【推荐1】Unlike so-called basic emotions such as sadness, fear and anger, guilt emerges a little later, in line with a child's growing grasp of social and moral standards. Children aren't born knowing how to say “I'm sorry”; rather, they learn over time that such statements appease parents and friends—and their own consciences. This is why researchers generally regard so-called moral guilt, in the right amount, to be a good thing.

In the popular imagination, of course, guilt still gets a bad reputation. It is deeply uncomfortable—it's the emotional equivalent of wearing a jacket stuffed with stones. Yet this understanding is outdated. “There has been a kind of revival or a rethinking about what role guilt can serve”, says Amrisha Vaish, a psychology researcher at the University of Virginia, adding that this revival is part of a larger recognition that emotions aren't binary-feelings that may be advantageous in one context may be harmful in another. Jealousy and anger, for example, may have evolved to alert us to important inequalities. Too much happiness can be destructive.

And guilt, by prompting us to think more deeply about our own goodness, can encourage humans to make up for errors and fix relationships. Guilt, in other words, can help hold a cooperative species together. It is a kind of social glue.

Viewed in this light, guilt is an opportunity. Work by Tina Malti, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, suggests that guilt may compensate for an emotional deficiency. In a number of studies, Malti and others have shown that guilt and sympathy may represent different pathways to cooperation and sharing. Some kids who are low in sympathy may make up for that shortfall by experiencing more guilt, which can control their disgusting behaviors. And vice versa: high sympathy can substitute for low guilt.

In a 2014 study, for example, Malti looked at 244 children. Using caregiver assessments and the children's self-observations, she rated each child's overall sympathy level and his or her tendency to feel negative emotions after moral wrongdoings. Then the kids were handed chocolate coins, and given a chance to share them with an anonymous child. For the low-sympathy kids, how much they shared appeared to turn on how likely they were to feel guilty. The ones more likely to feel guilty tended to share more, even though they hadn't magically become more sympathetic to the other children.

“That's good news,” Malti says. “We can be prosocial because we caused harm and we feel regret.”

【推荐2】Are you frightened of clowns (小丑)? You are not alone. Coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns, is a widely recognized phenomenon. We set out to discover the reasons people are frightened by clowns, and to understand the psychology (心理) behind this. To do this, we designed a question form to look at how many people suffer from coulomphobia and how much they are afraid of it. The test was completed by a group of 987 people aged between 18 and 77.

More than half the volunteers (53.5%) said they were frightened of clowns at least to some degree, with 5% saying they were “extremely afraid” of them. We also discovered coulrophobia drops with age. Interestingly, we found the final explanation, of having had a fearful personal experience with a clown, had the lowest level of agreement. This shows that life experience alone is not a satisfying explanation for why people are afraid of them.

In contrast, negative (消极的) description of clowns in popular culture was a much stronger contributing factor towards coulrophobia. This is understandable because most famous clowns in books and films are designed to be terrible — such as Pennywise, the creepy (毛骨悚然的) clown from Stephen King’s 1986 novel It.

In fact the strongest factor we identified was hidden emotional signs suggesting that for many people, a fear of clowns comes from not being able to see their facial expressions due to their make-up. We cannot see their “true” faces and cannot understand their emotional purpose. So, for example, we don’t know whether they have a frown (皱眉) or a furrowed brow (眉头紧锁), which would show anger. Not being able to be aware of what a clown is thinking or what they might do next makes some of us on edge when we are around them.

【推荐3】“The dangerous thing about lying is people don't understand how the act changes us,” says Dan Ariely, behavioral psychologist and Duke university. Psychologists have documented children lying as early as the age of two. Some experts even consider lying a developmental milestone, like crawling and walking, because it requires sophisticated planning, attention and ability to see a situation from someone else's perspective to manipulate them. But, for most people, lying gets limited as we develop a sense of morality and the ability to self-regulate.

Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene says, for most of us, lying takes work. In studies, he gave subjects a chance to deceive for monetary gain while examining their brains in a functional MRI machine, which maps blood flow to active parts of the brain. Some people told the truth instantly and instinctively. But others opted to lie, and they showed increased activity in their frontal perietal (颅腔壁的) control network, which is involved in difficult or complex thinking. This suggests that they were deciding between truth and dishonesty — and ultimately opting for the latter. For a follow-up analysis, he found that people whose neural rewards centers were more active when they won money were also more likely to be among the group of liars — suggesting that suggesting that lying may have to do with the inability to resist temptation.

External conditions also matter in terms of when and how often we lie. We are more likely to lie, research shows, when we are able to rationalize it, when we are stressed and fatigued to see others being dishonest. And we are less likely to lie when we have moral reminders or when we think others are watching. “We as a society need to understand that, when we don't punish lying, we increase the probability it will happen again,” Ariely says.

In a 2016 study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience Ariely and colleagues showed how dishonesty alters people's brains, making it easier to tell lies in the future. When people uttered a falsehood, the scientists noticed a burst of activity in their amygdala. The amygdala is a crucial part of the brain that produces fear, anxiety and emotional response — including that sinking, guilty feeling you get when you lie. But when scientists had their subjects play a game in which they won many by deceiving their partner, they noticed the negative signals from the amygdala began to decrease. Not only that, but when people faced no consequences for dishonesty, their falsehoods tended to get even more sensational. This means that if you give people multiple opportunities to lie for their own benefit, they start with little lie which get bigger over time.

【推荐2】Some intelligent African giant rats are helping humans save lives through search and rescue missions while wearing tiny backpacks.

A British research scientist, Dr. Kean is training 170 rats to be sent into earthquake ruins to do vital work in finding earthquake survivors. These rescue rats are equipped with tiny backpacks that contain microphones, video cameras, and location trackers. These tools will allow the rescue teams to communicate with earthquake survivors in real-time.

Dr. Kean expressed how the rescue rats are ideal for this type of work, saying, “Rats would be able to get into small spaces to get victims buried in the ruins.” The highly clever rats are skillful at surviving in different environments and their natural agility (敏捷) makes them ideal for use in hard-to-navigate disaster zones. The rescue rats are even being trained to respond to the sound that call them back.

Dr. Kean’s team work together with the non-profit organization APOPO for their “Hero Rats” project. These “Hero Rats” are set to start working with a search and rescue team in Turkey, joining earthquake rescue efforts in the high-risk area, The group of 170 rats is being trained for additional projects involving landmines, tuberculosis (结核病), and even smelling out Brucellosis, an infectious disease that impacts farm animals. Dr. Kean feels hopeful about her project’s promising results and is excited that her team is the only organization in this field working with this species.

【推荐3】I left a job in higher education in 1987 to begin work full time as a futurist. Actually, there are three ways to this career.

First is the informal or self-taught path (途径) taken by many people. People in different fields often discover their personal interest in the future. And then they begin to read things about futures studies, forecasting, science and technology, and so on. They begin to attend meetings as they can find them. Gradually they begin to call themselves futurists. Of the 40,000 members of the World Future Society (WFS), most have taken that path. But only about 1,200 are “professional (职业的) members” who try to make a living as futurists. If this path sounds right for you, it can be successfully followed. The best place to start is with a membership in the WFS.

A second path is through the more traditional colleges. There are college programs in futures studies. Among those we suggest is the master’s degree program in futures studies at the University of Houston, Clear Lake, Texas. Another program in futures studies is the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, at the University of Hawaii.

Finally, a third path is the one that I took, or rather was given. That is the mentor (导师) path. An early futurist and founding member of the WFS took me under his wing while I was an undergraduate student. He began to feed me things to read and to attend, nurturing (培养) my own interest in the future through what became more than a ten-year-long relationship. His name was Ed Lindaman, at one time director of program planning for building Apollo, later a college president when I knew him. If you are lucky enough to find that kind of relationship, it can have some of the features of the first two paths, though without the formal degree.