Love, the prevalent emotion during Valentine's Day which just passed, is still very mysterious to some. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) conducted a study to find out if love is really blind, and the results say yes. Check out the full article to learn more.

In a recent study conducted by a University of Montreal professor, it was concluded that aggressive behavior in children nowadays is genetic rather than a by-product of violent media as previously assumed with the many issues popping up about violence-related cases due to video games.

Richard Tremblay, a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and psychology, explains that modern media is still relevant to their development and subsequent behavior; however, there were many recorded incidents of violent youths even before the television appeared.

Tremblay has been tracking over 35,000 Canadian children over the past 20 years and presented his findings earlier this week in London at a meeting of The Royal Society, the UK's academy of science. He sums up his study by saying:

We’re looking at to what extent the chronically aggressive individuals show differences in terms of gene expressions compared to those on the normal trajectory. The individuals that are chronically aggressive have… more genes that are not expressed. [This] is an indication that the problem is at a very basic level.

Maternal factors were also seen as potential reasons for violent behavior in children. Smoking, drinking, poor nutrition, and excessive stress can all affect the neurobiological development of the fetus. This may lead to kids with impaired communication or social interaction skills and who are prone to violent and aggressive behavior.

Scientists from the Laboratory for Neural Computation and Cognition at the University of Arizona have found links to the learning behavior of humans and the genes associated with the neurotransmitter Dopamine.

So far, three genes have been pinpointed to affect the production of Dopamine in a person's brain. These genes defined the ability of an individual to learn from both positive and negative decisions they make.

Assistant professor of Psychology and the head of the research team behind the project Michael Frank noted:

When making these kinds of choices, you do not explicitly recall each individual positive and negative outcome of all of your previous such choices. Instead, you often go with your gut, which may involve a more implicit representation of the probability of rewarding outcomes based on past experience

Of the three genes being studied, DSRPP-32 and DRD2 were found to be responsible for the long-term learning and retention of knowledge. The third gene, COMT predicted how a person would change strategies after he or she got hurt by a wrong decision.

Frank further elaborated on the three genes and the reason for their focusing on it:

The reason we looked at these three individual genes in the first place, out of a huge number of possible genes, is that we have a computer model that examines how dopamine mediates these kinds of reinforcement processes in the striatum and prefrontal cortex.

The model makes specific predictions on how subtle changes in different aspects of dopamine function can affect behavior, and one way to get at this question is to test individual genes

Frank admitted that the findings need more research before it can be confirmed. Hopefully this will be further pursued because the findings will be useful not only in developing treatments for patients suffering from Parkinson's disease, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and schizophrenia but also to identify the type of instruction methods to be used on individuals for maximum effect.

If you ever ate mothballs as a youngster thinking they were Mentos left by someone in the closet and you're here now, alive and well, reading this article, it's a safe bet you're not going for them again. That's because your brain has learned something that day and will not allow you to do that again unwittingly.

In the United Kingdom's University of Exeter's School of Psychology, researchers are now discovering how exactly the human brain learns from past mistakes. All the while, it was believed by many in the field that the frontal lobes which commandeer complex mental processes was responsible for the feat, but a new way of testing has proven otherwise.

What actually happens is that the lower temporal regions near the temples send a message within a tenth of a second that warns a person about a mistake he made in the past. Although not fully conscious, it's often enough to make people do a double-take on things.

The study also shows that the temporal area which is mostly associated with recognition is actually more akin to learning than originally thought.

Professor Andy Wills says that this fast process helps us in a lot of ways. "For example," he says "when driving abroad the rules of the road sometimes differ. We may make a mistake the first time we misinterpret a situation, for example not realizing that in the States cars can turn right on a red light. The next time we’re driving out there and see a red light, this early warning signal will immediately alert us to our previous mistake to prevent us from repeating it."

Think that your innocent-looking toddler brother or sister are all sunshine and smiles and no darkness inside? Better think again. Dr. Vasudevi Reddy from the University of Portsmouth's psychology department, studied more than 50 children and interviewed their parents - and was surprised with what she discovered.

In the past, it was established that children's brains are not capable of lying until they reach the age of four. However, Dr. Reddy's research showed that even infants seem to know how to get their parents' attention with fake crying and fake crying. Dr. Reddy said:

Fake crying is one of the earliest forms of deception to emerge, and infants use it to get attention even though nothing is wrong. You can tell, as they will then pause while they wait to hear if their mother is responding, before crying again.

When children reach the age of eight months, they exhibit more elaborate forms of deception, such as doing something forbidden behind their parents' backs and even diverting their parent's attention. Dr. Reddy adds, "Later it becomes more sophisticated by saying, 'I don't care' when threatened with a punishment - when they clearly do."

All in all, Dr. Reddy identified seven kinds of deception performed by children as young as six months to three years of age. "It demonstrates they're clearly able to distinguish that what they are doing will have an effect," Dr. Reddy said of children being capable of lying. "This is essentially all adults do when they tell lies, except in adults it becomes more morally loaded."

So when someone accuses your cute little sister that she stole a cookie or broke a jar, better investigate first before believing your pigtailed sister when she says she didn't do it. Children experiment and learn at a very early age which lies to use in certain situations, and at the same time will learn the repercussions of their actions when properly dealt with.

According to the latest study conducted by three U.S. universities, telling girls that boys are better than them at mathematics irritate them so much and has the potential to negatively affect the girls' performance in the said subject and other areas. The study isn't all about quirks and whatnot as it also focuses on the idea of stereotyping.

University of Chicago Assistant Professor in Psychology Sian Beilock commented that this makes women worry so much (because they want to prove themselves). That worrying uses up important short term or working memory which could otherwise be used performing the task at hand. Beilock continued,

They get so concerned with the stereotype that this spills over into other tests. Our work suggests that if a girl has a mathematics class first thing in the morning and experiences math-related worries in this class, these worries may carry implications for her performance in the class she attends next.

For the study, the women were separated into two groups. The first set was told that they were being tested to see why men generally do better on math. The other group was simply told that they are part of an experiment on Math performance. Women belonging to the first set had an accuracy reduction from nearly 90 percent in a pretest to about 80 percent.

The study was actually based on five previous studies involving about 200 college women who did well in mathematics. Beilock's colleagues involve other experts from the University of Miami and University of California.

Dr. John Charlton, Research Fellow in Psychology in the School of Health, Psychology and Sport, has recently conducted a study on refining the methods for diagnosing game addiction. The current accepted method to diagnosing gaming addiciton is by using symptoms found in people with gambling problems. Dr. Charlton has questioned this approach towards the topic.

In a press release that has recently surfaced, Dr. Charlton said "that several symptoms researchers had thought were important in diagnosing computing-related addictions were actually only indicative of high, but non-addictive, involvement." He added that "This means that taking them into account when conducting research gives an incorrect result - 10% higher than is correct."

In a survey conducted with 400 people from Asheron's Call there have been players who have complained about the negative effect of the game on their lives. The criteria that Dr. Charlton proposed was applied to this group, and the following results came to light:

• more than 40% said their social life was suffering
• 30% recognised gaming was interfering with their work
• 40% said it was causing arguments at home
• 50% confessed they were not getting enough sleep
• 35% said they missed meals to carry on playing.

It should be noted that of the respondents, 85% of them were male, so it would suggest that this is a largely male dominated pastime. It's good that studies such as these are being done. It's so much better to approach the problem in a scientific manner unlike a certain daytime TV show which shredded a disk to avoid gaming addiction.

Scientists in Germany have finally figured out a way to read people's minds.

PhysOrg.com reports that a team from Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience is definitely breaking new psychic ground with their research. The team, led by Dr. John-Dylan Haynes, used MRI machines to track and identify brain activity in order to predict whether their subjects would add or subtract two given numbers.

Before you go all bonkers and start hoarding tinfoil to make into "protective hats," please note that this is only possible through the use of an MRI machine, and it's not very accurate. In fact, the 71 percent accuracy rate is only about 20 percent more successful than random selection.

"It's really weird," said Tanja Steinbach, a 21-year-old Leipzig student who participated in the experiment. "But since I know they're only able to do this if they have certain machines, I'm not worried that everybody else on the street can read my mind."

Still, the research has managed to stir up some interest in the scientific community. "Haynes' experiment strikes at the heart of how good we will get at predicting behaviors," said Dr. Todd Braver, an associate professor in the department of psychology at Washington University. "The barriers that we assumed existed in reading our minds keep getting breached."

Haynes, meanwhile, envisions more benign uses (i.e., not in any way similar to "Minority Report") for the research. For example, he says it could contribute to the development of machines already in existence that respond to brain signals and allow the paralyzed to change TV channels, surf the Internet, and operate small robotic devices.

No, no, not THAT mind reader, silly! Ushering a possible "Minority Report" age to our lives, a brain-scan technique developed by neuroscientists now can help pattern a person's thoughts in their brain before they act. Something like thinking about someone and then hearing the phone ring a few seconds after...

How do they do it exactly? Well, it revolves around the principle that the brain generates certain thought patterns whenever it sends signals to the rest of the body or thinks. It is also believed that a thought is formed right before it becomes action, which is called intention.

Predicting, or reading, intention, is what functional magnetic imaging resonance does. Well, actually it is used to scan the brain for thought patterns in periods before the targeted thought occurs or while it is occurring. Coupled with software that spots subtle differences in brain activity, the method predicts a person's intention with a 70% accuracy.

So you can be sure 70% of the time, you know what your date is going to do (hurray?). While it isn't anything precognitive (precognition is knowing the future before it happens), it does make us think about the ethical ramifications of it's uses. No one likes a telepathic Big Brother...well, not yet.

Barbara Sahakian, a professor of neuro-psychology at Cambridge University, said that a neuroethics society was formed following the rapid advances in neuroscience. It was to monitor and single out the impact of each research being conducted in the field. She said:

Do we want...a 'Minority Report' society where we're preventing crimes that might not happen? A lot of neuroscientists in the field are very cautious and say we can't talk about reading individuals' minds, and right now that is very true, but we're moving ahead so rapidly, it's not going to be that long before we will be able to tell whether someone's making up a story, or whether someone intended to do a crime with a certain degree of certainty.

Professor Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist and director of the Medical Research Council, said that people shouldn't go overboard about the power of these techniques at the moment, but what others can be absolutely sure of is that the developments will continue to roll out. By then they will have more ability to probe people's intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions.

The method is now being looked into, so it can be made to discern between an actual intention and just a passing thought.

Jungian psychology was one of the most enjoyable courses that I took. It was also one of the hardest subjects that I had to hurdle back then. Just to give you a gist of what's up with this article, we're talking about Carl Jung the Swiss psychiatrist, the guy who was the founder of Analytical Psychology and his studies influences the Myers-Briggs personality test.

Basically, all people can be classified using four criteria - Extroversion, Introversion, Sensing, Intuition. All in all, there are sixteen personality types and going over all of them is gonna be a real pain in the neck.

So it's a good thing that a website called Human Metrics has a personality test based on the Carl Jung-Myers-Briggs typological approach. This test could be taken by anybody who feels like it - be it the average Joe or the college graduate.

As for me, I have been a consistent INFP (Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving) type. There are 72 questions for you to answer with a yes or no. Questions range from the deep kind (You readily help people while asking nothing in return) to the more shallower bits (You feel involved when watching TV soaps).  After answering all that, you'll know where personality type you'll belong and there are even a couple of descriptions at hand for you. Click on the read link below and take the test to see what your personality type is.