Can Compassion Training Increase Altruistic Behavior?
“Our findings support the possibility that compassion and altruism can be viewed as trainable skills rather than stable traits,” a research team led by Richard Davidson and Helen Weng of the University of Wisconsin-Madison writes in the journal Psychological Science. Specifically, they report that taking a course in compassion leads to increased engagement of certain neural systems, which prompts higher levels of altruistic behavior. (Tom Jacobs, Pacific Standard)

Smart Giving
Adam Grant: Intelligence and concern for others often go hand in hand. This doesn’t mean it’s wise to give away the farm. The key is to use our brainpower to make sure that our contributions to others don’t come at the expense of our own interests. (The Huffington Post)

If You’re Happy and Your Phone or Computer Knows It
What if these devices could really read our emotions? What if they could interpret every little gesture, every facial cue so that they can gauge our feelings as well as—maybe better than—our best friends? And then they respond, not with information, but what might pass for empathy. We’re not there yet, but we’re quickly moving in that direction, driven by a field of science known as affective computing. It’s built around software that can measure, interpret, and react to human feelings. (Randy Rieland, Innovations, Smithsonian)

More Baba Brinkman
In his next run, aptly titled Evolutionary Tales: A Hip Hop Theatre Cycle, Baba Brinkman will be playing a combination of his three previous works. These are: Ingenious Nature, The Rap Guide to Evolution, and The Canterbury Tales Remixed. (Carin Bondar, PsiVid, Scientific American)

In a recent study conducted in Brazil, researchers studied people who perform simpatias: formulaic rituals that are used for solving problems such as quitting smoking, curing asthma, and warding off bad luck. People perceive simpatias to be more effective depending on the number of steps involved, the repetition of procedures, and whether the steps are performed at a specified time. These findings suggest that the specific nature of rituals may be crucial in understanding when they work—and when they do not.

In my research in collaboration with various colleagues, I find that even a ritual involving a set of random steps (e.g., Step 1. Draw how you currently feel on the piece of paper on your desk for two minutes. Step 2. Please sprinkle a pinch of salt on the paper with your drawing. Step 3. Please tear up the piece of paper. Step 4. Count up to 10 in your head five times) produces powerful effects on people’s behavior.

I think as long as people believe they are performing a ritual, our research suggests, the ritual is likely to affect their thinking, feelings, and behavior.

Francesca Gino is an associate professor of business administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School and the author of the new book Sidetracked.

Why Bullies Succeed at Work
The bottom line? A lot of bullies are keen analyzers and manipulators of social dynamics and reputations; they are highly political animals, with finely tuned antennae that allow them to identify and abuse their victims without anyone else noticing. (Gary Belsky, TIME)

Choice Closure
Decisions can be hard. We may be haunted by the path not taken. But the best way to feel better about the one choice we do make may be to put up a literal barrier to any of the other choices. (Christie Nicholson, Scientific American)

More on Last Week’s Cloning Breakthrough and the Ethical Issues It Raises
Last week’s announcement in Cell that a team in Oregon has successfully derived stem cells from a cloned human embryo raises many questions. Researchers must do their best to answer them. If they do not, then they risk a repeat performance of the misinformation, confusion, and distraction that followed the birth in 1996 of the first mammalian clone, Dolly the sheep. (Nature)

Redefining the Meaning of Religion
Adam Frank: We live in an era when attitudes about religion are changing in the very same moment that the institutions of science are being challenged by forces of religious extremism. For people not given to extremes, this is the moment to get creative. (13.7: Cosmos and Culture, NPR)

The Problem of Consciousness
The hard problem remains unsolved. Yet neuroscientists have still made incredible progress understanding consciousness, from the reasons it exists to the problems we have when it doesn’t work properly. (New Scientist)

Upper-Body Strength and the Economic Views of Men
The hypothesis: Men with more upper-body strength would be less open to economic redistribution. And it turned out to be true, to an extent, depending on socioeconomic status. From an evolutionary biology perspective, the idea is that physical strength would enable a man (and it is gender-specific) to hold and protect property, making him less likely to support sharing with the group. (Dan Nosowitz, Popular Science)

Grief and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
In a move that could add to the tension between religion and science, the American Psychiatric Association changed a controversial diagnosis regarding how grief relates to mental health. (Tim Townsend, Religion News Service)

Throwing Spears and Firing Arrows
Archaeologists have long debated when early humans began hurling stone-tipped spears and darts at large prey. By throwing a spear, instead of thrusting it, humans could hunt buffalo and other dangerous game from a safe distance, with less risk of a goring or mauling. But direct evidence of this hunting technique in early sites has been lacking. A new study of impact marks on the bones of ancient prey shows that such sophisticated killing techniques go back at least 90,000 years ago in Africa and offers a new method of determining how prehistoric hunters made their kills. (Heather Pringle, ScienceNOW)

Can Marijuana Reduce the Pain of Social Exclusion and Loneliness?
A 2010 paper by C. Nathan DeWall, a co-author of this new study, found the use of acetaminophen (i.e., Tylenol) reduces the pain of social rejection. A much-publicized follow-up earlier this year found that use of that same painkiller can reduce existential angst. Since acetaminophen and marijuana work through similar brain receptors, the researchers wondered whether pot similarly softens the pain of exclusion. They describe four experiments providing evidence that indeed it does. (Tom Jacobs, Pacific Standard)

We believe there are two factors at play. First is the moral balancing effect. People who declined to perform a good deed may feel the need to “cleanse” themselves by complying with the second, prosocial request. On the other hand, people desire to remain consistent. So those declining the donation request may want to remain consistent and also decline the second request. While these two effects would suggest two different outcomes, we hypothesized that people’s focus on moral balancing or consistency will depend on whether or not the two requests are related. If they are unrelated, people may think to “cleanse” themselves by complying with the second request after rejecting the first. If related, then people may reject the second request as they do NOT want to appear to be hypocritical by being inconsistent.

Say people rejected an initial donation request from UNICEF to help vaccinate children against polio, and then are asked to make a donation contribution to Reading Is Fundamental. They may feel that complying with the second request can help them cleanse themselves of not supporting the first cause. On the other hand, if the second request is the same request for support for UNICEF, then people’s desire for consistency may be heightened, leading them to reject the second request.

Gary Hsieh is a joint-appointed assistant professor in the departments of communication and telecommunication, information studies and media, and a co-founder of the BITLab, at Michigan State University.

When Apes and Monkeys Split
Palaeontologists working in Tanzania have discovered the oldest known fossils from two major primate groups—Old World monkeys, which include baboons and macaques, and apes, which include humans and chimpanzees. The study, published in Nature, reveals new information about primate evolution. (Chris Palmer, Nature)

Which Emotions Are the Hardest to Fake?
Unlike the commonly deployed social smile, distressed expressions—anger, fear, sadness, and occasionally surprise—prove much more difficult to display on command. (Emily Ferber, Popular Science)

Music-Color Associations
A new study found that people associate upbeat, major-key music with lighter, more vibrant yellow-toned colors, while slower music in minor keys actually gives people the blues. These results were the same for participants in both California and Mexico, suggesting humans may have a surprisingly universal emotional color palette. (LiveScience)

Order of the Good Death
Founded by Caitlin Doughty, a thoughtful young mortician in Los Angeles, the Order of the Good Death is a collective of death professionals, artists, and academics who promote real talk about death and dying. While its name has an occult quality, the Order’s mission is actually quite public: to encourage people to be “death positive,” or open to exploring their thoughts, feelings, and fears about mortality. (Kim O’Connor, Pacific Standard)

Water Isolated for More Than a Billion Years Has Ingredients Necessary to Support Life
The isolated water supply, Chris Ballentine says, provides “secluded biomes, ecosystems, in which life, you can speculate, might have even originated.” His colleagues are now working to establish whether the water does harbor life. The findings may also have implications for life on Mars, Ballentine says, though he acknowledges that the idea is speculative. The surface of Mars once held water and its rocks are chemically no different from those on Earth, he says. “There is no reason to think the same interconnected fluids systems do not exist there.” (Jessica Marshall, Nature)

Investigation at Ball State University
Ball State University has agreed to investigate complaints that a course taught by a physics and astronomy professor has crossed a line from being about science to being about Christianity. (Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed)

Q&A
Jaak Panksepp
Jaak Panksepp recently sat down with Discover executive editor Pamela Weintraub at the magazine’s offices in New York City to explain his iconoclastic take on emotion. His new book, The Archaeology of Mind: 
Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion, will be published in July. (Discover)

More on the Cloning Breakthrough and the Ethical Issues It Raises
Arthur Caplan: A team of experts in cloning at Oregon Health & Science University who have extensive experience and success with primate cloning have announced the cloning of human embryos. This announcement is sure to set off a heated debate about the morality of what they have done and what could be done with cloned human embryos. But while there is some reason for concern, there is more reason for excitement. (Vitals, NBC News)

Is This the End of the Kepler Mission?
NASA officials announced that the Kepler spacecraft, which has found more than 2,700 planetary candidates outside the solar system, has lost the ability to point in a specified direction due to the malfunctioning of one of its reaction wheels. The spacecraft has been put into safe mode while engineers attempt to figure out how to resolve the malfunction. (Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, ScienceInsider)

Cosmic Neutrinos
The South Pole IceCube neutrino observatory has seen a handful of ghostly high-energy neutrinos that almost certainly came from outer space, opening up the skies for neutrino astronomy. “We are witnessing the birth of this field,” says Dan Hooper, a theoretical astrophysicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, who is not a member of IceCube. (Anil Ananthaswamy, New Scientist)

The Emotionary
The Emotionary calls itself “an emotional toolbox that can help you figure out exactly what you’re feeling.” The site, basically, is trying to define as many different, currently undefined emotions that it can, so we can “actually be aware of our emotions so we can talk about them together.” (Ryan O’Hanlon, Pacific Standard)

Lessons From the National Center for Science Education
Science is necessary to defuse anti-science efforts, but not sufficient. Rather than simply deploying artilleries of scientific facts, the NCSE addresses the motivations and tactics of those who would misrepresent research. (Nature)

During the last two decades, James Pennebaker and his colleagues initiated an intriguing body of research showing that people differ in the frequency with which they use first-person pronouns, that these individual differences are relatively stable across context and time, and that they are meaningfully related to underlying psychological processes. For example, frequent use of first-person singular pronouns has been interpreted as an implicit measure of self-focused attention and found to be positively correlated with depressive symptoms.

Recently, we conducted our own study that builds on and extends these findings. Specifically, we assessed pronoun use in clinical interviews. These were relatively standardized situations in which people spoke about their lives, their problems, and their relationships. Participants also responded to questionnaires assessing their depressive symptoms and interpersonal problems. Our results were quite clear: The more participants used pronouns such as “I” or “me” during the interview, the more they reported having elevated depressive symptoms and interpersonal problems. In contrast, the more they used pronouns such as “we” or “us,” the less depressive symptoms and interpersonal problems they had. Note that these associations hold when controlling for other variables that might have influenced participants’ pronoun use (e.g., having a partner or child).

In addition to these findings, we also observed that self-referencing the singular way was associated with a (maladaptive) tendency to seek attention from others, whereas self-referencing the plural way seemed to reflect the (adaptive) tendency to balance social pressures and an individual’s own social needs. In sum, our findings confirm that the automatic processing of first-person pronouns indeed provides a window into how people think, feel, and relate to others.

As always, our study had several limitations, and there are plenty of questions that cannot be sufficiently answered yet. For example, it’s difficult to say what actually “determines” individual differences in pronoun use. The current data, including our own, is essentially correlational, so we cannot draw any causal conclusions. Experimental designs are needed to explore the causes and consequences of pronoun use more thoroughly. Until then, my rather speculative answer to the question is that pronoun use is, at least partially, determined by our current mood and habitual way of interacting with others.

Johannes Zimmermann is a researcher in clinical psychology and psychotherapy at the University of Kassel in Germany.

Racial Bias and the Rubber Hand Illusion
Lara Maister and her colleagues wanted to know if using a rubber hand in a dark skin tone might influence the way white people perceived race. Previous studies have found that people’s brains activate to mirror actions they watch other people doing; this effect is stronger when a person is watching someone of his or her own race and weakens when they see someone of another race. Perhaps, the researchers thought, if people came to see a limb with darker skin as their own, they might perceive more overlap between themselves and someone of another race. (Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience)

Sustaining a Colony on Mars
“Single-planet species don’t survive,” says former astronaut John Grunsfeld, who still works at NASA. “That’s a pretty sound theorem—just look at the dinosaurs. But we don’t want to prove it.” As the only other planet in the solar system we are likely to be able to settle on, Mars looks like the best first step toward establishing an off-Earth foothold. But making Mars a sustainable destination will require a few advances beyond those needed for one-off trips. (Victoria Jaggard, New Scientist)

Can Time Travel Really Be Done?
Paul Davies: Travel into the future is not only possible, we have done it, although so far in only paltry amounts. How about going back in time? That is far more problematic and remains an active area of research. (CNN)

On Bioethical Expertise
Nathan Emmerich: Expert bioethicists cannot allow themselves to become a priestly caste. They must engage with the public and, in doing so, become more fully engaged by and with their concerns. Bioethics must become part of the drive to make science public and part of the politics of scientific expertise. (guardian.co.uk)

New Science of Loneliness
Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. (Judith Shulevitz, The New Republic)

More Emotional Emoticons
In 1872, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a book that cataloged emotional expressions in humans and their link to the animal world. In the book, Darwin described more than 50 universal emotions. Now Facebook, with the help of a psychologist who studies emotions and a Pixar illustrator, has turned some of the emotions Darwin described in the 19th century into a set of emoticons. The hope: to create emoticons that better capture the vast range of human emotion. (Shaunacy Ferro, Popular Science)

Three Ways to Catch a Liar
Paul Ekman: When we teach people how to catch liars, it takes us 32 hours. And there are over 30 different things you look for. I’ll tell you a couple of them in a minute, but if you’re going to remember them and use them and spot them you need a lot of practice. (In Their Own Words, Big Think)

BOOKS
The Serpent’s Promise
In The Serpent’s Promise, Steve Jones, a British geneticist and outspoken anti-religionist, sets out to retell the Bible from the point of view of science. Well, not exactly. Instead of a point-by-point fact-checking of the Christian holy book, Jones has opted to pick some of its main themes. From big topics such as the origins of the world and of humans, Noah’s flood and other epic disasters, and the ultimate fate of Earth, he sketches out our scientific knowledge for each. (Bob Holmes, New Scientist)