. Ultimately, this is what these fairy tales were attempting to achieve going forward - a warning of sorts. While also serving the function of an allegorical collective therapy session to heal past trauma within a community caused by psychopaths in the past.

Emotional safety. We all need it. We really can't do without it. But do we know what it is?

More than at any other time in the history of humankind we do.

Freud, a neurologist by training, acknowledged that there was no way to confirm the validity of his theories unless and until it became possible to measure and monitor neurophysiological processes.

Current technology enables us to now detect patterns of activation and function of the brain and peripheral nervous system in ways that Freud could only have dreamt about.

Breakthroughs in research and theory - with huge indebtedness to the work of Stephen Porges, Ph.D., pioneering neuroscientist - enable us to define the term emotional safety and describe it in neuroscientific, as well as psychological, terms.

The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

And the more urgent the issue, the more people want to remain unaware, according to a paper published online in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"These studies were designed to help understand the so-called 'ignorance is bliss' approach to social issues," said author Steven Shepherd, a graduate student with the University of Waterloo in Ontario. "The findings can assist educators in addressing significant barriers to getting people involved and engaged in social issues."

Through a series of five studies conducted in 2010 and 2011 with 511 adults in the United States and Canada, the researchers described "a chain reaction from ignorance about a subject to dependence on and trust in the government to deal with the issue."

Scientists have used scans to shed more light on how the brain deals with the memory of unpleasant or traumatic events during sleep.

The University of California, Berkeley team showed emotional images to volunteers, then scanned them several hours later as they saw them again.

Those allowed to sleep in between showed less activity in the areas of the brain linked to emotion.

Instead, the part of the brain linked to rational thought was more active.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, said it showed the links between dreams and memory.

Most people have to deal with traumatic events at some point in their lives, and, for some, these can produce post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), leaving them emotionally disturbed long after the event itself.

Lao Pan, an unmarried man without much family, found close companionship with his loyal dog. And even through tragedy, their steadfast bond lives on.

Pan lived in the Chinese village of Panjiatun, but died earlier this month at the age of 68. His furry friend was found by villagers at Pan's grave safeguarding the site according to BBC News. The loyal pup refused to leave even after going seven days without food.


Sky News reports that since noticing the dog, villagers have been bringing food and water to the gravesite, and are even planning to build a kennel there for the dog to sleep in.

Wherever I go and ask people what is missing from their lives, the most common answer (if they are not impoverished or seriously ill) is "community." What happened to community, and why don't we have it any more? There are many reasons - the layout of suburbia, the disappearance of public space, the automobile and the television, the high mobility of people and jobs - and, if you trace the "why's" a few levels down, they all implicate the money system.

More directly posed: community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbors - or indeed on any specific person - for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it.

In former times, people depended for all of life's necessities and pleasures on people they knew personally. If you alienated the local blacksmith, brewer, or doctor, there was no replacement. Your quality of life would be much lower. If you alienated your neighbors then you might not have help if you sprained your ankle during harvest season, or if your barn burnt down. Community was not an add-on to life, it was a way of life. Today, with only slight exaggeration, we could say we don't need anyone. I don't need the farmer who grew my food - I can pay someone else to do it. I don't need the mechanic who fixed my car. I don't need the trucker who brought my shoes to the store. I don't need any of the people who produced any of the things I use. I need someone to do their jobs, but not the unique individual people. They are replaceable and, by the same token, so am I.

Shark-like, they rise fast but risk killing the world economy, concludes a business professor.

Given the state of the global economy, it might not surprise you to learn that psychopaths may be controlling the world. Not violent criminals, but corporate psychopaths who nonetheless have a genetically-inherited biochemical condition that prevents them from feeling normal human empathy.

Scientific research is revealing that 21st century financial institutions with a high rate of turnover and expanding global power have become highly attractive to psychopathic individuals to enrich themselves at the expense of others, and the companies they work for.

A peer-reviewed theoretical paper from 2011 titled "The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis" details how highly-placed psychopaths in the banking sector may have nearly brought down the world economy through their own inherent inability to care about the consequences of their actions.

Reasons why we see only what we expect to see.

People tend to think of perception as a passive process. We see, hear, smell, taste or feel stimuli that impinge upon our senses. We think that if we are at all objective, we record what is actually there. Yet perception is demonstrably an active rather than a passive process; it constructs rather than records "reality." Perception implies understanding as well as awareness. It is a process of inference in which people construct their own version of reality on the basis of information provided through the five senses.

In the illustration a grid appears normal in the center, yet the left and right areas are irregular and incoherent. If you stare at the center of the grid for a few minutes, the grid will miraculously heal itself and you will perceive a perfect grid. In reality, the grid is still incoherent but your mind will perceive it as a perfect grid. This is because your mind is strongly influenced by your past experiences, education, cultural values and role requirements as well as by the stimuli recorded by their receptor organs. Your mind expects the grid to be a perfect grid and makes it so.

In the spring of 2002, I filed suit for the first of 243 victims of priest sexual abuse committed within the Archdiocese of Louisville, Kentucky. That same spring, Jerry Sandusky, an assistant coach of football at Penn State witnessed a 10 year-old boy being raped in the Penn State locker room. Like the bishops in the Catholic Church, Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno sought to protect the institution they loved rather than the children they were obligated to protect.

I grew up in the South. My dad was a lawyer, his dad was a lawyer, and his dad's dad was a Methodist Bishop. I was all about righteousness. I just knew that I would make a difference and the law was going to be my path.

I have always sought out cases no one else would touch: a case against a convenience store for insisting that a 6 year-old boy be fingerprinted, photographed, and jailed for stealing a 42 cent pack of gum; a case against a county jailer for locking up an 7 year-old boy because he was with his mother and father when they were arrested for a petty crime; a case against a lawyer for duping dozens of his female clients--for decades--into believing that he must perform "physical" examinations. His conduct was reported to the state bar association and went unpunished for twenty years.