July 4, 2023
by Patricia Tomasi
A new study published in the Journal of Psychological Medicine looked at early-initiated childhood reading for pleasure and its associations with better cognitive performance, mental well-being and brain structure in early teens. “I and my co-authors wanted to understand the effects of reading for pleasure in young children on brain structure, cognition, school academic achievement and mental health,” study author Barbara J. Shakahian told us. “Some of the previously published literature suggested that there should be beneficial effects on cognition, but there had not been a very large scale study, with over 10,000 adolescents before on all these measures together.”
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May 30, 2023
by Elizabeth Pratt
The decision making capability of college students has likely been negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Researchers from Ohio State University found that students had less consistent decision making in the fall semester of 2020 compared with students who had previously participated in the study in previous years.
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May 22, 2023
by Elizabeth Pratt
People who frequently watch YouTube have elevated levels of depression, anxiety and loneliness.
Researchers from the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention found that the most widely used streaming platform had both positive and negative impacts on the mental health of users.
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March 14, 2023
by Patricia Tomasi
A new study published in the Journal of Child Development looked at how caregiver speech can predict the emergence of children’s emotion vocabulary. “We were interested in understanding how children learn words like ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ that label emotional experiences,” study author Mira L. Nencheva told us. “We were curious if the words that surround emotion labels might help children learn their meaning.”
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February 28, 2023
by Elizabeth Pratt
Mental health issues like depression are most common in the hospital and real estate industries.
Researches in the UK found that roughly one in seven people in the workplace experience mental health problems, with women being twice as likely to experience mental health issues than men.
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February 14, 2023
by Patricia Tomasi
A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looked at attachment anxiety and how it predicts false memories when people can see the communicator. “Past research has linked attachment avoidance with forgetting specifically relational material,” study author Dr. Nathan W. Hudson told us. “Conversely, prior studies have shown that attachment anxiety predicts false memories in relationship contexts.”
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January 31, 2023
by Patricia Tomasi
A new study published in the Journal of Molecular Psychiatry looked at an autism-associated mutation in human neurons. “In this study, we are trying to understand the mechanism underlying a genetic mutation linked to autism,” Dr. Le Wang, lead author, told us. “Since the gene is involved in the information flow in the brain, we wanted to find out if the genetic mutation leads to abnormal information flow in humans using a human neural model.”
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January 29, 2023
by Elizabeth Pratt
Daily engagement in political news can have a negative impact on mental health, but disengaging can also have consequences.
Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that strategies to manage the negative emotions that come from daily engagement may also reduce an individual’s motivation to act on what they care about politically.
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January 28, 2023
by Elizabeth Pratt
Teenagers with positive psychological assets like optimism and feeling loved are more likely to reach their 20s and 30s in good cardiometabolic health.
A study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that teens who felt happy, optimistic, had good self-esteem, felt loved and felt a sense of belonging had better cardiometabolic health later in life compared to their peers without these positive psychological assets.
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December 27, 2022
by Patricia Tomasi
A new study published in Nature Communications delved more into autism by growing brain-like organoids. “The human brain is unique, and certain aspects of human brain development, and brain diseases, are notoriously difficult to study using animal models,” study author Alex Shcheglovitov, PhD told us. “We wanted to develop a new method to model early aspects of human telencephalic brain development in health and disease. Our approach was to make human brain organoids in a robust and reproducible manner.”
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