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Our grins and frowns may just be tools to manipulate others, discovers Emma Young [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the side effects of empathy not just its good side, to understand more the distinction between what individual's feel according from the research conducted by Tania Singer, psychologist of Max Planck Society. Topics discussed include the impact of social networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter to publicize emotions, the physical effects of emotional contagion through observation and looking for other people with compassion.

The article focuses on the risks of too much empathy and how people might be able to control how much they let others' emotions affect them. Topics discussed include the goodness in empathy, how social networks such as Facebook and Twitter indicate just how sensitive people's emotions are to outside influence, and how much one has to care about someone to be infected by their stress. It also explains how empathy overload can happen in the workplace and how to avoid empathy burnout.

People living in areas where incomes are more similar tend to report greater wellbeing - and this holds not just for overall high-income regions, such as Scandinavian countries, but regions where money isn't used much at all, such as the Solomon Islands. The researchers think this could be because even though there is lower social mobility and also greater income inequality in the US compared with western Europe, Americans are greater believers in the possibility of social mobility. Matthew A. Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania, US, analysed data from more than 33,000 employed adults in the US, who had been asked to report on their own wellbeing at random timepoints via a smart phone app. [Extracted from the article]

"Awe walks" can boost positive emotions among older adults Strategies to prevent or at least counteract these deteriorations are badly needed, and new research by a team in the US, published in the journal Emotion, has now identified one apparently promising strategy: so-called "awe walks". Only the awe group was told that 'with the right outlook, awe can be found almost anywhere, but it is most likely to occur in places that involve two key features: physical vastness and novelty'. [Extracted from the article]

Are you an evening person - an owl? The closer a participant was to the lark extreme, the more likely they were to use cognitive reappraisal to regulate their emotions. [Extracted from the article]

The article presents a neuropsychological observation and understanding about dreams. Patrick McNamara of Boston University, states that dreams modulate the emotion and are crucial for processing emotions. It also discusses that rapid-eye-movement (REM) dream allow individuals to relive powerful emotional memories, but without the rush of stress hormones that accompanied the real life experiences. It explores the factors that can influence the content of dreams.