April 30, 2023
by Elizabeth Pratt
Teenage girls are experiencing record high levels of persistent sadness.
A report from the CDC found that 57% of teenage girls in the US felt hopeless or persistently sad in 2021, that’s a 60% increase over the past ten years.
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March 31, 2023
by Elizabeth Pratt
The number of children and adolescents visiting the emergency department for attempted suicide and suicide ideation rose sharply during the pandemic.
Research publish in The Lancet Psychiatry found that while pediatric emergency department visits decreased overall during the pandemic, suicide related visits among youth rose by 22%.
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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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January 31, 2023
by Elizabeth Pratt
Receiving support from others could help ease the impact from genetic risk for depression.
Researchers from the University of Michigan found that individuals with a high genetic risk for developing depression most benefit from a nurturing social environment.
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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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December 6, 2022
by Patricia Tomasi
A new study in the Journal of Child Development looked at whether more hours in center-based care cause more externalizing problems. “This study revisits the question of whether increasing a child’s time in center-based care leads to increases in problem behaviors,” study author Catalina Rey-Guerra told us. “We decided to revisit this topic because, for the last four decades, there have been a lot of disagreements around the answer to this question.”
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November 29, 2022
by Patricia Tomasi
A new study published in the Journal of Child Development looked at developmental changes in students’ use of dimensional comparisons to form ability self-concepts in math and verbal domains. “We know that adolescent students may compare their math performance with their own reading performance to determine whether they are a ‘math person’ or ‘reading person’,” study author Sirui Wan told us.
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November 15, 2022
by Patricia Tomasi
A new study published in Health Services Research looked at the effect of mental health staffing on suicide-related events. “We wanted to answer a seemingly simple question: does increasing mental health staffing at Veterans Health Administration (VHA) facilities reduce suicide-related events?” study author Yevgeniy Feyman told us. “While this seems straightforward on its face, the existing evidence is mixed. Some work has found that staffing reduces suicide related events, while others have found no effect.”
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November 1, 2022
by Patricia Tomasi
A new study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology looked at the mechanisms underlying childhood exposure to blue spaces and adult subjective well-being. “Our study is about the benefits of childhood contact with blue spaces, a collective name to indicate all the areas with waterbodies or watercourses, such as the sea, lakes and rivers,” study author Valeria Vitale told us. “We were hoping to find a positive link between the exposure to blue spaces during childhood and adult well-being and explore potential pathways that may explain this relationship.”
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October 25, 2022
by Patricia Tomasi
“Our study was about adolescent health in the context of parental incarceration and foster care,” study author, Luke Muentner told us. “Really, we were hoping to get a deeper understanding of how exposure to both the criminal legal and the child welfare system differentially impacts youth mental health compared to peers who were exposed to only one system as well as those who were never systems-impacted.”
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