When fruit flies respond to the threat of an overhead shadow, is that fear? The response to visual threats includes many essential elements of what we humans call fear and David J. Anderson of the…

The prospect of death, and the impact of mortality, is a lot less daunting when there is belief in the afterlife, say psychologists. Dr. Arnaud Wisman and Dr. Nathan Heflick, of the University of…

In an experiment, rats who saw another rat drowning extended a helping paw to rescue it, and the behavior was even more pronounced in rats that previously had a watery near-death experience. …

The act of identifying a perpetrator is memory and involves thinking but it also constitutes a moral decision - because by identifying or not identifying someone, an eyewitness runs the risk of…

If you got a recent promotion, or a new car on Facebook, that's good news, and in the idealized vision of social media it should be shared. That is just social media marketing talking. In reality,…

Male job applicants are perceived to have high levels of leadership potential and are rated as a better employment prospect than a female applicant with proven leadership track record, according to a…

Brian Owens, Inside Science - Habitual gamblers are more likely to believe they see patterns in random sequences of events, and to act on that belief, than the general population, according to new…

America is the fattest developed country on earth and psychologists say that positive images and societal reinforcement make losing weight easier - obese people are more likely to have obese friends…

A majority of American adults have tried dieting to lose weight at some point in their lives, and at any given time, about one-third of the adult population say they're currently dieting, which is…

Our view of what makes us happy has changed  since 1938. In the United States of 1938, for example, it was a good thing not to have heat waves and droughts and a Dust Bowl across 75 percent of…