Whether it’s getting a cold during exam time or feeling run-down after a big meeting, we’ve all experienced feeling sick following a particularly stressful time at work or school. Is this merely coincidence, or is it possible that stress can actually make us sick? In a new report in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser from the Ohio Read the rest of this entry »
Say a deadly campus shooting occurs. It might seem sensible to offer everyone on campus psychological support to prevent psychological repercussions, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
However, a new review from Wales and Australia suggests the opposite: Researchers found no evidence to support offering interventions to everyone involved in a traumatic event. In fact, they found that some forms of blanket intervention might foster worse outcomes Read the rest of this entry »
Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have shown that disclosing genetic risk information to adult children of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) who request this information does not result in significant short-term psychological distress. The report from the REVEAL Study*, which appears in the July 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first randomized trial to disclose to participants whether or not Read the rest of this entry »
Young people with asthma have nearly twice the incidence of depression compared to their peers without asthma, and studies have shown that depression is associated with increased asthma symptoms and, in some cases, death.
How stress and depression play upon one another to worsen asthma is a lingering question.
A new study by researchers at the University at Buffalo has shown that depressed children with asthma Read the rest of this entry »
What is going on in teenagers’ brains as their drive for peer approval begins to eclipse their family affiliations? Brain scans of teens sizing each other up reveal an emotion circuit activating more in girls as they grow older, but not in boys. The study by Daniel Pine, M.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of National Institutes of Health, and colleagues, shows how emotion circuitry diverges in the male and female Read the rest of this entry »