Feature Channels: Psychology and Psychiatry

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In a new study, researchers at the University of Chicago explored whether mostly subconscious visual cues embedded in dilapidated buildings, overgrown lots and littered streets can fuel deviant behavior, reassessing the influential “broken windows” theory.

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For most of his life, Kevin Hughes has felt like an outsider. A loner as a child, the 65-year-old comedian struggled socially as a teenager and lacked friends as an adult, often offending people without knowing why. That changed one night when a physician told him he had autism after one of his comedy shows sending him on a painful three-year journey of self-diagnosis experienced by millions of Americans with ASD

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NSF grant will support five-year project to create cohesive, research-based curricula in biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology.

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Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD, Dean for Academic and Scientific Affairs, Director of the Friedman Brain Institute (FBI) and Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, began his term as President of the Society for Neuroscience (SFN) at the 2016 annual meeting last evening.

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Florida State University researcher Joseph Franklin made a startling discovery during an exhaustive examination of hundreds of suicide prediction studies conducted over the past 50 years: Science is still not very good at predicting who will kill themselves.

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Psychologists tap big data and Twitter to analyze the accuracy of stereotypes

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The violent and sexual media you consume during the day may infiltrate your dreams at night, new research suggests. People who reported consuming violent media within 90 minutes of bedtime were 13 times more likely to have a violent dream that night.

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Experts’ ability to predict if someone will attempt to take his or her own life is no better than chance and has not significantly improved over the last 50 years, according to a comprehensive review of suicide research published by the American Psychological Association.

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The rate of adolescents reporting a recent bout of clinical depression grew by 37 percent over the decade ending in 2014, with one in six girls reporting an episode in the past year, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health-led research suggests.

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On Thanksgiving, many of us take a moment to reflect on what we’re grateful for -- and we get notable rewards for doing so. Feeling gratitude leads to important benefits, like increased happiness and social cohesion, better health outcomes, and even improved sleep quality.

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Siblings bear responsibility for the spread of problem behaviors. Identifying the exact nature of that influence has proven difficult, because behavior problems in siblings can also be traced to friends, shared genetics and shared experiences with parents. Evidence describing how problem behaviors spread between siblings has been scarce – until now, thanks to a first-of-its-kind longitudinal study on identical and fraternal twins.

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Depression has been known to be associated with poor cardiovascular outcomes, but if patients who are depressed attend cardiac rehabilitation after heart surgery, their risk of death is significantly reduced, according to a new study.

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Scientists are uncovering clues to what might be unfolding in the relationship between the brain and immune system in those who suffer from long-term repercussions of stress. New research details those connections, specifically that an abundance of white blood cells in the spleen could be sending messages to the brain that result in behavioral changes long after mice experience repeated stress.

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Sunshine matters. A lot. The idea isn’t exactly new, but according to a recent study, when it comes to your mental and emotional health, the amount of time between sunrise and sunset is the weather variable that matters most.

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Research conducted at The Family Institute at Northwestern University detected clear interpersonal behavior differences between couples with and without posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

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Brain imaging scans may one day provide useful information on the response to psychotherapy in patients with depression or anxiety, according to a review of current research in the November/December issue of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, published by Wolters Kluwer.

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Middle-age adults living with a combination of arthritis, heart disease or diabetes, and depression are more likely to experience disability and limited involvement in society

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Research suggests feedback loop between greater executive function and healthy behavior

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Research shows adults with diabetes are disproportionately prone to depression and the risk to be significantly greater for women than it is for men. A NYU study establishes various depression predictors among adult women of diverse ages, races, and ethnicities. The results enable the targeting of especially vulnerable women for screening and depression treatment, recognizing that the female-specific characteristics are not the same as those combinations of characteristics identified in mixed populations with diabetes.

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Style, not substance, accounts for Donald Trump’s U.S. Republican presidential nomination, according to a psychological analysis from the University of British Columbia.

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Researchers at the University of Washington tested a telephone-based intervention for military members struggling with alcohol abuse, with promising results. Participants significantly reduced their drinking over time, had lower rates of alcohol dependence and were more likely to seek treatment.

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The Family Institute at Northwestern University receives the 2016 Leo. G Bent award in recognition of it's demonstrated commitment to providing outstanding education in counseling.

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People who meet recommended weekly physical activity guidelines are still at risk of developing chronic disease if they spend too much non-exercising time sitting. Researchers found that women sit more as they grow older, raising their risks even more. Peter Katzmarzyk of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center will present findings at the Integrative Biology of Exercise 7 meeting.

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When it comes to lying, our brains are much more likely to give us away than sweaty palms or spikes in heart rate, new evidence from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania suggests.  The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, found that scanning people’s brains with fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, was significantly more effective at spotting lies than a traditional polygraph test.

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Almost all of us get songs stuck in our heads from time to time but why do certain tunes have the 'stick factor'?

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Researchers at Binghamton University, led by PhD student Anastacia Kudinova, aimed to examine whether physiological reactivity to emotional stimuli, assessed via pupil dilation, served as a biological marker of risk for depression recurrence among individuals who are known to be at a higher risk due to having previous history of depression. Participants were 57 women with a history of major depressive disorder (MDD). The researchers recorded the change in pupil dilation in response to angry, happy, sad and neutral faces. The team found that women’s pupillary reactivity to negative (sad or angry faces) but not positive stimuli prospectively predicted MDD recurrence.

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Present-day racial biases may contribute to the pollution and devaluation of lower- and middle-class black communities, according to new research led by a social psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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About 160,000 people got divorced in 2014 in Florida, according to the state Department of Health. UF/IFAS Extension faculty hope to help lower that number a bit through a program called SMART Couples.

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Those first holidays with college freshmen returning home can be exciting . . . and frustrating. Here's how to cope.

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Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin can now map what happens neurologically when new information influences a person to change his or her mind, a finding that offers more insight into the mechanics of learning.

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As published in JNCCN, a recent project out of Canada shows that programs identifying stress and distress in patients with cancer increase health care professionals’ confidence and awareness of patient-centeredness; outcomes are influenced by site-based navigators and practice size.

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The latest research and features in the fields of psychology and psychiatry.

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Babies crunching leaves in their hands, children creating costumes with their parents, and families picking pumpkins at the local pumpkin patch -- it doesn't have to be cheap or include witches and werewolves for parents to spend time with their children and help aid in their psychological and social development

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The number of people diagnosed with depression at psychiatric hospitals increases immediately after the transition from daylight saving time to standard time -- this is the conclusion of a recent register-based study from Denmark.

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Epidural anesthesia may do more than relieve pain during labor; in some women it may decrease the likelihood of postpartum depression, suggests a preliminary study presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2016 annual meeting.

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Studying brain tissue from deceased donors, Johns Hopkins scientists have found common groups of genes disrupted among people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression. The commonly affected genes sets, identified with RNA sequencing methods, engage in making proteins, controlling brain cell communications and mounting an immune system response, the researchers say.

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Although powerful people often tend to decide and act quickly, they become more indecisive than others when the decisions are toughest to make, a new study suggests. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

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Discussing the importance of addressing the emotional needs of all family members involved upon the announcement of a new addition to the family.

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Although powerful people often tend to decide and act quickly, they become more indecisive than others when the decisions are toughest to make, a new study suggests.

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Many children are still learning to control their behavior as they enter kindergarten and may need educational support to develop that critical skill, indicates one of the most conclusive studies to date of early childhood self-regulation.

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– A new paper in Biological Psychiatry reports that chronic cannabis users have reduced levels of an enzyme called fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH). The enzyme has been considered for treatment for cannabis dependence because it breaks down substances made in the brain that have cannabis-like effects, called endocannabinoids, rendering them inactive.

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The contentious presidential campaign is causing stress among friends who hold different opinions on the candidates. UAB's Josh Klapow sheds light on how to cope if your friend is voting for the other side.

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Visual hallucinations ... everyone has heard of them, and many people have experienced the sensation of "seeing" something that isn't there. But studying the phenomenon of hallucinations is difficult: they are irregular, transitory, and highly personal--only the person experiencing the hallucination knows what he or she is seeing, and representations of what's being seen are limited to verbal descriptions or drawings.

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Despite community colleges serving an important role in the STEM education pipeline, physiology students and faculty at these schools are not getting the same professional development and collaboration opportunities as their counterparts at four-year institutions.

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Given the relatively short lifespans of many pets, it’s not unusual for children to witness the realities of life played out in their homes. Research by Canisius College professor Joshua J. Russell, PhD, focuses on how children understand death in these moments, and the ideas, feelings and responses they have when their pets die.