5th Jan 2008 : Psychologists at Harvard University have developed a new method to study extrasensory perception that, they argue, can resolve the century-old debate over its existence.

29th Nov 2007 : Fear of looking unattractive can be a stronger motivation for keeping people going to the gym than the hope of looking good, a study says.

22nd Nov 2007 : Even infants can tell the difference between naughty and nice playmates, and know which to choose, a new study finds.

11th Nov 2007 : Cults maintain their following by putting members through a cycle of ups and downs. There is a psychology behind these tactics and it is to exploit the the members and keep them dependent on the cult. This brainwashing is very effective and it is important for people to understand how it works.

11th Nov 2007 : Since writing about the newly discovered ability of monkeys to rationalize, I've gotten reactions to the experiment from some other experts in cognitive dissonance. Some of them find the new research with monkeys intriguing but say it doesn't explain the complicated forms of rationalization employed by human primates.

6th Nov 2007 : For half a century, social psychologists have been trying to figure out the human gift for rationalizing irrational behavior.

9th Oct 2007 : Royal is a cantankerous old male baboon whose troop of some 80 members lives in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana. A perplexing event is about to disturb his day.

7th Oct 2007 : Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith

7th Oct 2007 : Neuroscientists have taken a step closer to a physiological explanation of why some people work and play well with others.

4th Oct 2007 : The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science presents Andy Thomson's lecture titled "We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers." This video was taken at the AAI 2007 conference in Washington, D.C.

28th Sept 2007 : Variations in two genes may increase the likelihood that a person will report suicidal thoughts after taking an antidepressant, researchers reported yesterday.

22nd Sept 2007 : Why do some juries take weeks to reach a verdict, while others take just hours? How do judges pick the perfect beauty queen from a sea of very similar candidates?

13th Sept 2007 : Resistance to certain scientific ideas derives in large part from assumptions and biases that can be demonstrated experimentally in young children and that may persist into adulthood. In particular, both adults and children resist acquiring scientific information that clashes with common-sense intuitions about the physical and psychological domains. Additionally, when learning information from other people, both adults and children are sensitive to the trustworthiness of the source of that information. Resistance to science, then, is particularly exaggerated in societies where nonscientific ideologies have the advantages of being both grounded in common sense and transmitted by trustworthy sources.

13th Sept 2007 : Earlier this summer, the American Psychiatric Association announced that a 27-member panel will update its official diagnostic handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

12th Sept 2007 : Thinking about animals � and especially thinking about whether animals can think � is like looking at the world through a two-way mirror.

5th Sept 2007 : What's it like to work with relatives who think sex is like a handshake, who organise orgies with the neighbours, and firmly believe females should be in charge of everything?

4th Sept 2007 : By providing wrong but matching views and feelings, scientists mentally "teleport" people outside their own bodies

31th Aug 2007 : New study shows different regions of the brain kick into action depending on the perceived threat level.

31th Aug 2007 : The chimpanzees, after spotting the humans at the corner of their compound, came over to us with their arms outstretched and their palms turned upward.

21st Aug 2007 : The reason he had picked me from the audience, Apollo Robbins insisted, was that I'd seemed so engaged, nodding my head and making eye contact as he and the other magicians explained the tricks of the trade.

4th Aug 2007 : In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people's judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.

2nd Aug 2007 : A 38-year-old man who spent more than five years in a mute, barely conscious state as a result of a severe head injury is now communicating regularly with family members and recovering his ability to move after having his brain stimulated with pulses of electric current, neuroscientists are reporting.

2nd Aug 2007 : Sure, we know about the sexual side effects of SSRIs. But researchers now wonder if that's the only aspect of romance the drugs can influence.

26th Jul 2007 : The capacity to resist peer pressure in early adolescence may depend on the strength of connections between certain areas of the brain, according to a study carried out by University of Nottingham researchers.

9th Jul 2007 :

28th Jun 2007 : Using 25,000 neurons from the brain of a rat, scientists at the University of Florida in Gainesville have created a living "brain" that can fly a simulated high performance aircraft.

30th May 2007 : The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

27th Apr 2007 : Strides in understanding human brain chemistry and genetics are giving scientists hope they may be able to defuse violent behavior to avoid tragedies like last week's university massacre in Virginia, neurologists say.

16th Apr 2007 : German government decides to tackle the myth of the 'Mozart effect'

10th Apr 2007 : Can Prozac keep you from falling�and staying�in love? How SSRIs are wreaking havoc on courtship.

10th Apr 2007 : Science editor David Corcoran interviews Helen Fisher about the science of sexual behavior.

10th Apr 2007 : Sexual desire. The phrase alone holds such loaded, voluptuous power that the mere expression of it sounds like a come-on � a little pungent, a little smutty, a little comical and possibly indictable.

26th Mar 2007 : A person has two hands, two legs, two eyes, two cerebral hemispheres. But it is only at first sight that a human being is a symmetric creature.

24th Mar 2007 : Prostitutes, perversions and public scandals � the stuff of the 21st century tabloids was familiar to readers three centuries earlier, according to new research from the University of Leeds.

22nd Mar 2007 : NO ONE seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

22nd Mar 2007 : Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists reported yesterday.

20th Mar 2007 : Playground roughhousing has long been a tradition of children and adolescents, much to the chagrin of several generations of parents who worry that their child will be hurt or worse, become accustom to violence and aggression.

10th Mar 2007 : Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before.

8th Mar 2007 : Every parent of a young child knows how emotionally attached children can become to a soft toy or blanket that they sleep with every night.

31th Jan 2007 : Is morally-motivated choice different from other kinds of decision making? Previous research has implied that the answer is yes, suggesting that certain sacred or protected values are resistant to real world tradeoffs.

23rd Jan 2007 : During the first phase of sleep our brain is occupied with our last awake experiences.

23rd Jan 2007 : Duke University Medical Center researchers have discovered that activation of a particular brain region predicts whether people tend to be selfish or altruistic.

21st Jan 2007 : The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs.

29th Nov 2006 : A new study has found that adolescents who play violent video games may exhibit lingering effects on brain function, including increased activity in the region of the brain that governs emotional arousal and decreased activity in the brain's executive function, which is associated with control, focus and concentration.