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74 results for “PsyPost”
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DATE: September 28, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Dogmatic beliefs about sex and gender are linked to authoritarianism on both the left and the right
A new study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior indicates that rigid, dogmatic thinking about sex and gender exists on both ends of the political spectrum. The research suggests that while viewing gender as strictly binary and fixed is tied to conservative authoritarianism, believing gender is fluid and nonbinary is similarly associated with progressive authoritarianism.
In the social sciences, “sex” generally refers to biological characteristics like chromosomes and anatomy, while “gender” describes an individual’s psychological identity and social role. People tend to hold differing beliefs about how these two concepts interact. Some view sex and gender as firmly binary and permanently fixed at birth, viewing male and female as the only options. Others see gender as a spectrum that can change and operates independently of biological sex.
Previous research investigating the psychology behind these views has often linked a strictly binary perspective to right-wing authoritarianism. For instance, a 2021 study found that people who strongly favor submitting to traditional societal authorities also tend to hold rigid beliefs about traditional gender roles. This body of work painted a picture of conservative ideology as a primary driver of dogmatic views on gender.
“We found that, to date, there have been several empirical studies regarding the relationship between right-wing authoritarianism and beliefs regarding whether human sex or gender are binary or not,” Alex Bertrams, a researcher at the University of Bern, told PsyPost. “However, what had been completely absent until now were studies examining how sex/gender beliefs are related to left-wing authoritarianism.”
However, separate psychological research points out that authoritarian tendencies can also occur on the political left. A 2020 study established a model of left-wing authoritarianism, noting a specific urge among some progressives to aggressively enforce unconventional norms. This aligns with a study covered by PsyPost in 2025, which identified anti-conventionalism as a distinct component of left-wing authoritarian beliefs, characterized by a demand for political homogeneity and the absolute rejection of conservative values.
Bertrams and Ann Krispenz conducted the new study to connect these two lines of research, suspecting that authoritarianism plays a role in modern gender debates regardless of which side someone takes. “In addition, we noticed that certain ideological circles (also within universities) label those beliefs toward sex and gender which do not align with their own progressive views as ‘authoritarian’ or even ‘fascist,'” the researchers said. “However, certain morally overbearing forms of advocacy for progressive sex/gender beliefs may also be authoritarian – but left-wing authoritarian.”
The research team set out to test whether an anti-conventional, progressive view of gender is just as linked to left-wing authoritarianism as traditional gender views are to right-wing authoritarianism. “It is not a secret that the social sciences, including psychology, are ideologically biased these days by progressive views,” they added. “Part of our motivation was the desire to counteract this questionable situation, even if only a little, by conducting respective empirical research. In our view, it is not an appropriate role for publicly funded universities to one-sidedly provide material for the rhetorical manipulation of the population.”
To investigate this, the researchers conducted two separate online surveys. In the first study, they recruited 1,431 adults from the United States. Participants answered questions to measure their beliefs about sex and gender on a continuous scale, and they also answered a simple question about whether there are only two genders. In this sample, 57 percent stated there are only two genders, and 43 percent stated there are more than two.
The participants also completed psychological assessments measuring two specific types of authoritarianism. The first was right-wing authoritarian conventionalism, which is the desire to force everyone in society to comply with traditional moral standards. The second was left-wing authoritarian anti-conventionalism, which is the desire to force everyone to adopt progressive values while treating conservative views as inherently immoral.
The researchers found a strong relationship between the participants’ gender beliefs and their authoritarian tendencies. Believing that gender is binary and fixed was strongly associated with right-wing conventionalism. Believing that gender is nonbinary and changeable was strongly associated with left-wing anti-conventionalism. These relationships remained robust even after the researchers accounted for demographic differences like age, income, and general political orientation.
“We generally found strong associations between the sex/gender beliefs and the investigated forms of left- and right-wing authoritarianism,” the researchers noted. “Given the conceptual proximity of the sex/gender beliefs on the one hand and the ideological underpinnings of these authoritarianism forms on the other hand, this was not particularly surprising. After all, our goal was not to investigate something particularly sensational but something obvious for the purpose of filling a gap in research that had not been addressed until now.”
In the second study, the researchers recruited 1,390 adults from the United Kingdom to see if the pattern held in a different culture. They used the same measures for gender beliefs, right-wing conventionalism, and left-wing anti-conventionalism. In this British sample, 68 percent of participants endorsed a binary view of gender, and 32 percent endorsed a nonbinary view.
This second study also measured additional authoritarian traits, including social dominance orientation, right-wing aggression, left-wing anti-hierarchical aggression, and the desire for top-down censorship. The findings mirrored the first study, showing that binary beliefs were strongly linked to right-wing conventionalism and nonbinary beliefs were strongly linked to left-wing anti-conventionalism. The researchers noted that conventionalism and anti-conventionalism were the strongest predictors of gender beliefs, standing out above the other authoritarian traits like aggression or the desire for censorship.
This replication across datasets was a key part of the team’s methodology. “In contrast to many psychological studies conducted to date, our study (including the hypotheses as well as the methodology and data analysis) was pre-registered and adheres to open science standards,” they explained. “In addition, our study includes two independent samples from different countries, meaning that the findings from the first sample were replicated in a second sample.”
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2020, which found that right-leaning ideology is strongly linked to holding rigid, binary beliefs about sex and gender. The new research adds depth to this by demonstrating a parallel relationship on the political left, while looking specifically at right-wing authoritarian conventionalism rather than general political conservatism.
“From our perspective, our study can help to counter misleading rhetoric,” the researchers noted. “If certain people label a particular belief about sex and gender as the viewpoint of (right-wing) authoritarians—and in doing so imply that their own position is therefore the only correct option—one can counter this viewpoint by citing our study results which contradict this characterization. Our findings suggest that very different, even contradicting, views on sex and gender can be held by authoritarian individuals on the left and the right. It is therefore inappropriate to make a one-sided association between a particular sex/gender belief and authoritarianism.”
As with all research, there are a few caveats to consider. The study measured correlations, meaning it cannot determine whether holding a specific gender belief makes someone more authoritarian, or if naturally authoritarian people just gravitate toward strict rules about gender. The researchers also caution against assuming that any specific belief about gender is inherently authoritarian on its own.
Many people hold binary or nonbinary views on gender without having any desire to force those views on others. The study simply indicates that people who do possess highly controlling, authoritarian personalities tend to attach themselves strongly to these distinct gender ideologies. “Whatever one believes about the binary or non-binary nature of sex and gender and whether or not people can freely determine their own sex and gender, one can also express and advocate for the respective view in a non-authoritarian way,” the researchers clarified.
Future work will need to explore whether these patterns appear in countries outside the United States and the United Kingdom, and whether deeper personality traits like narcissism help explain why some people adopt highly authoritarian approaches to gender debates. “Our research is not specifically focused on sex/gender beliefs, but rather on the diverse phenomena that could be explained by the dark-ego-vehicle principle,” the researchers said.
“According to this approach, individuals with dark (e.g., narcissistic or psychopathic) personalities tend to use ideologies and activism as vehicles to satisfy their dark needs (e.g., expressing supposed moral superiority over others, acting out aggression at protests),” they explained.
“We have already found some evidence that authoritarianism may be useful for dark personalities in this regard,” they continued. “In a study that was just published, we also found evidence that ideologically completely opposed stances may be useful vehicles for dark personalities. In this new study, antagonistic narcissism was associated with abortion-related radicalization intention, that is, the intention to also use illegal and violent means.”
This willingness to use extreme tactics was present regardless of the cause. “The key point is that this was true for both the individuals of the pro-choice as well as the pro-life group,” the researchers noted. “We believe that political activism on sex/gender issues is also a useful way to investigate the dark-ego-vehicle principle in terms of opposing ideological perspectives in future studies.”
The study, “Sex/Gender Beliefs are Strongly Related to Either Right‑Wing Authoritarian Conventionalism or Left‑Wing Authoritarian Anti‑Conventionalism,” was authored by Alex Bertrams and Ann Krispenz.
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DATE: September 29, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Brief exposure to uplifting YouTube clips eases depressive feelings
URL: https://www.psypost.org/watching-hopeful-videos-online-can-reduce-short-term-depression/
A new study suggests that watching short, uplifting videos online can reduce momentary feelings of depression. Participants who viewed hopeful video clips experienced increased positive emotions and greater motivation compared to those who watched merely pleasant content. The research was published in Psychology of Popular Media.
Depression affects millions of people globally, ranging from mild daily struggles to severe mood disorders. Despite this widespread burden, a large portion of those individuals never receive formal treatment. Barriers such as limited access to healthcare, financial constraints, and social stigma keep many from seeking traditional face-to-face therapy. This gap in care leaves a pressing need for accessible, low-cost methods to support emotional well-being in daily life.
Psychological research often focuses on positive emotions as a way to buffer against depressive feelings. Theories suggest that positive emotional states broaden a person’s cognitive flexibility, helping them build psychological resilience over time. A specific concept called hope theory breaks this future-oriented motivation down into two distinct parts.
The first is agency thinking, which is the internal motivation or drive to pursue goals. The second is pathway thinking, which involves the ability to create specific plans or strategies to reach those goals. Depression often diminishes both of these capacities, leaving individuals feeling helpless and unmotivated.
Yanhan Zhao, a psychology researcher at Beijing Normal University, led a team to investigate whether everyday digital content could tap into these specific cognitive mechanisms. Zhao and colleagues wanted to see if brief exposure to media tailored to elicit hope could improve mood more effectively than general positive entertainment. They focused on video-sharing platforms, which offer a vast, free library of emotional content that people already use to regulate their daily moods.
To conduct the experiment, the researchers first needed a systematic way to identify hopeful videos. They started with a pool of 236 public YouTube videos and used computer software to analyze the emotional tone of viewer comments. Rather than relying solely on the visual content of the videos, the team looked for content that generated specific reactions from the audience.
Using an established psychological model, they categorized hope as a combination of anticipation and trust. Videos that generated high levels of these two emotions in the comments were classified as hopeful. These clips often featured narratives of personal growth, overcoming adversity, and goal pursuit.
For comparison, the team identified a second set of videos that were generally positive but lacked the specific themes of hope. These control videos focused on humor, entertainment, and pleasant daily experiences without any explicit forward-looking narratives. The researchers selected a final pool of thirty hopeful videos and thirty non-hopeful positive videos to use in their experiment. Expert psychologists reviewed the final selections to verify that the videos matched their intended categories.
The study included 385 adult participants recruited online. The researchers started with a larger pool of volunteers but excluded those who failed attention checks or completed the task too quickly, ensuring the final data represented genuine engagement. Before watching any videos, participants completed questionnaires measuring their baseline levels of depression. They also answered questions to determine their general, long-term tendencies toward hopefulness, establishing a baseline for both their agency and pathway thinking.
The researchers then randomly assigned each person to watch either the hopeful videos or the positive control videos. Participants watched two videos from their assigned category, mimicking a natural browsing experience that lasted around ten minutes. Immediately after viewing the content, the participants filled out a second round of questionnaires. These surveys assessed their current momentary feelings of depression, their immediate positive and negative emotions, and their current state of hopefulness.
The researchers observed measurable differences between the two groups. Participants who watched the hopeful videos reported lower momentary depression scores than those who watched the standard positive videos. This benefit occurred consistently regardless of a person’s baseline depression level. The videos helped individuals with severe depression just as much as they helped those with mild or subclinical symptoms.
By analyzing the survey responses, the team identified how the hopeful videos altered the participants’ mindsets. The videos successfully elevated general positive emotions, which in turn contributed to the drop in depressive feelings. This boost in positive emotion accounted for a quarter of the overall reduction in momentary depression.
The hopeful content also sparked a distinct rise in state agency thinking. This means participants felt a temporary boost in their motivation and internal drive to pursue goals. This motivational shift accounted for about fifteen percent of the relief from depressive symptoms. The hopeful videos produced a direct benefit on mood that extended beyond these measured emotional and cognitive shifts, highlighting the unique impact of hope-oriented media.
While the videos improved motivation, they did not increase state pathway thinking. Participants felt more driven, but they did not feel any more equipped to formulate concrete strategies for their goals. The researchers suggest that pathway thinking might represent a more stable psychological trait. Generating concrete plans likely requires longer-term, skill-based interventions rather than a brief emotional boost.
The intervention also failed to alter negative emotions. While participants felt more positive and motivated, their underlying negative feelings remained unchanged. Negative emotions often involve persistent cognitive patterns, like repetitive worrying or rumination. A short video clip might elevate positive feelings without directly dismantling those ingrained negative thoughts.
The research relies entirely on self-reported questionnaires, which can sometimes fail to capture the full depth of a person’s emotional state. People might answer questions in ways they believe the researchers expect, introducing potential bias. The experiment also only tested a single, brief viewing session.
It remains unknown if repeated exposure to hopeful media over days or weeks could produce lasting benefits. Future studies could explore whether combining this accessible digital mood regulation with other psychological treatments offers stronger, more durable results for those struggling with depression.
The study, “Brief Exposure to Hopeful YouTube Videos Reduces Depressive Symptoms: Evidence From a Preliminary Study,” was authored by Yanhan Zhao, Danni Wang, Yang Yang, and Zhijin Hou.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/watching-hopeful-videos-online-can-reduce-short-term-depression/
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #HopefulYouTube #MoodBoost #DepressionRelief #PositiveContent #StateAgency #HopeTheory #MentalHealthTech #DigitalWellBeing #ShortVideoTherapy #PsychologyResearch
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DATE: September 29, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Brief exposure to uplifting YouTube clips eases depressive feelings
URL: https://www.psypost.org/watching-hopeful-videos-online-can-reduce-short-term-depression/
A new study suggests that watching short, uplifting videos online can reduce momentary feelings of depression. Participants who viewed hopeful video clips experienced increased positive emotions and greater motivation compared to those who watched merely pleasant content. The research was published in Psychology of Popular Media.
Depression affects millions of people globally, ranging from mild daily struggles to severe mood disorders. Despite this widespread burden, a large portion of those individuals never receive formal treatment. Barriers such as limited access to healthcare, financial constraints, and social stigma keep many from seeking traditional face-to-face therapy. This gap in care leaves a pressing need for accessible, low-cost methods to support emotional well-being in daily life.
Psychological research often focuses on positive emotions as a way to buffer against depressive feelings. Theories suggest that positive emotional states broaden a person’s cognitive flexibility, helping them build psychological resilience over time. A specific concept called hope theory breaks this future-oriented motivation down into two distinct parts.
The first is agency thinking, which is the internal motivation or drive to pursue goals. The second is pathway thinking, which involves the ability to create specific plans or strategies to reach those goals. Depression often diminishes both of these capacities, leaving individuals feeling helpless and unmotivated.
Yanhan Zhao, a psychology researcher at Beijing Normal University, led a team to investigate whether everyday digital content could tap into these specific cognitive mechanisms. Zhao and colleagues wanted to see if brief exposure to media tailored to elicit hope could improve mood more effectively than general positive entertainment. They focused on video-sharing platforms, which offer a vast, free library of emotional content that people already use to regulate their daily moods.
To conduct the experiment, the researchers first needed a systematic way to identify hopeful videos. They started with a pool of 236 public YouTube videos and used computer software to analyze the emotional tone of viewer comments. Rather than relying solely on the visual content of the videos, the team looked for content that generated specific reactions from the audience.
Using an established psychological model, they categorized hope as a combination of anticipation and trust. Videos that generated high levels of these two emotions in the comments were classified as hopeful. These clips often featured narratives of personal growth, overcoming adversity, and goal pursuit.
For comparison, the team identified a second set of videos that were generally positive but lacked the specific themes of hope. These control videos focused on humor, entertainment, and pleasant daily experiences without any explicit forward-looking narratives. The researchers selected a final pool of thirty hopeful videos and thirty non-hopeful positive videos to use in their experiment. Expert psychologists reviewed the final selections to verify that the videos matched their intended categories.
The study included 385 adult participants recruited online. The researchers started with a larger pool of volunteers but excluded those who failed attention checks or completed the task too quickly, ensuring the final data represented genuine engagement. Before watching any videos, participants completed questionnaires measuring their baseline levels of depression. They also answered questions to determine their general, long-term tendencies toward hopefulness, establishing a baseline for both their agency and pathway thinking.
The researchers then randomly assigned each person to watch either the hopeful videos or the positive control videos. Participants watched two videos from their assigned category, mimicking a natural browsing experience that lasted around ten minutes. Immediately after viewing the content, the participants filled out a second round of questionnaires. These surveys assessed their current momentary feelings of depression, their immediate positive and negative emotions, and their current state of hopefulness.
The researchers observed measurable differences between the two groups. Participants who watched the hopeful videos reported lower momentary depression scores than those who watched the standard positive videos. This benefit occurred consistently regardless of a person’s baseline depression level. The videos helped individuals with severe depression just as much as they helped those with mild or subclinical symptoms.
By analyzing the survey responses, the team identified how the hopeful videos altered the participants’ mindsets. The videos successfully elevated general positive emotions, which in turn contributed to the drop in depressive feelings. This boost in positive emotion accounted for a quarter of the overall reduction in momentary depression.
The hopeful content also sparked a distinct rise in state agency thinking. This means participants felt a temporary boost in their motivation and internal drive to pursue goals. This motivational shift accounted for about fifteen percent of the relief from depressive symptoms. The hopeful videos produced a direct benefit on mood that extended beyond these measured emotional and cognitive shifts, highlighting the unique impact of hope-oriented media.
While the videos improved motivation, they did not increase state pathway thinking. Participants felt more driven, but they did not feel any more equipped to formulate concrete strategies for their goals. The researchers suggest that pathway thinking might represent a more stable psychological trait. Generating concrete plans likely requires longer-term, skill-based interventions rather than a brief emotional boost.
The intervention also failed to alter negative emotions. While participants felt more positive and motivated, their underlying negative feelings remained unchanged. Negative emotions often involve persistent cognitive patterns, like repetitive worrying or rumination. A short video clip might elevate positive feelings without directly dismantling those ingrained negative thoughts.
The research relies entirely on self-reported questionnaires, which can sometimes fail to capture the full depth of a person’s emotional state. People might answer questions in ways they believe the researchers expect, introducing potential bias. The experiment also only tested a single, brief viewing session.
It remains unknown if repeated exposure to hopeful media over days or weeks could produce lasting benefits. Future studies could explore whether combining this accessible digital mood regulation with other psychological treatments offers stronger, more durable results for those struggling with depression.
The study, “Brief Exposure to Hopeful YouTube Videos Reduces Depressive Symptoms: Evidence From a Preliminary Study,” was authored by Yanhan Zhao, Danni Wang, Yang Yang, and Zhijin Hou.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/watching-hopeful-videos-online-can-reduce-short-term-depression/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #HopefulYouTube #MoodBoost #DepressionRelief #PositiveContent #StateAgency #HopeTheory #MentalHealthTech #DigitalWellBeing #ShortVideoTherapy #PsychologyResearch
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DATE: September 29, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Brief exposure to uplifting YouTube clips eases depressive feelings
URL: https://www.psypost.org/watching-hopeful-videos-online-can-reduce-short-term-depression/
A new study suggests that watching short, uplifting videos online can reduce momentary feelings of depression. Participants who viewed hopeful video clips experienced increased positive emotions and greater motivation compared to those who watched merely pleasant content. The research was published in Psychology of Popular Media.
Depression affects millions of people globally, ranging from mild daily struggles to severe mood disorders. Despite this widespread burden, a large portion of those individuals never receive formal treatment. Barriers such as limited access to healthcare, financial constraints, and social stigma keep many from seeking traditional face-to-face therapy. This gap in care leaves a pressing need for accessible, low-cost methods to support emotional well-being in daily life.
Psychological research often focuses on positive emotions as a way to buffer against depressive feelings. Theories suggest that positive emotional states broaden a person’s cognitive flexibility, helping them build psychological resilience over time. A specific concept called hope theory breaks this future-oriented motivation down into two distinct parts.
The first is agency thinking, which is the internal motivation or drive to pursue goals. The second is pathway thinking, which involves the ability to create specific plans or strategies to reach those goals. Depression often diminishes both of these capacities, leaving individuals feeling helpless and unmotivated.
Yanhan Zhao, a psychology researcher at Beijing Normal University, led a team to investigate whether everyday digital content could tap into these specific cognitive mechanisms. Zhao and colleagues wanted to see if brief exposure to media tailored to elicit hope could improve mood more effectively than general positive entertainment. They focused on video-sharing platforms, which offer a vast, free library of emotional content that people already use to regulate their daily moods.
To conduct the experiment, the researchers first needed a systematic way to identify hopeful videos. They started with a pool of 236 public YouTube videos and used computer software to analyze the emotional tone of viewer comments. Rather than relying solely on the visual content of the videos, the team looked for content that generated specific reactions from the audience.
Using an established psychological model, they categorized hope as a combination of anticipation and trust. Videos that generated high levels of these two emotions in the comments were classified as hopeful. These clips often featured narratives of personal growth, overcoming adversity, and goal pursuit.
For comparison, the team identified a second set of videos that were generally positive but lacked the specific themes of hope. These control videos focused on humor, entertainment, and pleasant daily experiences without any explicit forward-looking narratives. The researchers selected a final pool of thirty hopeful videos and thirty non-hopeful positive videos to use in their experiment. Expert psychologists reviewed the final selections to verify that the videos matched their intended categories.
The study included 385 adult participants recruited online. The researchers started with a larger pool of volunteers but excluded those who failed attention checks or completed the task too quickly, ensuring the final data represented genuine engagement. Before watching any videos, participants completed questionnaires measuring their baseline levels of depression. They also answered questions to determine their general, long-term tendencies toward hopefulness, establishing a baseline for both their agency and pathway thinking.
The researchers then randomly assigned each person to watch either the hopeful videos or the positive control videos. Participants watched two videos from their assigned category, mimicking a natural browsing experience that lasted around ten minutes. Immediately after viewing the content, the participants filled out a second round of questionnaires. These surveys assessed their current momentary feelings of depression, their immediate positive and negative emotions, and their current state of hopefulness.
The researchers observed measurable differences between the two groups. Participants who watched the hopeful videos reported lower momentary depression scores than those who watched the standard positive videos. This benefit occurred consistently regardless of a person’s baseline depression level. The videos helped individuals with severe depression just as much as they helped those with mild or subclinical symptoms.
By analyzing the survey responses, the team identified how the hopeful videos altered the participants’ mindsets. The videos successfully elevated general positive emotions, which in turn contributed to the drop in depressive feelings. This boost in positive emotion accounted for a quarter of the overall reduction in momentary depression.
The hopeful content also sparked a distinct rise in state agency thinking. This means participants felt a temporary boost in their motivation and internal drive to pursue goals. This motivational shift accounted for about fifteen percent of the relief from depressive symptoms. The hopeful videos produced a direct benefit on mood that extended beyond these measured emotional and cognitive shifts, highlighting the unique impact of hope-oriented media.
While the videos improved motivation, they did not increase state pathway thinking. Participants felt more driven, but they did not feel any more equipped to formulate concrete strategies for their goals. The researchers suggest that pathway thinking might represent a more stable psychological trait. Generating concrete plans likely requires longer-term, skill-based interventions rather than a brief emotional boost.
The intervention also failed to alter negative emotions. While participants felt more positive and motivated, their underlying negative feelings remained unchanged. Negative emotions often involve persistent cognitive patterns, like repetitive worrying or rumination. A short video clip might elevate positive feelings without directly dismantling those ingrained negative thoughts.
The research relies entirely on self-reported questionnaires, which can sometimes fail to capture the full depth of a person’s emotional state. People might answer questions in ways they believe the researchers expect, introducing potential bias. The experiment also only tested a single, brief viewing session.
It remains unknown if repeated exposure to hopeful media over days or weeks could produce lasting benefits. Future studies could explore whether combining this accessible digital mood regulation with other psychological treatments offers stronger, more durable results for those struggling with depression.
The study, “Brief Exposure to Hopeful YouTube Videos Reduces Depressive Symptoms: Evidence From a Preliminary Study,” was authored by Yanhan Zhao, Danni Wang, Yang Yang, and Zhijin Hou.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/watching-hopeful-videos-online-can-reduce-short-term-depression/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #HopefulYouTube #MoodBoost #DepressionRelief #PositiveContent #StateAgency #HopeTheory #MentalHealthTech #DigitalWellBeing #ShortVideoTherapy #PsychologyResearch
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DATE: September 29, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Faces and bodies send matching signals of attractiveness, but voices tell a different story
People often judge a potential partner based on a combination of their face, body, and voice. A recent study reveals that while facial and bodily attractiveness tend to match up, a person’s voice provides an independent cue about their traits. These findings, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, suggest that our physical features send a mix of redundant and distinct messages to observers.
Evolutionary psychology proposes that human physical traits communicate genetic quality and health to potential mates or rivals. During the search for a partner, individuals evaluate physical attractiveness to gauge underlying fitness. During competition with rivals, individuals might assess physical dominance to determine formidability. Researchers study how these visual and vocal cues combine to form an overall impression of an individual.
One major theoretical framework is the “one ornament hypothesis.” This concept suggests that different physical traits, such as the face and body, are shaped by the same underlying biological factors. In this view, various body parts act as a single, unified signal of health or genetic fitness. If a person has robust immune function or developmental stability, it should reflect across their entire physical appearance.
The second major framework is the “multiple messages hypothesis.” This theory argues that different parts of the body convey entirely separate pieces of information. For example, a face might signal immune system strength, while a voice might indicate physical dominance. If this theory holds true, a person’s individual physical features would not necessarily correlate with one another in the eyes of an observer.
Researchers also suspect that sex hormones like testosterone and estradiol might drive the synchronized development of these physical traits. These hormones guide sexual dimorphism, which refers to the biological differences in physical characteristics between men and women. Higher testosterone in men and higher estradiol in women are thought to influence the development of traits that others perceive as attractive, healthy, or dominant.
To test these competing hypotheses, a research team led by Tobias L. Kordsmeyer of the University of Goettingen designed an experiment. They wanted to examine how independent raters perceived the attractiveness, health, and physical dominance of faces, bodies, and voices. The researchers also sought to test whether sex hormones act as a biological bridge linking these disparate features.
The study included 165 men and 155 women as evaluation targets. The research team collected standardized facial photographs, three-dimensional body scans, and short audio recordings from each participant. The facial photographs featured participants standing against a white wall with a neutral expression.
The three-dimensional body scans were rendered as digital figures that rotated over an eight-second duration. The researchers deliberately removed skin color and texture from these digital models, converting them to a uniform gray. This step ensured that raters would focus entirely on physical shape and proportions, removing skin quality as a potential confounding factor.
To collect voice samples, male participants were recorded speaking about positive aspects of their lives for one minute. Female participants were recorded reading a standardized text known as the rainbow passage. The researchers extracted five-second audio clips from the men’s recordings and used the second sentence of the passage (about 3.5 seconds on average) from the women’s recordings for the final evaluation.
A separate group of 400 independent raters evaluated the collected stimuli. To prevent their judgments of one trait from influencing another, the raters were divided into specific groups. A single rater only evaluated one type of stimulus, such as male faces, female bodies, or male voices. The raters scored the targets for attractiveness, health, and physical dominance using standardized rating scales.
The research team also gathered saliva and hair samples from the targets to measure hormone levels. They measured baseline testosterone and reactive testosterone in men. Reactive testosterone was captured shortly after the men engaged in a competitive task. For women, the researchers assessed baseline testosterone and estradiol levels across different phases of the menstrual cycle.
When analyzing the rating data, the researchers found positive correlations between how raters perceived faces and bodies. Targets whose faces were rated highly for attractiveness and health also tended to receive high ratings for their body shapes. The effects were of medium size, showing a consistent pattern across both male and female targets.
This pattern also held true for physical dominance, though it was only observed for male targets. Men with faces rated as physically dominant also had bodies rated as physically dominant. Female targets did not exhibit a coordinated rating for physical dominance between their faces and bodies.
These positive associations between the face and the body align with the one ornament hypothesis. Observers seem to interpret facial and bodily cues redundantly, picking up on shared information about the individual’s physical condition. Even without skin texture, the bodies provided enough shape information to align with the health and attractiveness ratings of the faces.
The results for vocal recordings painted a different picture. The researchers found very few measurable associations between how raters judged a target’s voice and how they judged the target’s face or body. Voice ratings appeared to operate independently from visual appearance.
An individual might possess a highly rated face or body, but this did not guarantee their voice would be perceived in the same way. This independence supports the multiple messages hypothesis. The human voice seems to act as a separate channel of communication, offering non-redundant information to observers rather than echoing visual cues.
The hormone analysis yielded unexpected results. The researchers found that adult hormone levels did not mediate the correlated perceptions of faces and bodies. While men’s baseline testosterone levels did show some positive associations with facial dominance and vocal attractiveness, the hormones did not serve as the underlying link for synchronized ratings across body parts.
The proposed mechanism of adult sex hormones bridging these distinct traits was not supported by the data. Adjusting for the targets’ body mass index or relationship status did not alter these outcomes. The correlations between traits remained robust even when accounting for body fat.
The study measured adult baseline and reactive hormone levels rather than developmental hormones. Physical traits like bone structure and vocal cord length are heavily shaped by organizational hormones during fetal development and puberty. Adult hormone levels might not accurately reflect the specific hormonal environment that originally sculpted these physical characteristics.
Additionally, the body scans lacked skin color and texture. Skin quality is a known biological indicator of physical health. Stripping this information away might have altered how raters evaluated the overall condition of the targets, even though it successfully isolated the role of physical shape.
The researchers measured subjective impressions of health, dominance, and attractiveness rather than objective medical data. The ratings reveal how people perceive others based on evolutionary psychological cues. They do not confirm whether the highly rated individuals were objectively healthier or physically stronger in reality.
Future investigations could incorporate developmental hormone tracking during adolescence to better understand how biology links physical traits. Researchers might also include other sensory cues, such as body odor or dynamic movement, to build a more comprehensive picture of human nonverbal signaling.
The study, “Correlated perceptions and underlying hormonal factors of bodily, facial, and vocal attractiveness, health, and physical dominance,” was authored by Tobias L. Kordsmeyer, Philine A.C. Rasokat, Julia Stern, Christoph Schild, and Lars Penke.
-------------------------------------------------
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Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #attractiveness #facialandbodysignals #voicevsappearance #oneornamenthypothesis #multiplemessages #hormonesandtraits #physicaldominance #evolutionarypsychology #bodyshape #socialperception
-
DATE: September 29, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Faces and bodies send matching signals of attractiveness, but voices tell a different story
People often judge a potential partner based on a combination of their face, body, and voice. A recent study reveals that while facial and bodily attractiveness tend to match up, a person’s voice provides an independent cue about their traits. These findings, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, suggest that our physical features send a mix of redundant and distinct messages to observers.
Evolutionary psychology proposes that human physical traits communicate genetic quality and health to potential mates or rivals. During the search for a partner, individuals evaluate physical attractiveness to gauge underlying fitness. During competition with rivals, individuals might assess physical dominance to determine formidability. Researchers study how these visual and vocal cues combine to form an overall impression of an individual.
One major theoretical framework is the “one ornament hypothesis.” This concept suggests that different physical traits, such as the face and body, are shaped by the same underlying biological factors. In this view, various body parts act as a single, unified signal of health or genetic fitness. If a person has robust immune function or developmental stability, it should reflect across their entire physical appearance.
The second major framework is the “multiple messages hypothesis.” This theory argues that different parts of the body convey entirely separate pieces of information. For example, a face might signal immune system strength, while a voice might indicate physical dominance. If this theory holds true, a person’s individual physical features would not necessarily correlate with one another in the eyes of an observer.
Researchers also suspect that sex hormones like testosterone and estradiol might drive the synchronized development of these physical traits. These hormones guide sexual dimorphism, which refers to the biological differences in physical characteristics between men and women. Higher testosterone in men and higher estradiol in women are thought to influence the development of traits that others perceive as attractive, healthy, or dominant.
To test these competing hypotheses, a research team led by Tobias L. Kordsmeyer of the University of Goettingen designed an experiment. They wanted to examine how independent raters perceived the attractiveness, health, and physical dominance of faces, bodies, and voices. The researchers also sought to test whether sex hormones act as a biological bridge linking these disparate features.
The study included 165 men and 155 women as evaluation targets. The research team collected standardized facial photographs, three-dimensional body scans, and short audio recordings from each participant. The facial photographs featured participants standing against a white wall with a neutral expression.
The three-dimensional body scans were rendered as digital figures that rotated over an eight-second duration. The researchers deliberately removed skin color and texture from these digital models, converting them to a uniform gray. This step ensured that raters would focus entirely on physical shape and proportions, removing skin quality as a potential confounding factor.
To collect voice samples, male participants were recorded speaking about positive aspects of their lives for one minute. Female participants were recorded reading a standardized text known as the rainbow passage. The researchers extracted five-second audio clips from the men’s recordings and used the second sentence of the passage (about 3.5 seconds on average) from the women’s recordings for the final evaluation.
A separate group of 400 independent raters evaluated the collected stimuli. To prevent their judgments of one trait from influencing another, the raters were divided into specific groups. A single rater only evaluated one type of stimulus, such as male faces, female bodies, or male voices. The raters scored the targets for attractiveness, health, and physical dominance using standardized rating scales.
The research team also gathered saliva and hair samples from the targets to measure hormone levels. They measured baseline testosterone and reactive testosterone in men. Reactive testosterone was captured shortly after the men engaged in a competitive task. For women, the researchers assessed baseline testosterone and estradiol levels across different phases of the menstrual cycle.
When analyzing the rating data, the researchers found positive correlations between how raters perceived faces and bodies. Targets whose faces were rated highly for attractiveness and health also tended to receive high ratings for their body shapes. The effects were of medium size, showing a consistent pattern across both male and female targets.
This pattern also held true for physical dominance, though it was only observed for male targets. Men with faces rated as physically dominant also had bodies rated as physically dominant. Female targets did not exhibit a coordinated rating for physical dominance between their faces and bodies.
These positive associations between the face and the body align with the one ornament hypothesis. Observers seem to interpret facial and bodily cues redundantly, picking up on shared information about the individual’s physical condition. Even without skin texture, the bodies provided enough shape information to align with the health and attractiveness ratings of the faces.
The results for vocal recordings painted a different picture. The researchers found very few measurable associations between how raters judged a target’s voice and how they judged the target’s face or body. Voice ratings appeared to operate independently from visual appearance.
An individual might possess a highly rated face or body, but this did not guarantee their voice would be perceived in the same way. This independence supports the multiple messages hypothesis. The human voice seems to act as a separate channel of communication, offering non-redundant information to observers rather than echoing visual cues.
The hormone analysis yielded unexpected results. The researchers found that adult hormone levels did not mediate the correlated perceptions of faces and bodies. While men’s baseline testosterone levels did show some positive associations with facial dominance and vocal attractiveness, the hormones did not serve as the underlying link for synchronized ratings across body parts.
The proposed mechanism of adult sex hormones bridging these distinct traits was not supported by the data. Adjusting for the targets’ body mass index or relationship status did not alter these outcomes. The correlations between traits remained robust even when accounting for body fat.
The study measured adult baseline and reactive hormone levels rather than developmental hormones. Physical traits like bone structure and vocal cord length are heavily shaped by organizational hormones during fetal development and puberty. Adult hormone levels might not accurately reflect the specific hormonal environment that originally sculpted these physical characteristics.
Additionally, the body scans lacked skin color and texture. Skin quality is a known biological indicator of physical health. Stripping this information away might have altered how raters evaluated the overall condition of the targets, even though it successfully isolated the role of physical shape.
The researchers measured subjective impressions of health, dominance, and attractiveness rather than objective medical data. The ratings reveal how people perceive others based on evolutionary psychological cues. They do not confirm whether the highly rated individuals were objectively healthier or physically stronger in reality.
Future investigations could incorporate developmental hormone tracking during adolescence to better understand how biology links physical traits. Researchers might also include other sensory cues, such as body odor or dynamic movement, to build a more comprehensive picture of human nonverbal signaling.
The study, “Correlated perceptions and underlying hormonal factors of bodily, facial, and vocal attractiveness, health, and physical dominance,” was authored by Tobias L. Kordsmeyer, Philine A.C. Rasokat, Julia Stern, Christoph Schild, and Lars Penke.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #attractiveness #facialandbodysignals #voicevsappearance #oneornamenthypothesis #multiplemessages #hormonesandtraits #physicaldominance #evolutionarypsychology #bodyshape #socialperception
-
DATE: September 29, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Faces and bodies send matching signals of attractiveness, but voices tell a different story
People often judge a potential partner based on a combination of their face, body, and voice. A recent study reveals that while facial and bodily attractiveness tend to match up, a person’s voice provides an independent cue about their traits. These findings, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, suggest that our physical features send a mix of redundant and distinct messages to observers.
Evolutionary psychology proposes that human physical traits communicate genetic quality and health to potential mates or rivals. During the search for a partner, individuals evaluate physical attractiveness to gauge underlying fitness. During competition with rivals, individuals might assess physical dominance to determine formidability. Researchers study how these visual and vocal cues combine to form an overall impression of an individual.
One major theoretical framework is the “one ornament hypothesis.” This concept suggests that different physical traits, such as the face and body, are shaped by the same underlying biological factors. In this view, various body parts act as a single, unified signal of health or genetic fitness. If a person has robust immune function or developmental stability, it should reflect across their entire physical appearance.
The second major framework is the “multiple messages hypothesis.” This theory argues that different parts of the body convey entirely separate pieces of information. For example, a face might signal immune system strength, while a voice might indicate physical dominance. If this theory holds true, a person’s individual physical features would not necessarily correlate with one another in the eyes of an observer.
Researchers also suspect that sex hormones like testosterone and estradiol might drive the synchronized development of these physical traits. These hormones guide sexual dimorphism, which refers to the biological differences in physical characteristics between men and women. Higher testosterone in men and higher estradiol in women are thought to influence the development of traits that others perceive as attractive, healthy, or dominant.
To test these competing hypotheses, a research team led by Tobias L. Kordsmeyer of the University of Goettingen designed an experiment. They wanted to examine how independent raters perceived the attractiveness, health, and physical dominance of faces, bodies, and voices. The researchers also sought to test whether sex hormones act as a biological bridge linking these disparate features.
The study included 165 men and 155 women as evaluation targets. The research team collected standardized facial photographs, three-dimensional body scans, and short audio recordings from each participant. The facial photographs featured participants standing against a white wall with a neutral expression.
The three-dimensional body scans were rendered as digital figures that rotated over an eight-second duration. The researchers deliberately removed skin color and texture from these digital models, converting them to a uniform gray. This step ensured that raters would focus entirely on physical shape and proportions, removing skin quality as a potential confounding factor.
To collect voice samples, male participants were recorded speaking about positive aspects of their lives for one minute. Female participants were recorded reading a standardized text known as the rainbow passage. The researchers extracted five-second audio clips from the men’s recordings and used the second sentence of the passage (about 3.5 seconds on average) from the women’s recordings for the final evaluation.
A separate group of 400 independent raters evaluated the collected stimuli. To prevent their judgments of one trait from influencing another, the raters were divided into specific groups. A single rater only evaluated one type of stimulus, such as male faces, female bodies, or male voices. The raters scored the targets for attractiveness, health, and physical dominance using standardized rating scales.
The research team also gathered saliva and hair samples from the targets to measure hormone levels. They measured baseline testosterone and reactive testosterone in men. Reactive testosterone was captured shortly after the men engaged in a competitive task. For women, the researchers assessed baseline testosterone and estradiol levels across different phases of the menstrual cycle.
When analyzing the rating data, the researchers found positive correlations between how raters perceived faces and bodies. Targets whose faces were rated highly for attractiveness and health also tended to receive high ratings for their body shapes. The effects were of medium size, showing a consistent pattern across both male and female targets.
This pattern also held true for physical dominance, though it was only observed for male targets. Men with faces rated as physically dominant also had bodies rated as physically dominant. Female targets did not exhibit a coordinated rating for physical dominance between their faces and bodies.
These positive associations between the face and the body align with the one ornament hypothesis. Observers seem to interpret facial and bodily cues redundantly, picking up on shared information about the individual’s physical condition. Even without skin texture, the bodies provided enough shape information to align with the health and attractiveness ratings of the faces.
The results for vocal recordings painted a different picture. The researchers found very few measurable associations between how raters judged a target’s voice and how they judged the target’s face or body. Voice ratings appeared to operate independently from visual appearance.
An individual might possess a highly rated face or body, but this did not guarantee their voice would be perceived in the same way. This independence supports the multiple messages hypothesis. The human voice seems to act as a separate channel of communication, offering non-redundant information to observers rather than echoing visual cues.
The hormone analysis yielded unexpected results. The researchers found that adult hormone levels did not mediate the correlated perceptions of faces and bodies. While men’s baseline testosterone levels did show some positive associations with facial dominance and vocal attractiveness, the hormones did not serve as the underlying link for synchronized ratings across body parts.
The proposed mechanism of adult sex hormones bridging these distinct traits was not supported by the data. Adjusting for the targets’ body mass index or relationship status did not alter these outcomes. The correlations between traits remained robust even when accounting for body fat.
The study measured adult baseline and reactive hormone levels rather than developmental hormones. Physical traits like bone structure and vocal cord length are heavily shaped by organizational hormones during fetal development and puberty. Adult hormone levels might not accurately reflect the specific hormonal environment that originally sculpted these physical characteristics.
Additionally, the body scans lacked skin color and texture. Skin quality is a known biological indicator of physical health. Stripping this information away might have altered how raters evaluated the overall condition of the targets, even though it successfully isolated the role of physical shape.
The researchers measured subjective impressions of health, dominance, and attractiveness rather than objective medical data. The ratings reveal how people perceive others based on evolutionary psychological cues. They do not confirm whether the highly rated individuals were objectively healthier or physically stronger in reality.
Future investigations could incorporate developmental hormone tracking during adolescence to better understand how biology links physical traits. Researchers might also include other sensory cues, such as body odor or dynamic movement, to build a more comprehensive picture of human nonverbal signaling.
The study, “Correlated perceptions and underlying hormonal factors of bodily, facial, and vocal attractiveness, health, and physical dominance,” was authored by Tobias L. Kordsmeyer, Philine A.C. Rasokat, Julia Stern, Christoph Schild, and Lars Penke.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #attractiveness #facialandbodysignals #voicevsappearance #oneornamenthypothesis #multiplemessages #hormonesandtraits #physicaldominance #evolutionarypsychology #bodyshape #socialperception
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: The link between parental divorce and depression might not be what it seems
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-link-between-parental-divorce-and-depression-might-not-be-what-it-seems/
A recent study suggests that the increased risk of adult depression often associated with childhood parental divorce is largely explained by the parents’ own mental health and substance use challenges, rather than the divorce itself. By analyzing data from over 128,000 adults, researchers found that once factors like parental mental illness are taken into account, the statistical link between family structure and adult emotional distress mostly disappears. The findings were published in Psychiatry Research.
Past research, such as a 2019 meta-analysis, found that adults who experienced parental divorce during childhood tend to suffer from higher rates of depression and psychological distress. This observation led to a general assumption that the separation itself creates lasting emotional damage. However, family dynamics are complicated, and a marital split is rarely an isolated event. Many children who experience a family breakup also live through other household adversities.
For instance, a 2024 study indicated that adults who go through a divorce often carry higher underlying risks for mental illnesses, such as depression or anxiety. This raises a question about whether shared family vulnerabilities might explain both the breakdown of the marriage and the child’s later struggles. Previous researchers have used large health surveys to look at the long-term consequences of a changing family structure, such as a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 that linked parental divorce to an elevated risk of stroke in older adulthood.
The research, led by Mary Kate Schilke of Tyndale University and Esme Fuller-Thomson of the University of Toronto, set out to see if the apparent impact of parental divorce holds up when other negative childhood experiences are factored in. They also wanted to look at a growing but under-studied group: adults whose parents never married.
To answer these questions, the authors analyzed data from the 2021-2024 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. This is a massive telephone survey that collects health information from adults across the United States. The researchers focused on a sample of 128,264 adults. To ensure they were looking at the effects of family structure rather than severe trauma, they excluded anyone who reported experiencing physical or sexual abuse during childhood.
The respondents answered questions about their parents’ marital status before they turned 18, categorized as continuously married, divorced, or never married. The researchers looked at two primary measures of mental health. The first was a self-reported lifetime diagnosis of depression. The second was frequent mental distress, which means the respondent experienced 14 or more days of poor mental health in the past month.
Before taking other background factors into account, the researchers observed a noticeable gap in mental health based on family structure. Adults whose parents were divorced reported a lifetime depression rate of 19.2 percent, and those with unmarried parents reported a rate of 18.7 percent. Both groups were higher than the 14.1 percent rate among adults whose parents stayed married.
A similar pattern appeared for frequent mental distress in the past month. The rates were 13.6 percent for those with divorced parents, 16.3 percent for those with unmarried parents, and 8.5 percent for those with continuously married parents.
The picture changed when the researchers adjusted their statistical models to account for other adverse childhood experiences. They looked at factors like household neglect, domestic violence, emotional abuse, and having a parent who was incarcerated. Two specific factors stood out for their massive impact on the results: parental mental illness and parental substance use.
When the researchers factored in parental mental illness, the association between parental divorce and the adult child’s depression dropped by 68 percent. For adults with unmarried parents, accounting for parental mental illness reduced the association with depression by 52 percent. Parental substance use also played a large role, reducing the link between parental divorce and adult depression by 49 percent.
When all childhood adversities, sociodemographic factors like income and education, and adult health behaviors were accounted for, the link between childhood family structure and adult mental illness was no longer statistically significant. This suggests that a divorce itself is not necessarily the root cause of later mental health struggles. Instead, a cluster of environmental and genetic factors that often accompany a divorce or an unmarried household seem to drive the increased risk.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relies on self-reported data, which means participants might not remember their childhood experiences perfectly. The cross-sectional nature of the survey also means the researchers cannot establish a timeline of events. They do not know if a parent’s mental illness started before or after a divorce, or exactly how old the child was when the separation occurred.
The category for unmarried parents is also quite broad. It lumps together single parents and parents who lived together but never legally married, which are two very different family environments. In addition, the survey only recorded the respondents’ socioeconomic status in adulthood, not during their childhood. A family’s financial situation during a divorce could play a large role in a child’s development, but the researchers did not have the data to track that specific pathway.
The study, “Long After the Split: The Association Between Parental Divorce and Mental Health in Adults,” was authored by Mary Kate Schilke, Philip Baiden, and Esme Fuller-Thomson.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-link-between-parental-divorce-and-depression-might-not-be-what-it-seems/
-------------------------------------------------
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Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ParentalDivorce #MentalHealthResearch #DepressionRisk #AdverseChildhoodExperiences #ParentalMentalIllness #ParentalSubstanceUse #FamilyStructure #PsychiatryResearch #MentalHealthAwareness #ChildhoodAdversity
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: The link between parental divorce and depression might not be what it seems
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-link-between-parental-divorce-and-depression-might-not-be-what-it-seems/
A recent study suggests that the increased risk of adult depression often associated with childhood parental divorce is largely explained by the parents’ own mental health and substance use challenges, rather than the divorce itself. By analyzing data from over 128,000 adults, researchers found that once factors like parental mental illness are taken into account, the statistical link between family structure and adult emotional distress mostly disappears. The findings were published in Psychiatry Research.
Past research, such as a 2019 meta-analysis, found that adults who experienced parental divorce during childhood tend to suffer from higher rates of depression and psychological distress. This observation led to a general assumption that the separation itself creates lasting emotional damage. However, family dynamics are complicated, and a marital split is rarely an isolated event. Many children who experience a family breakup also live through other household adversities.
For instance, a 2024 study indicated that adults who go through a divorce often carry higher underlying risks for mental illnesses, such as depression or anxiety. This raises a question about whether shared family vulnerabilities might explain both the breakdown of the marriage and the child’s later struggles. Previous researchers have used large health surveys to look at the long-term consequences of a changing family structure, such as a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 that linked parental divorce to an elevated risk of stroke in older adulthood.
The research, led by Mary Kate Schilke of Tyndale University and Esme Fuller-Thomson of the University of Toronto, set out to see if the apparent impact of parental divorce holds up when other negative childhood experiences are factored in. They also wanted to look at a growing but under-studied group: adults whose parents never married.
To answer these questions, the authors analyzed data from the 2021-2024 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. This is a massive telephone survey that collects health information from adults across the United States. The researchers focused on a sample of 128,264 adults. To ensure they were looking at the effects of family structure rather than severe trauma, they excluded anyone who reported experiencing physical or sexual abuse during childhood.
The respondents answered questions about their parents’ marital status before they turned 18, categorized as continuously married, divorced, or never married. The researchers looked at two primary measures of mental health. The first was a self-reported lifetime diagnosis of depression. The second was frequent mental distress, which means the respondent experienced 14 or more days of poor mental health in the past month.
Before taking other background factors into account, the researchers observed a noticeable gap in mental health based on family structure. Adults whose parents were divorced reported a lifetime depression rate of 19.2 percent, and those with unmarried parents reported a rate of 18.7 percent. Both groups were higher than the 14.1 percent rate among adults whose parents stayed married.
A similar pattern appeared for frequent mental distress in the past month. The rates were 13.6 percent for those with divorced parents, 16.3 percent for those with unmarried parents, and 8.5 percent for those with continuously married parents.
The picture changed when the researchers adjusted their statistical models to account for other adverse childhood experiences. They looked at factors like household neglect, domestic violence, emotional abuse, and having a parent who was incarcerated. Two specific factors stood out for their massive impact on the results: parental mental illness and parental substance use.
When the researchers factored in parental mental illness, the association between parental divorce and the adult child’s depression dropped by 68 percent. For adults with unmarried parents, accounting for parental mental illness reduced the association with depression by 52 percent. Parental substance use also played a large role, reducing the link between parental divorce and adult depression by 49 percent.
When all childhood adversities, sociodemographic factors like income and education, and adult health behaviors were accounted for, the link between childhood family structure and adult mental illness was no longer statistically significant. This suggests that a divorce itself is not necessarily the root cause of later mental health struggles. Instead, a cluster of environmental and genetic factors that often accompany a divorce or an unmarried household seem to drive the increased risk.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relies on self-reported data, which means participants might not remember their childhood experiences perfectly. The cross-sectional nature of the survey also means the researchers cannot establish a timeline of events. They do not know if a parent’s mental illness started before or after a divorce, or exactly how old the child was when the separation occurred.
The category for unmarried parents is also quite broad. It lumps together single parents and parents who lived together but never legally married, which are two very different family environments. In addition, the survey only recorded the respondents’ socioeconomic status in adulthood, not during their childhood. A family’s financial situation during a divorce could play a large role in a child’s development, but the researchers did not have the data to track that specific pathway.
The study, “Long After the Split: The Association Between Parental Divorce and Mental Health in Adults,” was authored by Mary Kate Schilke, Philip Baiden, and Esme Fuller-Thomson.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-link-between-parental-divorce-and-depression-might-not-be-what-it-seems/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ParentalDivorce #MentalHealthResearch #DepressionRisk #AdverseChildhoodExperiences #ParentalMentalIllness #ParentalSubstanceUse #FamilyStructure #PsychiatryResearch #MentalHealthAwareness #ChildhoodAdversity
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: The link between parental divorce and depression might not be what it seems
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-link-between-parental-divorce-and-depression-might-not-be-what-it-seems/
A recent study suggests that the increased risk of adult depression often associated with childhood parental divorce is largely explained by the parents’ own mental health and substance use challenges, rather than the divorce itself. By analyzing data from over 128,000 adults, researchers found that once factors like parental mental illness are taken into account, the statistical link between family structure and adult emotional distress mostly disappears. The findings were published in Psychiatry Research.
Past research, such as a 2019 meta-analysis, found that adults who experienced parental divorce during childhood tend to suffer from higher rates of depression and psychological distress. This observation led to a general assumption that the separation itself creates lasting emotional damage. However, family dynamics are complicated, and a marital split is rarely an isolated event. Many children who experience a family breakup also live through other household adversities.
For instance, a 2024 study indicated that adults who go through a divorce often carry higher underlying risks for mental illnesses, such as depression or anxiety. This raises a question about whether shared family vulnerabilities might explain both the breakdown of the marriage and the child’s later struggles. Previous researchers have used large health surveys to look at the long-term consequences of a changing family structure, such as a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 that linked parental divorce to an elevated risk of stroke in older adulthood.
The research, led by Mary Kate Schilke of Tyndale University and Esme Fuller-Thomson of the University of Toronto, set out to see if the apparent impact of parental divorce holds up when other negative childhood experiences are factored in. They also wanted to look at a growing but under-studied group: adults whose parents never married.
To answer these questions, the authors analyzed data from the 2021-2024 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. This is a massive telephone survey that collects health information from adults across the United States. The researchers focused on a sample of 128,264 adults. To ensure they were looking at the effects of family structure rather than severe trauma, they excluded anyone who reported experiencing physical or sexual abuse during childhood.
The respondents answered questions about their parents’ marital status before they turned 18, categorized as continuously married, divorced, or never married. The researchers looked at two primary measures of mental health. The first was a self-reported lifetime diagnosis of depression. The second was frequent mental distress, which means the respondent experienced 14 or more days of poor mental health in the past month.
Before taking other background factors into account, the researchers observed a noticeable gap in mental health based on family structure. Adults whose parents were divorced reported a lifetime depression rate of 19.2 percent, and those with unmarried parents reported a rate of 18.7 percent. Both groups were higher than the 14.1 percent rate among adults whose parents stayed married.
A similar pattern appeared for frequent mental distress in the past month. The rates were 13.6 percent for those with divorced parents, 16.3 percent for those with unmarried parents, and 8.5 percent for those with continuously married parents.
The picture changed when the researchers adjusted their statistical models to account for other adverse childhood experiences. They looked at factors like household neglect, domestic violence, emotional abuse, and having a parent who was incarcerated. Two specific factors stood out for their massive impact on the results: parental mental illness and parental substance use.
When the researchers factored in parental mental illness, the association between parental divorce and the adult child’s depression dropped by 68 percent. For adults with unmarried parents, accounting for parental mental illness reduced the association with depression by 52 percent. Parental substance use also played a large role, reducing the link between parental divorce and adult depression by 49 percent.
When all childhood adversities, sociodemographic factors like income and education, and adult health behaviors were accounted for, the link between childhood family structure and adult mental illness was no longer statistically significant. This suggests that a divorce itself is not necessarily the root cause of later mental health struggles. Instead, a cluster of environmental and genetic factors that often accompany a divorce or an unmarried household seem to drive the increased risk.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relies on self-reported data, which means participants might not remember their childhood experiences perfectly. The cross-sectional nature of the survey also means the researchers cannot establish a timeline of events. They do not know if a parent’s mental illness started before or after a divorce, or exactly how old the child was when the separation occurred.
The category for unmarried parents is also quite broad. It lumps together single parents and parents who lived together but never legally married, which are two very different family environments. In addition, the survey only recorded the respondents’ socioeconomic status in adulthood, not during their childhood. A family’s financial situation during a divorce could play a large role in a child’s development, but the researchers did not have the data to track that specific pathway.
The study, “Long After the Split: The Association Between Parental Divorce and Mental Health in Adults,” was authored by Mary Kate Schilke, Philip Baiden, and Esme Fuller-Thomson.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-link-between-parental-divorce-and-depression-might-not-be-what-it-seems/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ParentalDivorce #MentalHealthResearch #DepressionRisk #AdverseChildhoodExperiences #ParentalMentalIllness #ParentalSubstanceUse #FamilyStructure #PsychiatryResearch #MentalHealthAwareness #ChildhoodAdversity
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New study links internet addiction to exhausted physiological stress systems
People who struggle with severe internet addiction might experience long-term changes in how their bodies process stress. A recent study analyzing human hair samples found that higher levels of internet addiction symptoms are linked to lower long-term accumulations of the stress hormone cortisol. The research was published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
Internet addiction is widely recognized as a behavioral disorder involving excessive and poorly controlled online activity. This can include anything from endless social media scrolling and online gaming to excessive internet shopping. The behavior becomes an addiction when it causes marked distress or impairs a person’s ability to function in their daily life, such as failing to fulfill obligations at school or work.
Psychologists have consistently linked internet addiction to high levels of psychological stress. Some theoretical models suggest that people who are highly vulnerable to stress may use the internet as a coping mechanism to escape negative emotions. However, studies looking at the physiological side of this stress response have yielded conflicting results.
The human body manages stress through a biological network known as the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, which ultimately produces cortisol. Cortisol is often called the primary stress hormone. In healthy amounts, it helps the body respond to immediate challenges, but chronic stress can alter how the system functions.
Previous research trying to measure cortisol in people with internet addiction has mostly relied on saliva or blood samples. These testing methods are highly sensitive to momentary fluctuations. A person’s cortisol levels can change based on the time of day, recent exercise, alcohol consumption, or a brief moment of anxiety just before the test.
To bypass these momentary spikes, scientists Hideki Tsumura of Tokushima University and Shuhei Izawa of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health in Japan turned to a different testing method. They chose to measure hormones trapped within human hair. Hair grows at an average rate of roughly one centimeter per month.
By analyzing a three-centimeter snippet of hair cut close to the scalp, researchers can measure the total amount of hormones secreted over the preceding three months. This provides a stable biological diary of long-term hormone production.
The researchers also decided to measure a second hormone called testosterone. Produced by a different biological network, testosterone is often associated with reward processing and risk-taking behaviors. Some neurobiological studies suggest that individuals who are prone to risk-taking might have heightened reward sensitivities driven by testosterone.
Because internet addiction often involves choosing immediate online rewards despite long-term negative consequences, the researchers suspected testosterone might play a role. The two biological systems that produce cortisol and testosterone also interact with one another. High levels of cortisol can suppress testosterone production, while testosterone can inhibit the release of cortisol.
Tsumura and Izawa wanted to examine both hormones simultaneously to see how each related to internet addiction symptoms. They recruited 155 Japanese university students for the study. The group included 94 women and 61 men, with an average age of roughly 21 years.
The researchers applied strict criteria to ensure the biological samples would be viable. They excluded individuals who had endocrine disorders, acute psychiatric conditions, or who were taking medications known to affect hormone levels, including hormonal contraceptives.
Participants completed a standardized survey known as the Internet Addiction Test. The questionnaire asks individuals to rate how often their internet use disrupts their sleep, academic performance, or social interactions. The students also completed a separate assessment to measure current depressive symptoms.
Following the surveys, the research team collected the hair samples from the back of each participant’s head. In the laboratory, they washed the hair samples in chemical solvents to remove external contaminants. The hair was then flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen and ground into a fine powder so the trapped hormones could be extracted and quantified.
To analyze the data, the researchers used statistical models that controlled for various outside factors. They adjusted the numbers to account for age, sex, body mass index, and depression scores. They also factored in hair care habits, such as bleaching, perming, and how many times a week the participants washed their hair.
The results showed that hair cortisol concentrations were negatively associated with internet addiction scores. Students who reported more severe symptoms of internet addiction had lower amounts of cortisol trapped in their hair. When the researchers divided the participants into two groups based on a standard cutoff score for internet addiction, the highly addicted group exhibited lower average cortisol levels than the low-risk group.
The initial hypothesis regarding testosterone was not supported by the data. The researchers found no association between internet addiction symptoms and long-term hair testosterone concentrations. The results remained consistent across both male and female participants.
Finding low levels of a stress hormone in people experiencing high psychological distress might seem counterintuitive. The researchers point out that chronic stress exposure can initially trigger high cortisol production, eventually leading to a state of biological exhaustion. Over time, the stress system may become blunted, resulting in lower baseline cortisol secretion.
Reduced hair cortisol levels have also been observed in people experiencing post-traumatic stress, severe depression, and prolonged adversity. The findings suggest that individuals with severe internet addiction might share a similar underlying biological profile characterized by an exhausted physiological stress response.
The authors noted a few limitations to their work. Because the study relied on a specific demographic of young university students, the findings may not represent the general population or older adults in clinical settings. The research was also cross-sectional, meaning it captured a single snapshot in time.
Without longitudinal data, researchers cannot determine the sequence of events. The data cannot show whether an altered stress system makes someone more vulnerable to internet addiction, or if the behavioral addiction eventually causes the stress system to burn out. Additionally, unmeasured conditions like past trauma could have influenced the biological markers.
The study, “Association of internet addiction symptoms with hair cortisol and hair testosterone concentrations,” was authored by Hideki Tsumura and Shuhei Izawa.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #InternetAddiction #HairCortisol #StressBiology #Psychoneuroendocrinology #LongTermStress #CortisolExhaustion # TestosteroneNotLinked #StressSystems #OnlineBehaviorResearch #YouthHealthMarkup
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New study links internet addiction to exhausted physiological stress systems
People who struggle with severe internet addiction might experience long-term changes in how their bodies process stress. A recent study analyzing human hair samples found that higher levels of internet addiction symptoms are linked to lower long-term accumulations of the stress hormone cortisol. The research was published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
Internet addiction is widely recognized as a behavioral disorder involving excessive and poorly controlled online activity. This can include anything from endless social media scrolling and online gaming to excessive internet shopping. The behavior becomes an addiction when it causes marked distress or impairs a person’s ability to function in their daily life, such as failing to fulfill obligations at school or work.
Psychologists have consistently linked internet addiction to high levels of psychological stress. Some theoretical models suggest that people who are highly vulnerable to stress may use the internet as a coping mechanism to escape negative emotions. However, studies looking at the physiological side of this stress response have yielded conflicting results.
The human body manages stress through a biological network known as the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, which ultimately produces cortisol. Cortisol is often called the primary stress hormone. In healthy amounts, it helps the body respond to immediate challenges, but chronic stress can alter how the system functions.
Previous research trying to measure cortisol in people with internet addiction has mostly relied on saliva or blood samples. These testing methods are highly sensitive to momentary fluctuations. A person’s cortisol levels can change based on the time of day, recent exercise, alcohol consumption, or a brief moment of anxiety just before the test.
To bypass these momentary spikes, scientists Hideki Tsumura of Tokushima University and Shuhei Izawa of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health in Japan turned to a different testing method. They chose to measure hormones trapped within human hair. Hair grows at an average rate of roughly one centimeter per month.
By analyzing a three-centimeter snippet of hair cut close to the scalp, researchers can measure the total amount of hormones secreted over the preceding three months. This provides a stable biological diary of long-term hormone production.
The researchers also decided to measure a second hormone called testosterone. Produced by a different biological network, testosterone is often associated with reward processing and risk-taking behaviors. Some neurobiological studies suggest that individuals who are prone to risk-taking might have heightened reward sensitivities driven by testosterone.
Because internet addiction often involves choosing immediate online rewards despite long-term negative consequences, the researchers suspected testosterone might play a role. The two biological systems that produce cortisol and testosterone also interact with one another. High levels of cortisol can suppress testosterone production, while testosterone can inhibit the release of cortisol.
Tsumura and Izawa wanted to examine both hormones simultaneously to see how each related to internet addiction symptoms. They recruited 155 Japanese university students for the study. The group included 94 women and 61 men, with an average age of roughly 21 years.
The researchers applied strict criteria to ensure the biological samples would be viable. They excluded individuals who had endocrine disorders, acute psychiatric conditions, or who were taking medications known to affect hormone levels, including hormonal contraceptives.
Participants completed a standardized survey known as the Internet Addiction Test. The questionnaire asks individuals to rate how often their internet use disrupts their sleep, academic performance, or social interactions. The students also completed a separate assessment to measure current depressive symptoms.
Following the surveys, the research team collected the hair samples from the back of each participant’s head. In the laboratory, they washed the hair samples in chemical solvents to remove external contaminants. The hair was then flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen and ground into a fine powder so the trapped hormones could be extracted and quantified.
To analyze the data, the researchers used statistical models that controlled for various outside factors. They adjusted the numbers to account for age, sex, body mass index, and depression scores. They also factored in hair care habits, such as bleaching, perming, and how many times a week the participants washed their hair.
The results showed that hair cortisol concentrations were negatively associated with internet addiction scores. Students who reported more severe symptoms of internet addiction had lower amounts of cortisol trapped in their hair. When the researchers divided the participants into two groups based on a standard cutoff score for internet addiction, the highly addicted group exhibited lower average cortisol levels than the low-risk group.
The initial hypothesis regarding testosterone was not supported by the data. The researchers found no association between internet addiction symptoms and long-term hair testosterone concentrations. The results remained consistent across both male and female participants.
Finding low levels of a stress hormone in people experiencing high psychological distress might seem counterintuitive. The researchers point out that chronic stress exposure can initially trigger high cortisol production, eventually leading to a state of biological exhaustion. Over time, the stress system may become blunted, resulting in lower baseline cortisol secretion.
Reduced hair cortisol levels have also been observed in people experiencing post-traumatic stress, severe depression, and prolonged adversity. The findings suggest that individuals with severe internet addiction might share a similar underlying biological profile characterized by an exhausted physiological stress response.
The authors noted a few limitations to their work. Because the study relied on a specific demographic of young university students, the findings may not represent the general population or older adults in clinical settings. The research was also cross-sectional, meaning it captured a single snapshot in time.
Without longitudinal data, researchers cannot determine the sequence of events. The data cannot show whether an altered stress system makes someone more vulnerable to internet addiction, or if the behavioral addiction eventually causes the stress system to burn out. Additionally, unmeasured conditions like past trauma could have influenced the biological markers.
The study, “Association of internet addiction symptoms with hair cortisol and hair testosterone concentrations,” was authored by Hideki Tsumura and Shuhei Izawa.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #InternetAddiction #HairCortisol #StressBiology #Psychoneuroendocrinology #LongTermStress #CortisolExhaustion # TestosteroneNotLinked #StressSystems #OnlineBehaviorResearch #YouthHealthMarkup
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New study links internet addiction to exhausted physiological stress systems
People who struggle with severe internet addiction might experience long-term changes in how their bodies process stress. A recent study analyzing human hair samples found that higher levels of internet addiction symptoms are linked to lower long-term accumulations of the stress hormone cortisol. The research was published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
Internet addiction is widely recognized as a behavioral disorder involving excessive and poorly controlled online activity. This can include anything from endless social media scrolling and online gaming to excessive internet shopping. The behavior becomes an addiction when it causes marked distress or impairs a person’s ability to function in their daily life, such as failing to fulfill obligations at school or work.
Psychologists have consistently linked internet addiction to high levels of psychological stress. Some theoretical models suggest that people who are highly vulnerable to stress may use the internet as a coping mechanism to escape negative emotions. However, studies looking at the physiological side of this stress response have yielded conflicting results.
The human body manages stress through a biological network known as the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, which ultimately produces cortisol. Cortisol is often called the primary stress hormone. In healthy amounts, it helps the body respond to immediate challenges, but chronic stress can alter how the system functions.
Previous research trying to measure cortisol in people with internet addiction has mostly relied on saliva or blood samples. These testing methods are highly sensitive to momentary fluctuations. A person’s cortisol levels can change based on the time of day, recent exercise, alcohol consumption, or a brief moment of anxiety just before the test.
To bypass these momentary spikes, scientists Hideki Tsumura of Tokushima University and Shuhei Izawa of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health in Japan turned to a different testing method. They chose to measure hormones trapped within human hair. Hair grows at an average rate of roughly one centimeter per month.
By analyzing a three-centimeter snippet of hair cut close to the scalp, researchers can measure the total amount of hormones secreted over the preceding three months. This provides a stable biological diary of long-term hormone production.
The researchers also decided to measure a second hormone called testosterone. Produced by a different biological network, testosterone is often associated with reward processing and risk-taking behaviors. Some neurobiological studies suggest that individuals who are prone to risk-taking might have heightened reward sensitivities driven by testosterone.
Because internet addiction often involves choosing immediate online rewards despite long-term negative consequences, the researchers suspected testosterone might play a role. The two biological systems that produce cortisol and testosterone also interact with one another. High levels of cortisol can suppress testosterone production, while testosterone can inhibit the release of cortisol.
Tsumura and Izawa wanted to examine both hormones simultaneously to see how each related to internet addiction symptoms. They recruited 155 Japanese university students for the study. The group included 94 women and 61 men, with an average age of roughly 21 years.
The researchers applied strict criteria to ensure the biological samples would be viable. They excluded individuals who had endocrine disorders, acute psychiatric conditions, or who were taking medications known to affect hormone levels, including hormonal contraceptives.
Participants completed a standardized survey known as the Internet Addiction Test. The questionnaire asks individuals to rate how often their internet use disrupts their sleep, academic performance, or social interactions. The students also completed a separate assessment to measure current depressive symptoms.
Following the surveys, the research team collected the hair samples from the back of each participant’s head. In the laboratory, they washed the hair samples in chemical solvents to remove external contaminants. The hair was then flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen and ground into a fine powder so the trapped hormones could be extracted and quantified.
To analyze the data, the researchers used statistical models that controlled for various outside factors. They adjusted the numbers to account for age, sex, body mass index, and depression scores. They also factored in hair care habits, such as bleaching, perming, and how many times a week the participants washed their hair.
The results showed that hair cortisol concentrations were negatively associated with internet addiction scores. Students who reported more severe symptoms of internet addiction had lower amounts of cortisol trapped in their hair. When the researchers divided the participants into two groups based on a standard cutoff score for internet addiction, the highly addicted group exhibited lower average cortisol levels than the low-risk group.
The initial hypothesis regarding testosterone was not supported by the data. The researchers found no association between internet addiction symptoms and long-term hair testosterone concentrations. The results remained consistent across both male and female participants.
Finding low levels of a stress hormone in people experiencing high psychological distress might seem counterintuitive. The researchers point out that chronic stress exposure can initially trigger high cortisol production, eventually leading to a state of biological exhaustion. Over time, the stress system may become blunted, resulting in lower baseline cortisol secretion.
Reduced hair cortisol levels have also been observed in people experiencing post-traumatic stress, severe depression, and prolonged adversity. The findings suggest that individuals with severe internet addiction might share a similar underlying biological profile characterized by an exhausted physiological stress response.
The authors noted a few limitations to their work. Because the study relied on a specific demographic of young university students, the findings may not represent the general population or older adults in clinical settings. The research was also cross-sectional, meaning it captured a single snapshot in time.
Without longitudinal data, researchers cannot determine the sequence of events. The data cannot show whether an altered stress system makes someone more vulnerable to internet addiction, or if the behavioral addiction eventually causes the stress system to burn out. Additionally, unmeasured conditions like past trauma could have influenced the biological markers.
The study, “Association of internet addiction symptoms with hair cortisol and hair testosterone concentrations,” was authored by Hideki Tsumura and Shuhei Izawa.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #InternetAddiction #HairCortisol #StressBiology #Psychoneuroendocrinology #LongTermStress #CortisolExhaustion # TestosteroneNotLinked #StressSystems #OnlineBehaviorResearch #YouthHealthMarkup
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: East Germans who experienced repression during the GDR show higher distress and systemic inflammation, study finds
A study involving citizens of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany or GDR) found that those who experienced state-organized soft repression scored higher on psychological distress indicators. They also tended to have higher interleukin-6 levels, indicating increased systemic inflammation. The paper was published in The British Journal of Psychiatry.
Political repression can affect health not only through overt violence, imprisonment, or torture, but also through quieter forms of control that interfere with everyday life. So-called soft repression can include surveillance, denunciation, restrictions on speech, harassment, and deliberate obstacles in a person’s professional or social life. These practices may create chronic feelings of insecurity, mistrust, uncertainty, and the need to constantly monitor one’s own behavior.
In the former German Democratic Republic, such methods were used against people and groups regarded as politically troublesome, including artists, church groups, youth subcultures, and people seeking to emigrate. Although these experiences do not necessarily meet conventional definitions of psychological trauma, they can still function as powerful and prolonged sources of psychosocial stress. Long-term stress of this kind has been linked to anxiety, depression, disruption of stress-regulation systems, and changes in immune functioning.
The German Democratic Republic was the socialist state that existed from 1949 until German reunification in 1990. It was closely aligned with the Soviet Union and governed by an authoritarian one-party system led by the Socialist Unity Party.
Study author Ruth Marheinecke and her colleagues examined the long-term psychobiological consequences of soft repression. They hypothesized that individuals who experienced soft repression in the GDR would show elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and trauma-related symptoms. They also expected that these individuals would have elevated levels of interleukin-6 and hs-CRP as well as shorter telomere length, indicating accelerated biological aging.
Interleukin-6 is a molecule involved in immune signaling and inflammation. Higher blood levels indicate increased inflammatory activity. High-sensitivity C-reactive protein or hs-CRP is a blood marker that detects low levels of systemic inflammation. It is commonly used to assess inflammatory and cardiovascular risk. Telomeres are repetitive DNA-protein structures located at the ends of chromosomes inside cells that help protect chromosome ends from damage and fusion. They are used as an indicator of biological aging, with shorter telomeres indicating greater cellular stress and higher biological age.
Participants of this study were 100 former GDR citizens between 50 and 78 years of age, mainly from Thuringia and Saxony in modern Germany. Study authors recruited them using flyers, local newspaper ads, and support from local organizations such as church communities.
They were organized into two groups. One group consisted of 49 participants who experienced at least two state-organized soft repression techniques in the GDR, including planned surveillance, summoning to interrogations, denunciation, or school and workplace harassment. The other group was composed of 51 individuals who lived in the GDR but reported no personal repression experiences. The two groups were matched for age, gender, and GDR origin.
Study participants completed assessments of depression (the Beck Depression Inventory-II), anxiety (the trait subscale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), and psychological trauma symptoms (the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire). They also completed assessments of perceived social support and resilience. Aside from this, study participants gave blood samples, allowing study authors to assess their interleukin-6 levels, hs-CRP levels, and telomere length.
The results showed that participants who were exposed to soft repression during the GDR had higher levels of depression, anxiety, and trauma symptoms on average. They also reported lower resilience compared to the control group and tended to have higher levels of interleukin-6. There were no differences between the two groups in hs-CRP levels and telomere length. However, in the repression group, lower social support was associated with shorter telomeres.
“This study is the first to explore the psychobiological health consequences of soft political repression. Findings emphasize its long-term consequences on the psyche and immune system and highlight the potential role of social support in mitigating cellular aging. As authoritarian tactics are becoming more prevalent worldwide, understanding the impact of soft repression on health is essential for supporting affected individuals,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychobiological consequences of state repression. However, it should be noted that the study did not have a pretest, and this was not an experimental study. Therefore, it remains unknown whether the observed differences are a consequence of the repression participants endured during the GDR or are caused by other factors. Furthermore, because individuals with acute psychopathology were excluded from participating, the sample may reflect particularly resilient individuals, meaning the actual impact of soft repression could be even more pronounced.
The paper, “Long-term consequences of soft political repression on psychological well-being, systemic inflammation and cellular ageing,” was authored by Ruth Marheinecke, Jost Blasberg, Jue Lin, Nils Opel, Carsten Spitzer, Bernhard Strauss, Elissa Epel, and Veronika Engert.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #GDRrepression #psychobiology #systemicinflammation #IL6 #telomerelength #softrepression #EastGermany #mentalhealth #inflammaging #socialsupportmatters
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: East Germans who experienced repression during the GDR show higher distress and systemic inflammation, study finds
A study involving citizens of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany or GDR) found that those who experienced state-organized soft repression scored higher on psychological distress indicators. They also tended to have higher interleukin-6 levels, indicating increased systemic inflammation. The paper was published in The British Journal of Psychiatry.
Political repression can affect health not only through overt violence, imprisonment, or torture, but also through quieter forms of control that interfere with everyday life. So-called soft repression can include surveillance, denunciation, restrictions on speech, harassment, and deliberate obstacles in a person’s professional or social life. These practices may create chronic feelings of insecurity, mistrust, uncertainty, and the need to constantly monitor one’s own behavior.
In the former German Democratic Republic, such methods were used against people and groups regarded as politically troublesome, including artists, church groups, youth subcultures, and people seeking to emigrate. Although these experiences do not necessarily meet conventional definitions of psychological trauma, they can still function as powerful and prolonged sources of psychosocial stress. Long-term stress of this kind has been linked to anxiety, depression, disruption of stress-regulation systems, and changes in immune functioning.
The German Democratic Republic was the socialist state that existed from 1949 until German reunification in 1990. It was closely aligned with the Soviet Union and governed by an authoritarian one-party system led by the Socialist Unity Party.
Study author Ruth Marheinecke and her colleagues examined the long-term psychobiological consequences of soft repression. They hypothesized that individuals who experienced soft repression in the GDR would show elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and trauma-related symptoms. They also expected that these individuals would have elevated levels of interleukin-6 and hs-CRP as well as shorter telomere length, indicating accelerated biological aging.
Interleukin-6 is a molecule involved in immune signaling and inflammation. Higher blood levels indicate increased inflammatory activity. High-sensitivity C-reactive protein or hs-CRP is a blood marker that detects low levels of systemic inflammation. It is commonly used to assess inflammatory and cardiovascular risk. Telomeres are repetitive DNA-protein structures located at the ends of chromosomes inside cells that help protect chromosome ends from damage and fusion. They are used as an indicator of biological aging, with shorter telomeres indicating greater cellular stress and higher biological age.
Participants of this study were 100 former GDR citizens between 50 and 78 years of age, mainly from Thuringia and Saxony in modern Germany. Study authors recruited them using flyers, local newspaper ads, and support from local organizations such as church communities.
They were organized into two groups. One group consisted of 49 participants who experienced at least two state-organized soft repression techniques in the GDR, including planned surveillance, summoning to interrogations, denunciation, or school and workplace harassment. The other group was composed of 51 individuals who lived in the GDR but reported no personal repression experiences. The two groups were matched for age, gender, and GDR origin.
Study participants completed assessments of depression (the Beck Depression Inventory-II), anxiety (the trait subscale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), and psychological trauma symptoms (the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire). They also completed assessments of perceived social support and resilience. Aside from this, study participants gave blood samples, allowing study authors to assess their interleukin-6 levels, hs-CRP levels, and telomere length.
The results showed that participants who were exposed to soft repression during the GDR had higher levels of depression, anxiety, and trauma symptoms on average. They also reported lower resilience compared to the control group and tended to have higher levels of interleukin-6. There were no differences between the two groups in hs-CRP levels and telomere length. However, in the repression group, lower social support was associated with shorter telomeres.
“This study is the first to explore the psychobiological health consequences of soft political repression. Findings emphasize its long-term consequences on the psyche and immune system and highlight the potential role of social support in mitigating cellular aging. As authoritarian tactics are becoming more prevalent worldwide, understanding the impact of soft repression on health is essential for supporting affected individuals,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychobiological consequences of state repression. However, it should be noted that the study did not have a pretest, and this was not an experimental study. Therefore, it remains unknown whether the observed differences are a consequence of the repression participants endured during the GDR or are caused by other factors. Furthermore, because individuals with acute psychopathology were excluded from participating, the sample may reflect particularly resilient individuals, meaning the actual impact of soft repression could be even more pronounced.
The paper, “Long-term consequences of soft political repression on psychological well-being, systemic inflammation and cellular ageing,” was authored by Ruth Marheinecke, Jost Blasberg, Jue Lin, Nils Opel, Carsten Spitzer, Bernhard Strauss, Elissa Epel, and Veronika Engert.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #GDRrepression #psychobiology #systemicinflammation #IL6 #telomerelength #softrepression #EastGermany #mentalhealth #inflammaging #socialsupportmatters
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: East Germans who experienced repression during the GDR show higher distress and systemic inflammation, study finds
A study involving citizens of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany or GDR) found that those who experienced state-organized soft repression scored higher on psychological distress indicators. They also tended to have higher interleukin-6 levels, indicating increased systemic inflammation. The paper was published in The British Journal of Psychiatry.
Political repression can affect health not only through overt violence, imprisonment, or torture, but also through quieter forms of control that interfere with everyday life. So-called soft repression can include surveillance, denunciation, restrictions on speech, harassment, and deliberate obstacles in a person’s professional or social life. These practices may create chronic feelings of insecurity, mistrust, uncertainty, and the need to constantly monitor one’s own behavior.
In the former German Democratic Republic, such methods were used against people and groups regarded as politically troublesome, including artists, church groups, youth subcultures, and people seeking to emigrate. Although these experiences do not necessarily meet conventional definitions of psychological trauma, they can still function as powerful and prolonged sources of psychosocial stress. Long-term stress of this kind has been linked to anxiety, depression, disruption of stress-regulation systems, and changes in immune functioning.
The German Democratic Republic was the socialist state that existed from 1949 until German reunification in 1990. It was closely aligned with the Soviet Union and governed by an authoritarian one-party system led by the Socialist Unity Party.
Study author Ruth Marheinecke and her colleagues examined the long-term psychobiological consequences of soft repression. They hypothesized that individuals who experienced soft repression in the GDR would show elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and trauma-related symptoms. They also expected that these individuals would have elevated levels of interleukin-6 and hs-CRP as well as shorter telomere length, indicating accelerated biological aging.
Interleukin-6 is a molecule involved in immune signaling and inflammation. Higher blood levels indicate increased inflammatory activity. High-sensitivity C-reactive protein or hs-CRP is a blood marker that detects low levels of systemic inflammation. It is commonly used to assess inflammatory and cardiovascular risk. Telomeres are repetitive DNA-protein structures located at the ends of chromosomes inside cells that help protect chromosome ends from damage and fusion. They are used as an indicator of biological aging, with shorter telomeres indicating greater cellular stress and higher biological age.
Participants of this study were 100 former GDR citizens between 50 and 78 years of age, mainly from Thuringia and Saxony in modern Germany. Study authors recruited them using flyers, local newspaper ads, and support from local organizations such as church communities.
They were organized into two groups. One group consisted of 49 participants who experienced at least two state-organized soft repression techniques in the GDR, including planned surveillance, summoning to interrogations, denunciation, or school and workplace harassment. The other group was composed of 51 individuals who lived in the GDR but reported no personal repression experiences. The two groups were matched for age, gender, and GDR origin.
Study participants completed assessments of depression (the Beck Depression Inventory-II), anxiety (the trait subscale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), and psychological trauma symptoms (the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire). They also completed assessments of perceived social support and resilience. Aside from this, study participants gave blood samples, allowing study authors to assess their interleukin-6 levels, hs-CRP levels, and telomere length.
The results showed that participants who were exposed to soft repression during the GDR had higher levels of depression, anxiety, and trauma symptoms on average. They also reported lower resilience compared to the control group and tended to have higher levels of interleukin-6. There were no differences between the two groups in hs-CRP levels and telomere length. However, in the repression group, lower social support was associated with shorter telomeres.
“This study is the first to explore the psychobiological health consequences of soft political repression. Findings emphasize its long-term consequences on the psyche and immune system and highlight the potential role of social support in mitigating cellular aging. As authoritarian tactics are becoming more prevalent worldwide, understanding the impact of soft repression on health is essential for supporting affected individuals,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychobiological consequences of state repression. However, it should be noted that the study did not have a pretest, and this was not an experimental study. Therefore, it remains unknown whether the observed differences are a consequence of the repression participants endured during the GDR or are caused by other factors. Furthermore, because individuals with acute psychopathology were excluded from participating, the sample may reflect particularly resilient individuals, meaning the actual impact of soft repression could be even more pronounced.
The paper, “Long-term consequences of soft political repression on psychological well-being, systemic inflammation and cellular ageing,” was authored by Ruth Marheinecke, Jost Blasberg, Jue Lin, Nils Opel, Carsten Spitzer, Bernhard Strauss, Elissa Epel, and Veronika Engert.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #GDRrepression #psychobiology #systemicinflammation #IL6 #telomerelength #softrepression #EastGermany #mentalhealth #inflammaging #socialsupportmatters
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Psychedelics reduce bottom-up brain activity in the default mode network
URL: https://www.psypost.org/psychedelics-alter-the-trajectory-of-moving-brain-waves/
Psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin reduce the amount of bottom-up brain activity flowing into a network associated with self-reflection. These altered trajectories of brain signals occur consistently across humans and mice, offering a biological explanation for how these drugs reshape the mind. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Psychedelics are gaining attention as potential psychiatric treatments for conditions like depression and trauma. To understand their therapeutic benefits and risks, researchers need to know exactly how these substances alter brain function. Prior research has identified that psychedelics affect the default mode network, a collection of brain regions responsible for introspection, daydreaming, and mental rigidity. Many psychiatric conditions involve abnormal activity in this specific network, making it a primary target for new treatments.
The default mode network sits at the top of a processing hierarchy in the brain. Brain activity constantly moves across the surface of the cortex, which is the brain’s outer layer. Information travels from lower-order sensory areas up into higher-order areas like the default mode network, a process known as bottom-up processing. The reverse movement, from higher cognitive regions down to sensory regions, is called top-down processing.
In a healthy brain, bottom-up processing updates our internal models with new information from the outside world. Top-down processing uses our past experiences and expectations to make sense of that incoming sensory data. An imbalance between these two directions of information flow can lead to psychological distress or perceptual errors.
Past imaging studies typically measured brain activity in static regions, treating the brain as a set of fixed locations. This approach ignores the continuous, wave-like movement of signals across the brain’s surface. Analyzing static brain regions is similar to measuring the total rainfall in a single county without tracking the movement of the storm system on a weather radar. By treating the brain as a collection of isolated points, traditional research methods might obscure the true dynamics of how different brain areas communicate over time.
Adam R. Pines, Leanne M. Williams, and their colleagues at Stanford University wanted to observe these moving signals directly. They adapted an analytical technique called optical flow, which tracks the frame-by-frame movement of pixels in a video. The team used this mathematical approach to track the direction and size of brain activity waves moving across the cortex.
The researchers first analyzed a small study of 14 human volunteers who received MDMA. They compared functional magnetic resonance imaging scans taken after the participants took MDMA to scans taken after a placebo pill or no drug at all. The optical flow analysis revealed a consistent pattern across the subjects.
The team found that MDMA reduced the overall magnitude of brain waves moving through the default mode network. The drug also reduced the proportion of signals traveling in a bottom-up direction into the network.
Next, the team examined a second small study involving six human participants who ingested psilocybin. The researchers compared brain scans from the psilocybin sessions to baseline scans and to an active placebo condition. For the active placebo, participants received a dose of the stimulant methylphenidate. This stimulant mimics the physical arousal of psilocybin without the psychedelic effects.
As with MDMA, psilocybin reduced the overall magnitude of propagating brain waves in the default mode network. The reduction in bottom-up directionality was also present but was not statistically significant. The researchers suspect this weaker result occurred because the effects of psilocybin lingered for days. This persistence may have artificially altered the baseline scans taken shortly after the drug sessions.
In a third small study, 18 human volunteers received an intravenous infusion of LSD. The researchers compared their brain activity to scans taken after a saline placebo infusion. Consistent with the other substances, LSD reduced both the magnitude of the moving brain waves and the proportion of bottom-up signals entering the default mode network.
To ensure these effects were not unique to humans or specific to magnetic resonance imaging, the team looked at a small study of 14 mice. They used widefield calcium imaging, a technique that directly records the physical activity of brain cells with high resolution. The mice received LSD, a sedative called diazepam, or a different sedative called dexmedetomidine.
Like the human participants, mice given LSD showed reduced magnitude and bottom-up flow of brain activity in the default mode network. Diazepam, an anti-anxiety medication, also reduced bottom-up signals, though to a lesser extent than LSD. Dexmedetomidine produced the exact opposite effect, increasing the proportion of bottom-up signals entering the network. These animal results confirmed that the optical flow technique measures actual changes in nerve cell activity rather than artifacts of blood flow.
The researchers also investigated whether these changes in moving brain activity related to the subjective experiences reported by the human volunteers. In the MDMA study, participants who experienced the greatest reduction in bottom-up processing also reported the most intense feelings of impaired control. They also reported a greater dread of ego dissolution, which is a fearful reaction to losing one’s sense of self.
This psychological correlation suggests that suppressing bottom-up information flow too much could trigger the negative experiences sometimes associated with psychedelics. Bottom-up processing normally grounds individuals in their immediate sensory environment. A severe drop in this grounding input might leave individuals feeling detached or at the mercy of their unanchored internal thoughts.
Some psychiatric conditions, such as ruminative depression, are characterized by excessive automatic thoughts and abnormal bottom-up signaling. Reducing bottom-up flow might explain why psychedelics offer relief for some patients with depression. The drugs could temporarily quiet the intrusive signals feeding into the default mode network.
Individuals at risk for psychosis already suffer from impaired bottom-up processing. Giving psychedelics to these vulnerable patients could exacerbate their symptoms. The drugs might overpower their ability to update internal beliefs with external reality.
The sample sizes across all four datasets are small, which limits the ability to account for individual differences in how people react to these drugs. Larger datasets will be necessary to map out how different psychedelics affect people with varied biological backgrounds. Expanding the number of participants could reveal more subtle alterations to brain activity flow that this initial analysis missed.
The optical flow analysis focused exclusively on the outer surface of the brain. Psychedelics also heavily influence deep brain structures, but tracking moving signals between these buried regions and the surface remains computationally out of reach for this specific technique. The imaging technologies used in human participants also have limits in their spatial and temporal resolution. These equipment limitations mean researchers might miss faster changes in brain signaling.
Finally, the studies relied entirely on healthy volunteers and laboratory mice. Future research will need to test these observations in clinical populations to determine how these changes in brain activity relate to therapeutic outcomes. Understanding the exact mechanisms of psychedelic action could help doctors identify which patients are most likely to benefit from these treatments and which patients might be harmed by them.
The study, “Psychedelics disrupt hierarchical cortical propagations in the default mode network of humans and mice,” was authored by Adam R. Pines, Xue Zhang, John Kochalka, Sam S. Vesuna, Isaac V. Kauvar, Divya Rajasekharan, T. Rick Reneau, Teddy J. Akiki, Laura M. Hack, Joshua S. Siegel, and Leanne M. Williams.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/psychedelics-alter-the-trajectory-of-moving-brain-waves/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PsychedelicsBrain activity #DefaultModeNetwork #BottomUpProcessing #MDMA #Psilocybin #LSD #Neuroscience #OpticalFlow #BrainConnectivity #PsychedelicTherapy
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Psychedelics reduce bottom-up brain activity in the default mode network
URL: https://www.psypost.org/psychedelics-alter-the-trajectory-of-moving-brain-waves/
Psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin reduce the amount of bottom-up brain activity flowing into a network associated with self-reflection. These altered trajectories of brain signals occur consistently across humans and mice, offering a biological explanation for how these drugs reshape the mind. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Psychedelics are gaining attention as potential psychiatric treatments for conditions like depression and trauma. To understand their therapeutic benefits and risks, researchers need to know exactly how these substances alter brain function. Prior research has identified that psychedelics affect the default mode network, a collection of brain regions responsible for introspection, daydreaming, and mental rigidity. Many psychiatric conditions involve abnormal activity in this specific network, making it a primary target for new treatments.
The default mode network sits at the top of a processing hierarchy in the brain. Brain activity constantly moves across the surface of the cortex, which is the brain’s outer layer. Information travels from lower-order sensory areas up into higher-order areas like the default mode network, a process known as bottom-up processing. The reverse movement, from higher cognitive regions down to sensory regions, is called top-down processing.
In a healthy brain, bottom-up processing updates our internal models with new information from the outside world. Top-down processing uses our past experiences and expectations to make sense of that incoming sensory data. An imbalance between these two directions of information flow can lead to psychological distress or perceptual errors.
Past imaging studies typically measured brain activity in static regions, treating the brain as a set of fixed locations. This approach ignores the continuous, wave-like movement of signals across the brain’s surface. Analyzing static brain regions is similar to measuring the total rainfall in a single county without tracking the movement of the storm system on a weather radar. By treating the brain as a collection of isolated points, traditional research methods might obscure the true dynamics of how different brain areas communicate over time.
Adam R. Pines, Leanne M. Williams, and their colleagues at Stanford University wanted to observe these moving signals directly. They adapted an analytical technique called optical flow, which tracks the frame-by-frame movement of pixels in a video. The team used this mathematical approach to track the direction and size of brain activity waves moving across the cortex.
The researchers first analyzed a small study of 14 human volunteers who received MDMA. They compared functional magnetic resonance imaging scans taken after the participants took MDMA to scans taken after a placebo pill or no drug at all. The optical flow analysis revealed a consistent pattern across the subjects.
The team found that MDMA reduced the overall magnitude of brain waves moving through the default mode network. The drug also reduced the proportion of signals traveling in a bottom-up direction into the network.
Next, the team examined a second small study involving six human participants who ingested psilocybin. The researchers compared brain scans from the psilocybin sessions to baseline scans and to an active placebo condition. For the active placebo, participants received a dose of the stimulant methylphenidate. This stimulant mimics the physical arousal of psilocybin without the psychedelic effects.
As with MDMA, psilocybin reduced the overall magnitude of propagating brain waves in the default mode network. The reduction in bottom-up directionality was also present but was not statistically significant. The researchers suspect this weaker result occurred because the effects of psilocybin lingered for days. This persistence may have artificially altered the baseline scans taken shortly after the drug sessions.
In a third small study, 18 human volunteers received an intravenous infusion of LSD. The researchers compared their brain activity to scans taken after a saline placebo infusion. Consistent with the other substances, LSD reduced both the magnitude of the moving brain waves and the proportion of bottom-up signals entering the default mode network.
To ensure these effects were not unique to humans or specific to magnetic resonance imaging, the team looked at a small study of 14 mice. They used widefield calcium imaging, a technique that directly records the physical activity of brain cells with high resolution. The mice received LSD, a sedative called diazepam, or a different sedative called dexmedetomidine.
Like the human participants, mice given LSD showed reduced magnitude and bottom-up flow of brain activity in the default mode network. Diazepam, an anti-anxiety medication, also reduced bottom-up signals, though to a lesser extent than LSD. Dexmedetomidine produced the exact opposite effect, increasing the proportion of bottom-up signals entering the network. These animal results confirmed that the optical flow technique measures actual changes in nerve cell activity rather than artifacts of blood flow.
The researchers also investigated whether these changes in moving brain activity related to the subjective experiences reported by the human volunteers. In the MDMA study, participants who experienced the greatest reduction in bottom-up processing also reported the most intense feelings of impaired control. They also reported a greater dread of ego dissolution, which is a fearful reaction to losing one’s sense of self.
This psychological correlation suggests that suppressing bottom-up information flow too much could trigger the negative experiences sometimes associated with psychedelics. Bottom-up processing normally grounds individuals in their immediate sensory environment. A severe drop in this grounding input might leave individuals feeling detached or at the mercy of their unanchored internal thoughts.
Some psychiatric conditions, such as ruminative depression, are characterized by excessive automatic thoughts and abnormal bottom-up signaling. Reducing bottom-up flow might explain why psychedelics offer relief for some patients with depression. The drugs could temporarily quiet the intrusive signals feeding into the default mode network.
Individuals at risk for psychosis already suffer from impaired bottom-up processing. Giving psychedelics to these vulnerable patients could exacerbate their symptoms. The drugs might overpower their ability to update internal beliefs with external reality.
The sample sizes across all four datasets are small, which limits the ability to account for individual differences in how people react to these drugs. Larger datasets will be necessary to map out how different psychedelics affect people with varied biological backgrounds. Expanding the number of participants could reveal more subtle alterations to brain activity flow that this initial analysis missed.
The optical flow analysis focused exclusively on the outer surface of the brain. Psychedelics also heavily influence deep brain structures, but tracking moving signals between these buried regions and the surface remains computationally out of reach for this specific technique. The imaging technologies used in human participants also have limits in their spatial and temporal resolution. These equipment limitations mean researchers might miss faster changes in brain signaling.
Finally, the studies relied entirely on healthy volunteers and laboratory mice. Future research will need to test these observations in clinical populations to determine how these changes in brain activity relate to therapeutic outcomes. Understanding the exact mechanisms of psychedelic action could help doctors identify which patients are most likely to benefit from these treatments and which patients might be harmed by them.
The study, “Psychedelics disrupt hierarchical cortical propagations in the default mode network of humans and mice,” was authored by Adam R. Pines, Xue Zhang, John Kochalka, Sam S. Vesuna, Isaac V. Kauvar, Divya Rajasekharan, T. Rick Reneau, Teddy J. Akiki, Laura M. Hack, Joshua S. Siegel, and Leanne M. Williams.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/psychedelics-alter-the-trajectory-of-moving-brain-waves/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PsychedelicsBrain activity #DefaultModeNetwork #BottomUpProcessing #MDMA #Psilocybin #LSD #Neuroscience #OpticalFlow #BrainConnectivity #PsychedelicTherapy
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Psychedelics reduce bottom-up brain activity in the default mode network
URL: https://www.psypost.org/psychedelics-alter-the-trajectory-of-moving-brain-waves/
Psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin reduce the amount of bottom-up brain activity flowing into a network associated with self-reflection. These altered trajectories of brain signals occur consistently across humans and mice, offering a biological explanation for how these drugs reshape the mind. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Psychedelics are gaining attention as potential psychiatric treatments for conditions like depression and trauma. To understand their therapeutic benefits and risks, researchers need to know exactly how these substances alter brain function. Prior research has identified that psychedelics affect the default mode network, a collection of brain regions responsible for introspection, daydreaming, and mental rigidity. Many psychiatric conditions involve abnormal activity in this specific network, making it a primary target for new treatments.
The default mode network sits at the top of a processing hierarchy in the brain. Brain activity constantly moves across the surface of the cortex, which is the brain’s outer layer. Information travels from lower-order sensory areas up into higher-order areas like the default mode network, a process known as bottom-up processing. The reverse movement, from higher cognitive regions down to sensory regions, is called top-down processing.
In a healthy brain, bottom-up processing updates our internal models with new information from the outside world. Top-down processing uses our past experiences and expectations to make sense of that incoming sensory data. An imbalance between these two directions of information flow can lead to psychological distress or perceptual errors.
Past imaging studies typically measured brain activity in static regions, treating the brain as a set of fixed locations. This approach ignores the continuous, wave-like movement of signals across the brain’s surface. Analyzing static brain regions is similar to measuring the total rainfall in a single county without tracking the movement of the storm system on a weather radar. By treating the brain as a collection of isolated points, traditional research methods might obscure the true dynamics of how different brain areas communicate over time.
Adam R. Pines, Leanne M. Williams, and their colleagues at Stanford University wanted to observe these moving signals directly. They adapted an analytical technique called optical flow, which tracks the frame-by-frame movement of pixels in a video. The team used this mathematical approach to track the direction and size of brain activity waves moving across the cortex.
The researchers first analyzed a small study of 14 human volunteers who received MDMA. They compared functional magnetic resonance imaging scans taken after the participants took MDMA to scans taken after a placebo pill or no drug at all. The optical flow analysis revealed a consistent pattern across the subjects.
The team found that MDMA reduced the overall magnitude of brain waves moving through the default mode network. The drug also reduced the proportion of signals traveling in a bottom-up direction into the network.
Next, the team examined a second small study involving six human participants who ingested psilocybin. The researchers compared brain scans from the psilocybin sessions to baseline scans and to an active placebo condition. For the active placebo, participants received a dose of the stimulant methylphenidate. This stimulant mimics the physical arousal of psilocybin without the psychedelic effects.
As with MDMA, psilocybin reduced the overall magnitude of propagating brain waves in the default mode network. The reduction in bottom-up directionality was also present but was not statistically significant. The researchers suspect this weaker result occurred because the effects of psilocybin lingered for days. This persistence may have artificially altered the baseline scans taken shortly after the drug sessions.
In a third small study, 18 human volunteers received an intravenous infusion of LSD. The researchers compared their brain activity to scans taken after a saline placebo infusion. Consistent with the other substances, LSD reduced both the magnitude of the moving brain waves and the proportion of bottom-up signals entering the default mode network.
To ensure these effects were not unique to humans or specific to magnetic resonance imaging, the team looked at a small study of 14 mice. They used widefield calcium imaging, a technique that directly records the physical activity of brain cells with high resolution. The mice received LSD, a sedative called diazepam, or a different sedative called dexmedetomidine.
Like the human participants, mice given LSD showed reduced magnitude and bottom-up flow of brain activity in the default mode network. Diazepam, an anti-anxiety medication, also reduced bottom-up signals, though to a lesser extent than LSD. Dexmedetomidine produced the exact opposite effect, increasing the proportion of bottom-up signals entering the network. These animal results confirmed that the optical flow technique measures actual changes in nerve cell activity rather than artifacts of blood flow.
The researchers also investigated whether these changes in moving brain activity related to the subjective experiences reported by the human volunteers. In the MDMA study, participants who experienced the greatest reduction in bottom-up processing also reported the most intense feelings of impaired control. They also reported a greater dread of ego dissolution, which is a fearful reaction to losing one’s sense of self.
This psychological correlation suggests that suppressing bottom-up information flow too much could trigger the negative experiences sometimes associated with psychedelics. Bottom-up processing normally grounds individuals in their immediate sensory environment. A severe drop in this grounding input might leave individuals feeling detached or at the mercy of their unanchored internal thoughts.
Some psychiatric conditions, such as ruminative depression, are characterized by excessive automatic thoughts and abnormal bottom-up signaling. Reducing bottom-up flow might explain why psychedelics offer relief for some patients with depression. The drugs could temporarily quiet the intrusive signals feeding into the default mode network.
Individuals at risk for psychosis already suffer from impaired bottom-up processing. Giving psychedelics to these vulnerable patients could exacerbate their symptoms. The drugs might overpower their ability to update internal beliefs with external reality.
The sample sizes across all four datasets are small, which limits the ability to account for individual differences in how people react to these drugs. Larger datasets will be necessary to map out how different psychedelics affect people with varied biological backgrounds. Expanding the number of participants could reveal more subtle alterations to brain activity flow that this initial analysis missed.
The optical flow analysis focused exclusively on the outer surface of the brain. Psychedelics also heavily influence deep brain structures, but tracking moving signals between these buried regions and the surface remains computationally out of reach for this specific technique. The imaging technologies used in human participants also have limits in their spatial and temporal resolution. These equipment limitations mean researchers might miss faster changes in brain signaling.
Finally, the studies relied entirely on healthy volunteers and laboratory mice. Future research will need to test these observations in clinical populations to determine how these changes in brain activity relate to therapeutic outcomes. Understanding the exact mechanisms of psychedelic action could help doctors identify which patients are most likely to benefit from these treatments and which patients might be harmed by them.
The study, “Psychedelics disrupt hierarchical cortical propagations in the default mode network of humans and mice,” was authored by Adam R. Pines, Xue Zhang, John Kochalka, Sam S. Vesuna, Isaac V. Kauvar, Divya Rajasekharan, T. Rick Reneau, Teddy J. Akiki, Laura M. Hack, Joshua S. Siegel, and Leanne M. Williams.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/psychedelics-alter-the-trajectory-of-moving-brain-waves/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PsychedelicsBrain activity #DefaultModeNetwork #BottomUpProcessing #MDMA #Psilocybin #LSD #Neuroscience #OpticalFlow #BrainConnectivity #PsychedelicTherapy
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 11:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Love on the Spectrum: What are people saying about the reality TV show?
URL: https://www.psypost.org/love-on-the-spectrum-what-are-people-saying-about-the-reality-tv-show/
Love on the Spectrum is an American reality television series currently streaming on Netflix. Based on an Australian program of the same name, the series follows an ensemble cast of autistic adults as they navigate the complexities of the dating world. Produced by Northern Pictures, the show was created by Karina Holden and Cian O’Clery, with O’Clery also serving as the director. The American version first aired in May 2022 and has since released four full seasons, with a fifth season currently in production.
Over the past four years, the program has attracted significant attention from critics, medical professionals, and the autism community. To understand the impact of the series, we can look at six different reviews from a wide variety of authors and publications. These writers include autistic adults, journalists, and clinical professionals. Across the six reviews, several shared themes emerge again and again, along with one major point of disagreement.
An Antidote to Conventional Reality TV
In the modern landscape of reality television, conflict is usually the main attraction. For decades, the genre has drifted toward manufactured drama and intense arguments. Louis Staples, writing for The Guardian, points out this history by noting the trajectory of shows like Big Brother and Wife Swap, and he references a recent scandal on the dating show The Bachelorette. Against this backdrop, reviewers agree that the Netflix series feels like a welcome departure from the norm.
Kerry Magro, an autistic author reviewing the show on his Autism Speaks blog, contrasts the series favorably against drama-driven dating franchises like The Bachelor. Sara Luterman, an autistic writer for The Transmitter, observes that the production crew does not try to manufacture arguments, and no cast members are ever voted off the island. Maya Salam, a reporter for The New York Times, agrees, writing that the series actually delivers on the original promise of reality television. The shared view among these critics is that the program is honest, unscripted, and entirely free of pretense.
Kindness and Warmth
This lack of pretense results in a show that radiates kindness and warmth. Even the harshest critics grant this point. Luterman notes that the show is kind and well-intentioned, even as she lists her specific objections to its format. Lisa Sheinhouse, a clinician writing for Psychology Today, treats the series as a sincere attempt at inclusion. Salam adds an important note: while the show feels very good to watch, reducing it to mere “feel-good TV” undersells the actual depth of the program.
Countering the Myth of Lovelessness
A central theme across the reviews is how the series dismantles the myth that autistic people have no desire for romantic relationships or cannot find love. Nils Skudra, an autistic artist and writer for The Art of Autism, frames this myth-busting as the central achievement of the program. Salam places the show in direct contrast to recent claims by politicians, specifically noting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s statement that autistic children will “never go out on a date.” The series proves this assumption wrong time and again.
Staples highlights how the cast members experience the exact same pre-date anxieties as anyone else, from wondering what to wear to hoping their date likes them. Magro presents cast member Michael as a role model for countless people because he knows what he wants in a relationship and refuses to settle for less.
The Power of Acceptance
The reviewers also point out that the most successful relationships on the show happen when partners fully embrace each other’s autistic traits. Autism is a developmental condition that affects how people communicate, interact, and behave. People with autism often rely on specific routines or have highly focused interests. Several reviewers notice this dynamic independently.
Luterman observes this acceptance in action when cast member Sharnae goes with her boyfriend Jimmy to the store. Jimmy becomes highly agitated because he needs navy blue socks instead of black ones. Instead of getting annoyed, Sharnae accepts his distress and helps him find the right socks. Skudra highlights the difficult search for a partner who understands autism, using cast member Kaelynn as an example. Kaelynn shares a painful story about a time she had to disclose her autism because of her service dog, which resulted in immediate rejection.
Staples praises cast member Emma for her refreshing directness on dates, and he commends her mother for deciding to stop focusing on the things Emma is not. Salam points to a moment where Abbey sings a song about her boyfriend David. In the song, she mentions that David sees colors as numbers, a neurological condition known as synesthesia, and she sings about how he took the time to learn how her mind works.
LGBTQ Representation
Representation on the show extends beyond heterosexual relationships, which multiple reviewers single out as a strength. Magro points out the inclusion of bisexual cast members Teo and Mark. Luterman praises a highly popular date between Chloe and Lotus. Salam highlights Pari and Tina, who share a same-sex romance in the third season. However, Luterman goes a step further and argues that the show still under-represents the queer autistic community, pointing to evidence that autistic people are significantly more likely to identify as LGBTQ than the general population.
Family Dynamics
The reviews also focus on the families. Salam and Staples both see the show as a story about family support networks just as much as it is a story about the daters themselves. Luterman flips this observation into a critique. She notes that the show features more interviews with parents than interviews with the autistic adults themselves. She calls this approach “infantilizing,” a term used when capable adults are treated as if they were helpless children.
TV vs. Reality
This leads into a broader concern shared by the reviewers: the gap between reality television and actual reality. The critical reviews share a deep concern about how representative the show truly is. Luterman challenges a claim made by one cast member that only five percent of autistic people find love, noting that there is very little scientific data to support such a specific number. She also criticizes the overwhelmingly white cast, pointing out that people of color face major disparities in getting an autism diagnosis in the real world. Sheinhouse warns parents watching at home that what happens on screen is not a realistic guide for real-life dating. Even Salam concedes that a single television program cannot possibly capture the entire breadth of the autism spectrum.
The Main Split: Coaching and Support
The most significant disagreement among the six reviewers revolves around the dating coaching and support provided to the cast. This is where the reviews actively disagree, and the division directly tracks with who is writing.
Sheinhouse is a clinician who runs programs for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Often abbreviated as I/DD, this term refers to conditions that affect physical, learning, or behavioral development. From her professional perspective, she believes the cast members received far too little support. She argues for a much more structured approach, suggesting that dates should be chaperoned.
She also wants to see direct interventions during the dates when things get uncomfortable, along with formal education on setting boundaries, understanding physical consent, and learning how to safely interact with strangers, especially online.
The autistic reviewers take a very different stance. Luterman finds the show’s dating coaching to be entirely the wrong approach. She argues that the coaches teach scripted “neurotypical” behaviors. A neurotypical person is someone whose brain develops and functions in ways that are considered standard by society. Luterman points out that the coaches teach the cast to make eye contact, pull out chairs, and suppress talking about their special interests. She feels these exercises do not foster real emotional connection and only serve to make the autistic adults mimic standard social rules.
Skudra and Staples view the coaching in a much more positive light. They specifically praise Jennifer Cook, an autistic autism expert who runs role-playing sessions with the cast. Role-playing is an exercise where people act out a scenario in advance to practice how to handle it. Skudra and Staples feel this helps the cast build confidence before they go out.
This split over the coaching is the most fascinating fault line in how the show is received. One camp wants more guardrails and protection, while the other camp wants more autonomy and freedom. The autistic reviewers, including Magro, Luterman, and Skudra, base their opinions heavily on personal dignity and accurate representation. The clinical reviewer bases her opinions on safety, preparation, and protection from harm. Reviewing all six perspectives provides a deep, well-rounded understanding of how a simple dating show can spark massive conversations about human connection, disability, and independence.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/love-on-the-spectrum-what-are-people-saying-about-the-reality-tv-show/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #LoveOnTheSpectrum #AutismRomance #NetflixReality #AutismRepresentation #DatingWithAutism #RealityTVWithoutDrama #LGBTQAutism #NeurodiversityInMedia #CoachingVsAutonomy #LoveIsLoveSpectrum
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 11:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Love on the Spectrum: What are people saying about the reality TV show?
URL: https://www.psypost.org/love-on-the-spectrum-what-are-people-saying-about-the-reality-tv-show/
Love on the Spectrum is an American reality television series currently streaming on Netflix. Based on an Australian program of the same name, the series follows an ensemble cast of autistic adults as they navigate the complexities of the dating world. Produced by Northern Pictures, the show was created by Karina Holden and Cian O’Clery, with O’Clery also serving as the director. The American version first aired in May 2022 and has since released four full seasons, with a fifth season currently in production.
Over the past four years, the program has attracted significant attention from critics, medical professionals, and the autism community. To understand the impact of the series, we can look at six different reviews from a wide variety of authors and publications. These writers include autistic adults, journalists, and clinical professionals. Across the six reviews, several shared themes emerge again and again, along with one major point of disagreement.
An Antidote to Conventional Reality TV
In the modern landscape of reality television, conflict is usually the main attraction. For decades, the genre has drifted toward manufactured drama and intense arguments. Louis Staples, writing for The Guardian, points out this history by noting the trajectory of shows like Big Brother and Wife Swap, and he references a recent scandal on the dating show The Bachelorette. Against this backdrop, reviewers agree that the Netflix series feels like a welcome departure from the norm.
Kerry Magro, an autistic author reviewing the show on his Autism Speaks blog, contrasts the series favorably against drama-driven dating franchises like The Bachelor. Sara Luterman, an autistic writer for The Transmitter, observes that the production crew does not try to manufacture arguments, and no cast members are ever voted off the island. Maya Salam, a reporter for The New York Times, agrees, writing that the series actually delivers on the original promise of reality television. The shared view among these critics is that the program is honest, unscripted, and entirely free of pretense.
Kindness and Warmth
This lack of pretense results in a show that radiates kindness and warmth. Even the harshest critics grant this point. Luterman notes that the show is kind and well-intentioned, even as she lists her specific objections to its format. Lisa Sheinhouse, a clinician writing for Psychology Today, treats the series as a sincere attempt at inclusion. Salam adds an important note: while the show feels very good to watch, reducing it to mere “feel-good TV” undersells the actual depth of the program.
Countering the Myth of Lovelessness
A central theme across the reviews is how the series dismantles the myth that autistic people have no desire for romantic relationships or cannot find love. Nils Skudra, an autistic artist and writer for The Art of Autism, frames this myth-busting as the central achievement of the program. Salam places the show in direct contrast to recent claims by politicians, specifically noting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s statement that autistic children will “never go out on a date.” The series proves this assumption wrong time and again.
Staples highlights how the cast members experience the exact same pre-date anxieties as anyone else, from wondering what to wear to hoping their date likes them. Magro presents cast member Michael as a role model for countless people because he knows what he wants in a relationship and refuses to settle for less.
The Power of Acceptance
The reviewers also point out that the most successful relationships on the show happen when partners fully embrace each other’s autistic traits. Autism is a developmental condition that affects how people communicate, interact, and behave. People with autism often rely on specific routines or have highly focused interests. Several reviewers notice this dynamic independently.
Luterman observes this acceptance in action when cast member Sharnae goes with her boyfriend Jimmy to the store. Jimmy becomes highly agitated because he needs navy blue socks instead of black ones. Instead of getting annoyed, Sharnae accepts his distress and helps him find the right socks. Skudra highlights the difficult search for a partner who understands autism, using cast member Kaelynn as an example. Kaelynn shares a painful story about a time she had to disclose her autism because of her service dog, which resulted in immediate rejection.
Staples praises cast member Emma for her refreshing directness on dates, and he commends her mother for deciding to stop focusing on the things Emma is not. Salam points to a moment where Abbey sings a song about her boyfriend David. In the song, she mentions that David sees colors as numbers, a neurological condition known as synesthesia, and she sings about how he took the time to learn how her mind works.
LGBTQ Representation
Representation on the show extends beyond heterosexual relationships, which multiple reviewers single out as a strength. Magro points out the inclusion of bisexual cast members Teo and Mark. Luterman praises a highly popular date between Chloe and Lotus. Salam highlights Pari and Tina, who share a same-sex romance in the third season. However, Luterman goes a step further and argues that the show still under-represents the queer autistic community, pointing to evidence that autistic people are significantly more likely to identify as LGBTQ than the general population.
Family Dynamics
The reviews also focus on the families. Salam and Staples both see the show as a story about family support networks just as much as it is a story about the daters themselves. Luterman flips this observation into a critique. She notes that the show features more interviews with parents than interviews with the autistic adults themselves. She calls this approach “infantilizing,” a term used when capable adults are treated as if they were helpless children.
TV vs. Reality
This leads into a broader concern shared by the reviewers: the gap between reality television and actual reality. The critical reviews share a deep concern about how representative the show truly is. Luterman challenges a claim made by one cast member that only five percent of autistic people find love, noting that there is very little scientific data to support such a specific number. She also criticizes the overwhelmingly white cast, pointing out that people of color face major disparities in getting an autism diagnosis in the real world. Sheinhouse warns parents watching at home that what happens on screen is not a realistic guide for real-life dating. Even Salam concedes that a single television program cannot possibly capture the entire breadth of the autism spectrum.
The Main Split: Coaching and Support
The most significant disagreement among the six reviewers revolves around the dating coaching and support provided to the cast. This is where the reviews actively disagree, and the division directly tracks with who is writing.
Sheinhouse is a clinician who runs programs for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Often abbreviated as I/DD, this term refers to conditions that affect physical, learning, or behavioral development. From her professional perspective, she believes the cast members received far too little support. She argues for a much more structured approach, suggesting that dates should be chaperoned.
She also wants to see direct interventions during the dates when things get uncomfortable, along with formal education on setting boundaries, understanding physical consent, and learning how to safely interact with strangers, especially online.
The autistic reviewers take a very different stance. Luterman finds the show’s dating coaching to be entirely the wrong approach. She argues that the coaches teach scripted “neurotypical” behaviors. A neurotypical person is someone whose brain develops and functions in ways that are considered standard by society. Luterman points out that the coaches teach the cast to make eye contact, pull out chairs, and suppress talking about their special interests. She feels these exercises do not foster real emotional connection and only serve to make the autistic adults mimic standard social rules.
Skudra and Staples view the coaching in a much more positive light. They specifically praise Jennifer Cook, an autistic autism expert who runs role-playing sessions with the cast. Role-playing is an exercise where people act out a scenario in advance to practice how to handle it. Skudra and Staples feel this helps the cast build confidence before they go out.
This split over the coaching is the most fascinating fault line in how the show is received. One camp wants more guardrails and protection, while the other camp wants more autonomy and freedom. The autistic reviewers, including Magro, Luterman, and Skudra, base their opinions heavily on personal dignity and accurate representation. The clinical reviewer bases her opinions on safety, preparation, and protection from harm. Reviewing all six perspectives provides a deep, well-rounded understanding of how a simple dating show can spark massive conversations about human connection, disability, and independence.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/love-on-the-spectrum-what-are-people-saying-about-the-reality-tv-show/
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-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 11:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Love on the Spectrum: What are people saying about the reality TV show?
URL: https://www.psypost.org/love-on-the-spectrum-what-are-people-saying-about-the-reality-tv-show/
Love on the Spectrum is an American reality television series currently streaming on Netflix. Based on an Australian program of the same name, the series follows an ensemble cast of autistic adults as they navigate the complexities of the dating world. Produced by Northern Pictures, the show was created by Karina Holden and Cian O’Clery, with O’Clery also serving as the director. The American version first aired in May 2022 and has since released four full seasons, with a fifth season currently in production.
Over the past four years, the program has attracted significant attention from critics, medical professionals, and the autism community. To understand the impact of the series, we can look at six different reviews from a wide variety of authors and publications. These writers include autistic adults, journalists, and clinical professionals. Across the six reviews, several shared themes emerge again and again, along with one major point of disagreement.
An Antidote to Conventional Reality TV
In the modern landscape of reality television, conflict is usually the main attraction. For decades, the genre has drifted toward manufactured drama and intense arguments. Louis Staples, writing for The Guardian, points out this history by noting the trajectory of shows like Big Brother and Wife Swap, and he references a recent scandal on the dating show The Bachelorette. Against this backdrop, reviewers agree that the Netflix series feels like a welcome departure from the norm.
Kerry Magro, an autistic author reviewing the show on his Autism Speaks blog, contrasts the series favorably against drama-driven dating franchises like The Bachelor. Sara Luterman, an autistic writer for The Transmitter, observes that the production crew does not try to manufacture arguments, and no cast members are ever voted off the island. Maya Salam, a reporter for The New York Times, agrees, writing that the series actually delivers on the original promise of reality television. The shared view among these critics is that the program is honest, unscripted, and entirely free of pretense.
Kindness and Warmth
This lack of pretense results in a show that radiates kindness and warmth. Even the harshest critics grant this point. Luterman notes that the show is kind and well-intentioned, even as she lists her specific objections to its format. Lisa Sheinhouse, a clinician writing for Psychology Today, treats the series as a sincere attempt at inclusion. Salam adds an important note: while the show feels very good to watch, reducing it to mere “feel-good TV” undersells the actual depth of the program.
Countering the Myth of Lovelessness
A central theme across the reviews is how the series dismantles the myth that autistic people have no desire for romantic relationships or cannot find love. Nils Skudra, an autistic artist and writer for The Art of Autism, frames this myth-busting as the central achievement of the program. Salam places the show in direct contrast to recent claims by politicians, specifically noting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s statement that autistic children will “never go out on a date.” The series proves this assumption wrong time and again.
Staples highlights how the cast members experience the exact same pre-date anxieties as anyone else, from wondering what to wear to hoping their date likes them. Magro presents cast member Michael as a role model for countless people because he knows what he wants in a relationship and refuses to settle for less.
The Power of Acceptance
The reviewers also point out that the most successful relationships on the show happen when partners fully embrace each other’s autistic traits. Autism is a developmental condition that affects how people communicate, interact, and behave. People with autism often rely on specific routines or have highly focused interests. Several reviewers notice this dynamic independently.
Luterman observes this acceptance in action when cast member Sharnae goes with her boyfriend Jimmy to the store. Jimmy becomes highly agitated because he needs navy blue socks instead of black ones. Instead of getting annoyed, Sharnae accepts his distress and helps him find the right socks. Skudra highlights the difficult search for a partner who understands autism, using cast member Kaelynn as an example. Kaelynn shares a painful story about a time she had to disclose her autism because of her service dog, which resulted in immediate rejection.
Staples praises cast member Emma for her refreshing directness on dates, and he commends her mother for deciding to stop focusing on the things Emma is not. Salam points to a moment where Abbey sings a song about her boyfriend David. In the song, she mentions that David sees colors as numbers, a neurological condition known as synesthesia, and she sings about how he took the time to learn how her mind works.
LGBTQ Representation
Representation on the show extends beyond heterosexual relationships, which multiple reviewers single out as a strength. Magro points out the inclusion of bisexual cast members Teo and Mark. Luterman praises a highly popular date between Chloe and Lotus. Salam highlights Pari and Tina, who share a same-sex romance in the third season. However, Luterman goes a step further and argues that the show still under-represents the queer autistic community, pointing to evidence that autistic people are significantly more likely to identify as LGBTQ than the general population.
Family Dynamics
The reviews also focus on the families. Salam and Staples both see the show as a story about family support networks just as much as it is a story about the daters themselves. Luterman flips this observation into a critique. She notes that the show features more interviews with parents than interviews with the autistic adults themselves. She calls this approach “infantilizing,” a term used when capable adults are treated as if they were helpless children.
TV vs. Reality
This leads into a broader concern shared by the reviewers: the gap between reality television and actual reality. The critical reviews share a deep concern about how representative the show truly is. Luterman challenges a claim made by one cast member that only five percent of autistic people find love, noting that there is very little scientific data to support such a specific number. She also criticizes the overwhelmingly white cast, pointing out that people of color face major disparities in getting an autism diagnosis in the real world. Sheinhouse warns parents watching at home that what happens on screen is not a realistic guide for real-life dating. Even Salam concedes that a single television program cannot possibly capture the entire breadth of the autism spectrum.
The Main Split: Coaching and Support
The most significant disagreement among the six reviewers revolves around the dating coaching and support provided to the cast. This is where the reviews actively disagree, and the division directly tracks with who is writing.
Sheinhouse is a clinician who runs programs for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Often abbreviated as I/DD, this term refers to conditions that affect physical, learning, or behavioral development. From her professional perspective, she believes the cast members received far too little support. She argues for a much more structured approach, suggesting that dates should be chaperoned.
She also wants to see direct interventions during the dates when things get uncomfortable, along with formal education on setting boundaries, understanding physical consent, and learning how to safely interact with strangers, especially online.
The autistic reviewers take a very different stance. Luterman finds the show’s dating coaching to be entirely the wrong approach. She argues that the coaches teach scripted “neurotypical” behaviors. A neurotypical person is someone whose brain develops and functions in ways that are considered standard by society. Luterman points out that the coaches teach the cast to make eye contact, pull out chairs, and suppress talking about their special interests. She feels these exercises do not foster real emotional connection and only serve to make the autistic adults mimic standard social rules.
Skudra and Staples view the coaching in a much more positive light. They specifically praise Jennifer Cook, an autistic autism expert who runs role-playing sessions with the cast. Role-playing is an exercise where people act out a scenario in advance to practice how to handle it. Skudra and Staples feel this helps the cast build confidence before they go out.
This split over the coaching is the most fascinating fault line in how the show is received. One camp wants more guardrails and protection, while the other camp wants more autonomy and freedom. The autistic reviewers, including Magro, Luterman, and Skudra, base their opinions heavily on personal dignity and accurate representation. The clinical reviewer bases her opinions on safety, preparation, and protection from harm. Reviewing all six perspectives provides a deep, well-rounded understanding of how a simple dating show can spark massive conversations about human connection, disability, and independence.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/love-on-the-spectrum-what-are-people-saying-about-the-reality-tv-show/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #LoveOnTheSpectrum #AutismRomance #NetflixReality #AutismRepresentation #DatingWithAutism #RealityTVWithoutDrama #LGBTQAutism #NeurodiversityInMedia #CoachingVsAutonomy #LoveIsLoveSpectrum
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Neuroscientists shed light on how the brain juggles talking and listening during real conversation
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-the-brain-juggles-talking-and-listening-in-real-time/
When humans engage in a conversation, the brain must seamlessly process both the words they want to say and the sentences they are hearing. A new study reveals that the brain uses shared neural codes for speaking and listening during short verbal exchanges, but relies on distinct timing networks to process longer, overarching ideas. These findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, help map how the brain navigates the back-and-forth demands of natural social interaction.
Conversation is a highly dynamic activity that requires people to understand context, anticipate responses, and build a cohesive narrative together. To do this, the human brain must integrate language across multiple timescales. This ranges from the immediate processing of individual words to the broader comprehension of entire paragraphs and concepts.
For decades, researchers have studied how the brain processes language by having participants listen to isolated sentences or read long narratives. These past experiments established that the brain organizes language hierarchically. However, it was not entirely known how the brain handles the two-way street of spontaneous, real-time conversation.
Neuroscientists sought to determine whether the brain uses the exact same linguistic representations for generating speech and comprehending speech, or if it keeps those processes separated. A research team led by Masahiro Yamashita and Shinji Nishimoto at Osaka University and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan set out to answer this question. They designed a study to map out how brain activity shifts depending on whether a person is talking or listening, and how much previous context they are factoring in.
The researchers recruited eight native Japanese speakers for a small study involving brain imaging. Each participant lay inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, a machine that tracks blood flow in the brain to measure neural activity. While inside the scanner, the participants engaged in unscripted, natural conversations with an experimenter through a microphone and earphones. They discussed casual topics, such as their favorite classes and personal introductions, for roughly three hours each.
To translate the messy, spontaneous nature of human speech into a format the researchers could analyze, they turned to a large language model. This artificial intelligence tool, based on the GPT architecture, was trained to predict language patterns by processing massive amounts of text. The researchers fed the transcripts of the participants’ conversations into the artificial intelligence to extract mathematical representations of the text’s meaning, known as contextual embeddings. They did this for different lengths of time, analyzing context windows that lasted anywhere from one second to thirty-two seconds.
The team then built computer models to predict the brain activity of the participants based on the artificial intelligence’s mathematical breakdown of the conversations. They first tested a model that treated speaking and listening as one shared pool of meaning. The results showed that when looking at short timescales of one to four seconds, the brain shares its linguistic representations regardless of whether a person is talking or listening. The neural codes used for formulating a quick thought and hearing a brief sentence overlapped in the prefrontal, temporal, and parietal cortices.
However, the researchers found a different pattern when examining longer stretches of conversation. When looking at context windows of sixteen to thirty-two seconds, the shared representations scattered across the brain. The patterns varied widely from person to person, occasionally reaching regions associated with guessing the thoughts of others and recalling memories. This suggests that while the brain uses a universal system to process immediate words, individuals use personalized strategies to integrate overarching social context and long-term conversation history.
Next, the researchers isolated the brain activity uniquely tied to just speaking or just listening. They discovered an opposing timescale preference for each action. The brain areas dedicated to producing speech were most active when processing short-term context. Conversely, the brain areas dedicated to understanding the experimenter’s speech were most active when processing long-term context spanning multiple sentences.
This division aligns with the specific demands of each task. Producing speech requires a person to react quickly to what the other person just said, planning words and sentence structures on the fly. Listening requires a person to hold onto information over time to build a complete mental model of what their conversational partner means.
The researchers also looked for brain regions that responded robustly to both speaking and listening, but in completely independent ways. They identified specific bimodal zones that peaked in activity only when factoring in longer context lengths of eight seconds or more. These areas encoded meaning for both tasks but did not share the exact same neural patterns, pointing to specialized regions that help individuals separate their own perspectives from those of their conversation partners. To navigate a dialogue, the brain must keep track of who knows what, and these bimodal zones likely support that cognitive juggling.
Finally, the team used a statistical technique to break down the specific types of words that drove the strongest brain responses at short timescales. They found that conversational fillers and short confirmations, such as “yeah” or “uh,” evoked distinct neural patterns. These tiny words require very little cognitive effort to say, but they act as social glue to maintain the flow of dialogue. The brain appears to have dedicated neural tuning for these interactive words, separating them from highly logical or factual statements.
Because this was a small study involving only eight people, the findings represent a narrow slice of the population. The researchers noted that they did not use functional localizer tasks, which are preliminary tests used to outline established brain networks, such as the regions responsible for mentalizing what other people are thinking. Without these preliminary tests, the team could not definitively map their results onto precisely defined cognitive networks. Future research with larger groups and additional mapping techniques will be needed to confirm exactly which distinct brain networks manage these conversational timelines.
The study, “Conversational content is organized across multiple timescales in the brain,” was authored by Masahiro Yamashita, Rieko Kubo, and Shinji Nishimoto.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-the-brain-juggles-talking-and-listening-in-real-time/
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
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-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Neuroscientists shed light on how the brain juggles talking and listening during real conversation
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-the-brain-juggles-talking-and-listening-in-real-time/
When humans engage in a conversation, the brain must seamlessly process both the words they want to say and the sentences they are hearing. A new study reveals that the brain uses shared neural codes for speaking and listening during short verbal exchanges, but relies on distinct timing networks to process longer, overarching ideas. These findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, help map how the brain navigates the back-and-forth demands of natural social interaction.
Conversation is a highly dynamic activity that requires people to understand context, anticipate responses, and build a cohesive narrative together. To do this, the human brain must integrate language across multiple timescales. This ranges from the immediate processing of individual words to the broader comprehension of entire paragraphs and concepts.
For decades, researchers have studied how the brain processes language by having participants listen to isolated sentences or read long narratives. These past experiments established that the brain organizes language hierarchically. However, it was not entirely known how the brain handles the two-way street of spontaneous, real-time conversation.
Neuroscientists sought to determine whether the brain uses the exact same linguistic representations for generating speech and comprehending speech, or if it keeps those processes separated. A research team led by Masahiro Yamashita and Shinji Nishimoto at Osaka University and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan set out to answer this question. They designed a study to map out how brain activity shifts depending on whether a person is talking or listening, and how much previous context they are factoring in.
The researchers recruited eight native Japanese speakers for a small study involving brain imaging. Each participant lay inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, a machine that tracks blood flow in the brain to measure neural activity. While inside the scanner, the participants engaged in unscripted, natural conversations with an experimenter through a microphone and earphones. They discussed casual topics, such as their favorite classes and personal introductions, for roughly three hours each.
To translate the messy, spontaneous nature of human speech into a format the researchers could analyze, they turned to a large language model. This artificial intelligence tool, based on the GPT architecture, was trained to predict language patterns by processing massive amounts of text. The researchers fed the transcripts of the participants’ conversations into the artificial intelligence to extract mathematical representations of the text’s meaning, known as contextual embeddings. They did this for different lengths of time, analyzing context windows that lasted anywhere from one second to thirty-two seconds.
The team then built computer models to predict the brain activity of the participants based on the artificial intelligence’s mathematical breakdown of the conversations. They first tested a model that treated speaking and listening as one shared pool of meaning. The results showed that when looking at short timescales of one to four seconds, the brain shares its linguistic representations regardless of whether a person is talking or listening. The neural codes used for formulating a quick thought and hearing a brief sentence overlapped in the prefrontal, temporal, and parietal cortices.
However, the researchers found a different pattern when examining longer stretches of conversation. When looking at context windows of sixteen to thirty-two seconds, the shared representations scattered across the brain. The patterns varied widely from person to person, occasionally reaching regions associated with guessing the thoughts of others and recalling memories. This suggests that while the brain uses a universal system to process immediate words, individuals use personalized strategies to integrate overarching social context and long-term conversation history.
Next, the researchers isolated the brain activity uniquely tied to just speaking or just listening. They discovered an opposing timescale preference for each action. The brain areas dedicated to producing speech were most active when processing short-term context. Conversely, the brain areas dedicated to understanding the experimenter’s speech were most active when processing long-term context spanning multiple sentences.
This division aligns with the specific demands of each task. Producing speech requires a person to react quickly to what the other person just said, planning words and sentence structures on the fly. Listening requires a person to hold onto information over time to build a complete mental model of what their conversational partner means.
The researchers also looked for brain regions that responded robustly to both speaking and listening, but in completely independent ways. They identified specific bimodal zones that peaked in activity only when factoring in longer context lengths of eight seconds or more. These areas encoded meaning for both tasks but did not share the exact same neural patterns, pointing to specialized regions that help individuals separate their own perspectives from those of their conversation partners. To navigate a dialogue, the brain must keep track of who knows what, and these bimodal zones likely support that cognitive juggling.
Finally, the team used a statistical technique to break down the specific types of words that drove the strongest brain responses at short timescales. They found that conversational fillers and short confirmations, such as “yeah” or “uh,” evoked distinct neural patterns. These tiny words require very little cognitive effort to say, but they act as social glue to maintain the flow of dialogue. The brain appears to have dedicated neural tuning for these interactive words, separating them from highly logical or factual statements.
Because this was a small study involving only eight people, the findings represent a narrow slice of the population. The researchers noted that they did not use functional localizer tasks, which are preliminary tests used to outline established brain networks, such as the regions responsible for mentalizing what other people are thinking. Without these preliminary tests, the team could not definitively map their results onto precisely defined cognitive networks. Future research with larger groups and additional mapping techniques will be needed to confirm exactly which distinct brain networks manage these conversational timelines.
The study, “Conversational content is organized across multiple timescales in the brain,” was authored by Masahiro Yamashita, Rieko Kubo, and Shinji Nishimoto.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-the-brain-juggles-talking-and-listening-in-real-time/
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BrainSpeechTiming #ConversationNeuroscience #LanguageProcessing #SpeakingVsListening #NeuralCodes #ContextWindow #BimodalRegions #SocialCommunication #GPTEmbeddings #NeuroscienceResearch
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Neuroscientists shed light on how the brain juggles talking and listening during real conversation
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-the-brain-juggles-talking-and-listening-in-real-time/
When humans engage in a conversation, the brain must seamlessly process both the words they want to say and the sentences they are hearing. A new study reveals that the brain uses shared neural codes for speaking and listening during short verbal exchanges, but relies on distinct timing networks to process longer, overarching ideas. These findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, help map how the brain navigates the back-and-forth demands of natural social interaction.
Conversation is a highly dynamic activity that requires people to understand context, anticipate responses, and build a cohesive narrative together. To do this, the human brain must integrate language across multiple timescales. This ranges from the immediate processing of individual words to the broader comprehension of entire paragraphs and concepts.
For decades, researchers have studied how the brain processes language by having participants listen to isolated sentences or read long narratives. These past experiments established that the brain organizes language hierarchically. However, it was not entirely known how the brain handles the two-way street of spontaneous, real-time conversation.
Neuroscientists sought to determine whether the brain uses the exact same linguistic representations for generating speech and comprehending speech, or if it keeps those processes separated. A research team led by Masahiro Yamashita and Shinji Nishimoto at Osaka University and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan set out to answer this question. They designed a study to map out how brain activity shifts depending on whether a person is talking or listening, and how much previous context they are factoring in.
The researchers recruited eight native Japanese speakers for a small study involving brain imaging. Each participant lay inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, a machine that tracks blood flow in the brain to measure neural activity. While inside the scanner, the participants engaged in unscripted, natural conversations with an experimenter through a microphone and earphones. They discussed casual topics, such as their favorite classes and personal introductions, for roughly three hours each.
To translate the messy, spontaneous nature of human speech into a format the researchers could analyze, they turned to a large language model. This artificial intelligence tool, based on the GPT architecture, was trained to predict language patterns by processing massive amounts of text. The researchers fed the transcripts of the participants’ conversations into the artificial intelligence to extract mathematical representations of the text’s meaning, known as contextual embeddings. They did this for different lengths of time, analyzing context windows that lasted anywhere from one second to thirty-two seconds.
The team then built computer models to predict the brain activity of the participants based on the artificial intelligence’s mathematical breakdown of the conversations. They first tested a model that treated speaking and listening as one shared pool of meaning. The results showed that when looking at short timescales of one to four seconds, the brain shares its linguistic representations regardless of whether a person is talking or listening. The neural codes used for formulating a quick thought and hearing a brief sentence overlapped in the prefrontal, temporal, and parietal cortices.
However, the researchers found a different pattern when examining longer stretches of conversation. When looking at context windows of sixteen to thirty-two seconds, the shared representations scattered across the brain. The patterns varied widely from person to person, occasionally reaching regions associated with guessing the thoughts of others and recalling memories. This suggests that while the brain uses a universal system to process immediate words, individuals use personalized strategies to integrate overarching social context and long-term conversation history.
Next, the researchers isolated the brain activity uniquely tied to just speaking or just listening. They discovered an opposing timescale preference for each action. The brain areas dedicated to producing speech were most active when processing short-term context. Conversely, the brain areas dedicated to understanding the experimenter’s speech were most active when processing long-term context spanning multiple sentences.
This division aligns with the specific demands of each task. Producing speech requires a person to react quickly to what the other person just said, planning words and sentence structures on the fly. Listening requires a person to hold onto information over time to build a complete mental model of what their conversational partner means.
The researchers also looked for brain regions that responded robustly to both speaking and listening, but in completely independent ways. They identified specific bimodal zones that peaked in activity only when factoring in longer context lengths of eight seconds or more. These areas encoded meaning for both tasks but did not share the exact same neural patterns, pointing to specialized regions that help individuals separate their own perspectives from those of their conversation partners. To navigate a dialogue, the brain must keep track of who knows what, and these bimodal zones likely support that cognitive juggling.
Finally, the team used a statistical technique to break down the specific types of words that drove the strongest brain responses at short timescales. They found that conversational fillers and short confirmations, such as “yeah” or “uh,” evoked distinct neural patterns. These tiny words require very little cognitive effort to say, but they act as social glue to maintain the flow of dialogue. The brain appears to have dedicated neural tuning for these interactive words, separating them from highly logical or factual statements.
Because this was a small study involving only eight people, the findings represent a narrow slice of the population. The researchers noted that they did not use functional localizer tasks, which are preliminary tests used to outline established brain networks, such as the regions responsible for mentalizing what other people are thinking. Without these preliminary tests, the team could not definitively map their results onto precisely defined cognitive networks. Future research with larger groups and additional mapping techniques will be needed to confirm exactly which distinct brain networks manage these conversational timelines.
The study, “Conversational content is organized across multiple timescales in the brain,” was authored by Masahiro Yamashita, Rieko Kubo, and Shinji Nishimoto.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-the-brain-juggles-talking-and-listening-in-real-time/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BrainSpeechTiming #ConversationNeuroscience #LanguageProcessing #SpeakingVsListening #NeuralCodes #ContextWindow #BimodalRegions #SocialCommunication #GPTEmbeddings #NeuroscienceResearch
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: How adults feel about their ADHD depends heavily on their specific symptoms
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-adults-feel-about-their-adhd-depends-heavily-on-their-specific-symptoms/
A new study published in the Journal of Attention Disorders suggests that how adults feel about their attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder depends on their specific symptoms. Researchers found that individuals with higher levels of hyperactive and impulsive symptoms tend to view their condition more positively, while those with primarily inattentive symptoms are less likely to see their diagnosis as an advantage. These findings highlight the diverse ways people experience and interpret their neurodevelopmental differences.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD, is a condition that begins in childhood and often continues into adulthood. The diagnosis is based on two main categories of symptoms. The first is inattention, which involves difficulty focusing, sustaining attention, or staying organized. The second category is hyperactivity and impulsivity, characterized by excessive physical movement, restlessness, or acting without thinking. For many years, medical and psychological research focused heavily on the negative impacts of these symptoms, such as difficulties in school, struggles with emotional regulation, and challenges in relationships.
Recently, the rise of the neurodiversity movement has encouraged scientists to look at the other side of the coin. Earlier qualitative studies gathered personal stories showing that people with ADHD often identify real strengths and silver linings in their condition. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 found that adults diagnosed with ADHD reported experiencing notable personal strengths, identifying positive themes like high energy, unconventional thinking, and a drive for novelty. Similarly, a 2018 interview-based study revealed that many adults with ADHD identify distinct personal strengths and resilience linked directly to their diagnosis.
This qualitative foundation sparked recent efforts to study these positives numerically. A 2024 study took early steps to measure these strengths, finding that people with more ADHD traits in the general population also scored higher on traits like cognitive flexibility and sensory processing sensitivity. The new research, led by Gili Katabi of Tel-Aviv University, builds on this momentum by creating a formal scale to measure positive attitudes toward ADHD. The authors wanted to test whether these positive feelings depend on whether someone’s symptoms are mostly hyperactive or mostly inattentive.
To explore this, the researchers developed the Positive Attitudes Toward ADHD Scale. This questionnaire was designed to capture how individuals perceive the positive aspects of their own condition, based on themes from previous interviews like creativity, dynamic energy, and resilience. Participants rated their agreement with various statements on a five-point scale. The team then recruited three distinct groups of adults with ADHD to test the scale and see how scores related to symptom types.
The first sample included 84 young adults in Israel with formal ADHD diagnoses who completed the questionnaires in a laboratory setting. This initial group helped the researchers confirm that the new scale was reliable and captured a wide range of attitudes. The second sample involved 125 adults in Israel who also participated in the lab. For this group, the researchers conducted structured clinical interviews by phone to verify that the participants still met the criteria for ADHD at the time of testing, while excluding those with heavy alcohol or cannabis use.
The third sample was an online group of 126 English-speaking adults residing in 24 different countries. These participants provided detailed written information about their diagnosis and treatment history to confirm their status. Across all three groups, participants filled out the new attitude scale alongside a widely used checklist that measures the frequency of their inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms over the past six months.
When analyzing the results, the researchers found that more frequent ADHD symptoms overall were associated with more favorable attitudes toward the condition. However, breaking the symptoms down into the two main categories painted a more detailed picture. Across all three samples, a higher frequency of hyperactive and impulsive symptoms strongly predicted more positive attitudes toward having ADHD.
In contrast, inattention symptoms showed a very different pattern. Higher levels of inattention tended to associate with less positive attitudes toward the condition, though this negative association was not statistically significant across every sample. The researchers also ran a follow-up test with 35 participants from the second sample to measure their general life satisfaction. They found that the link between hyperactive symptoms and positive attitudes remained distinct, indicating that the new scale was capturing specific feelings about ADHD rather than just a generally happy outlook on life.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that young adult hyperactivity and impulsivity predicted higher relationship and job satisfaction later in life. Together, this body of research suggests that the physical and mental energy associated with hyperactivity might foster traits like curiosity and enthusiasm that people learn to appreciate over time.
There are a few things to keep in mind about these findings. The new scale relies entirely on self-reporting, meaning it captures how people feel about their own condition, not objective measurements of their abilities. Endorsing statements about creativity or flexibility does not necessarily mean a person would score higher on a behavioral test of divergent thinking. The study focuses on subjective opinions, which are important for understanding self-esteem and coping, but are separate from observable advantages.
Another detail to consider is the potential for reporting biases based on how society views different symptoms. Hyperactive and impulsive traits might be easier to reframe in a positive light, such as viewing restlessness as boundless energy. Inattentive traits, like spacing out or forgetting things, might feel less socially acceptable and harder to spin positively. Additionally, the researchers noted that their scale did not include questions about hyperfocus, a common experience where people with ADHD become intensely absorbed in tasks they find interesting, which might have skewed the results away from the inattentive dimension.
Future studies could incorporate reports from friends or family members to provide a more rounded view of how these traits manifest in daily life. Scientists might also test whether these contrasting attitudes exist in children and adolescents, or if they are unique to adults who have had more time to adapt to their neurodevelopmental differences.
The study, “ADHD Individuals’ Positivity About Their Condition Varies by Their Levels of Hyperactivity/Impulsivity Versus Inattention Symptoms,” was authored by Gili Katabi, Merav Huss, Steve Lukito, Tycho J. Dekkers, Edmund Sonuga-Barke, and Nitzan Shahar.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-adults-feel-about-their-adhd-depends-heavily-on-their-specific-symptoms/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ADHD #HyperactivityImpulsivity #Inattention #ADHDPositivity #Neurodiversity #ADHDSymptoms #MentalHealthResearch #AttentionDisorders #PositiveAttitudesADHD #AdultADHD
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: How adults feel about their ADHD depends heavily on their specific symptoms
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-adults-feel-about-their-adhd-depends-heavily-on-their-specific-symptoms/
A new study published in the Journal of Attention Disorders suggests that how adults feel about their attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder depends on their specific symptoms. Researchers found that individuals with higher levels of hyperactive and impulsive symptoms tend to view their condition more positively, while those with primarily inattentive symptoms are less likely to see their diagnosis as an advantage. These findings highlight the diverse ways people experience and interpret their neurodevelopmental differences.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD, is a condition that begins in childhood and often continues into adulthood. The diagnosis is based on two main categories of symptoms. The first is inattention, which involves difficulty focusing, sustaining attention, or staying organized. The second category is hyperactivity and impulsivity, characterized by excessive physical movement, restlessness, or acting without thinking. For many years, medical and psychological research focused heavily on the negative impacts of these symptoms, such as difficulties in school, struggles with emotional regulation, and challenges in relationships.
Recently, the rise of the neurodiversity movement has encouraged scientists to look at the other side of the coin. Earlier qualitative studies gathered personal stories showing that people with ADHD often identify real strengths and silver linings in their condition. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 found that adults diagnosed with ADHD reported experiencing notable personal strengths, identifying positive themes like high energy, unconventional thinking, and a drive for novelty. Similarly, a 2018 interview-based study revealed that many adults with ADHD identify distinct personal strengths and resilience linked directly to their diagnosis.
This qualitative foundation sparked recent efforts to study these positives numerically. A 2024 study took early steps to measure these strengths, finding that people with more ADHD traits in the general population also scored higher on traits like cognitive flexibility and sensory processing sensitivity. The new research, led by Gili Katabi of Tel-Aviv University, builds on this momentum by creating a formal scale to measure positive attitudes toward ADHD. The authors wanted to test whether these positive feelings depend on whether someone’s symptoms are mostly hyperactive or mostly inattentive.
To explore this, the researchers developed the Positive Attitudes Toward ADHD Scale. This questionnaire was designed to capture how individuals perceive the positive aspects of their own condition, based on themes from previous interviews like creativity, dynamic energy, and resilience. Participants rated their agreement with various statements on a five-point scale. The team then recruited three distinct groups of adults with ADHD to test the scale and see how scores related to symptom types.
The first sample included 84 young adults in Israel with formal ADHD diagnoses who completed the questionnaires in a laboratory setting. This initial group helped the researchers confirm that the new scale was reliable and captured a wide range of attitudes. The second sample involved 125 adults in Israel who also participated in the lab. For this group, the researchers conducted structured clinical interviews by phone to verify that the participants still met the criteria for ADHD at the time of testing, while excluding those with heavy alcohol or cannabis use.
The third sample was an online group of 126 English-speaking adults residing in 24 different countries. These participants provided detailed written information about their diagnosis and treatment history to confirm their status. Across all three groups, participants filled out the new attitude scale alongside a widely used checklist that measures the frequency of their inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms over the past six months.
When analyzing the results, the researchers found that more frequent ADHD symptoms overall were associated with more favorable attitudes toward the condition. However, breaking the symptoms down into the two main categories painted a more detailed picture. Across all three samples, a higher frequency of hyperactive and impulsive symptoms strongly predicted more positive attitudes toward having ADHD.
In contrast, inattention symptoms showed a very different pattern. Higher levels of inattention tended to associate with less positive attitudes toward the condition, though this negative association was not statistically significant across every sample. The researchers also ran a follow-up test with 35 participants from the second sample to measure their general life satisfaction. They found that the link between hyperactive symptoms and positive attitudes remained distinct, indicating that the new scale was capturing specific feelings about ADHD rather than just a generally happy outlook on life.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that young adult hyperactivity and impulsivity predicted higher relationship and job satisfaction later in life. Together, this body of research suggests that the physical and mental energy associated with hyperactivity might foster traits like curiosity and enthusiasm that people learn to appreciate over time.
There are a few things to keep in mind about these findings. The new scale relies entirely on self-reporting, meaning it captures how people feel about their own condition, not objective measurements of their abilities. Endorsing statements about creativity or flexibility does not necessarily mean a person would score higher on a behavioral test of divergent thinking. The study focuses on subjective opinions, which are important for understanding self-esteem and coping, but are separate from observable advantages.
Another detail to consider is the potential for reporting biases based on how society views different symptoms. Hyperactive and impulsive traits might be easier to reframe in a positive light, such as viewing restlessness as boundless energy. Inattentive traits, like spacing out or forgetting things, might feel less socially acceptable and harder to spin positively. Additionally, the researchers noted that their scale did not include questions about hyperfocus, a common experience where people with ADHD become intensely absorbed in tasks they find interesting, which might have skewed the results away from the inattentive dimension.
Future studies could incorporate reports from friends or family members to provide a more rounded view of how these traits manifest in daily life. Scientists might also test whether these contrasting attitudes exist in children and adolescents, or if they are unique to adults who have had more time to adapt to their neurodevelopmental differences.
The study, “ADHD Individuals’ Positivity About Their Condition Varies by Their Levels of Hyperactivity/Impulsivity Versus Inattention Symptoms,” was authored by Gili Katabi, Merav Huss, Steve Lukito, Tycho J. Dekkers, Edmund Sonuga-Barke, and Nitzan Shahar.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-adults-feel-about-their-adhd-depends-heavily-on-their-specific-symptoms/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ADHD #HyperactivityImpulsivity #Inattention #ADHDPositivity #Neurodiversity #ADHDSymptoms #MentalHealthResearch #AttentionDisorders #PositiveAttitudesADHD #AdultADHD
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: How adults feel about their ADHD depends heavily on their specific symptoms
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-adults-feel-about-their-adhd-depends-heavily-on-their-specific-symptoms/
A new study published in the Journal of Attention Disorders suggests that how adults feel about their attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder depends on their specific symptoms. Researchers found that individuals with higher levels of hyperactive and impulsive symptoms tend to view their condition more positively, while those with primarily inattentive symptoms are less likely to see their diagnosis as an advantage. These findings highlight the diverse ways people experience and interpret their neurodevelopmental differences.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD, is a condition that begins in childhood and often continues into adulthood. The diagnosis is based on two main categories of symptoms. The first is inattention, which involves difficulty focusing, sustaining attention, or staying organized. The second category is hyperactivity and impulsivity, characterized by excessive physical movement, restlessness, or acting without thinking. For many years, medical and psychological research focused heavily on the negative impacts of these symptoms, such as difficulties in school, struggles with emotional regulation, and challenges in relationships.
Recently, the rise of the neurodiversity movement has encouraged scientists to look at the other side of the coin. Earlier qualitative studies gathered personal stories showing that people with ADHD often identify real strengths and silver linings in their condition. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 found that adults diagnosed with ADHD reported experiencing notable personal strengths, identifying positive themes like high energy, unconventional thinking, and a drive for novelty. Similarly, a 2018 interview-based study revealed that many adults with ADHD identify distinct personal strengths and resilience linked directly to their diagnosis.
This qualitative foundation sparked recent efforts to study these positives numerically. A 2024 study took early steps to measure these strengths, finding that people with more ADHD traits in the general population also scored higher on traits like cognitive flexibility and sensory processing sensitivity. The new research, led by Gili Katabi of Tel-Aviv University, builds on this momentum by creating a formal scale to measure positive attitudes toward ADHD. The authors wanted to test whether these positive feelings depend on whether someone’s symptoms are mostly hyperactive or mostly inattentive.
To explore this, the researchers developed the Positive Attitudes Toward ADHD Scale. This questionnaire was designed to capture how individuals perceive the positive aspects of their own condition, based on themes from previous interviews like creativity, dynamic energy, and resilience. Participants rated their agreement with various statements on a five-point scale. The team then recruited three distinct groups of adults with ADHD to test the scale and see how scores related to symptom types.
The first sample included 84 young adults in Israel with formal ADHD diagnoses who completed the questionnaires in a laboratory setting. This initial group helped the researchers confirm that the new scale was reliable and captured a wide range of attitudes. The second sample involved 125 adults in Israel who also participated in the lab. For this group, the researchers conducted structured clinical interviews by phone to verify that the participants still met the criteria for ADHD at the time of testing, while excluding those with heavy alcohol or cannabis use.
The third sample was an online group of 126 English-speaking adults residing in 24 different countries. These participants provided detailed written information about their diagnosis and treatment history to confirm their status. Across all three groups, participants filled out the new attitude scale alongside a widely used checklist that measures the frequency of their inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms over the past six months.
When analyzing the results, the researchers found that more frequent ADHD symptoms overall were associated with more favorable attitudes toward the condition. However, breaking the symptoms down into the two main categories painted a more detailed picture. Across all three samples, a higher frequency of hyperactive and impulsive symptoms strongly predicted more positive attitudes toward having ADHD.
In contrast, inattention symptoms showed a very different pattern. Higher levels of inattention tended to associate with less positive attitudes toward the condition, though this negative association was not statistically significant across every sample. The researchers also ran a follow-up test with 35 participants from the second sample to measure their general life satisfaction. They found that the link between hyperactive symptoms and positive attitudes remained distinct, indicating that the new scale was capturing specific feelings about ADHD rather than just a generally happy outlook on life.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that young adult hyperactivity and impulsivity predicted higher relationship and job satisfaction later in life. Together, this body of research suggests that the physical and mental energy associated with hyperactivity might foster traits like curiosity and enthusiasm that people learn to appreciate over time.
There are a few things to keep in mind about these findings. The new scale relies entirely on self-reporting, meaning it captures how people feel about their own condition, not objective measurements of their abilities. Endorsing statements about creativity or flexibility does not necessarily mean a person would score higher on a behavioral test of divergent thinking. The study focuses on subjective opinions, which are important for understanding self-esteem and coping, but are separate from observable advantages.
Another detail to consider is the potential for reporting biases based on how society views different symptoms. Hyperactive and impulsive traits might be easier to reframe in a positive light, such as viewing restlessness as boundless energy. Inattentive traits, like spacing out or forgetting things, might feel less socially acceptable and harder to spin positively. Additionally, the researchers noted that their scale did not include questions about hyperfocus, a common experience where people with ADHD become intensely absorbed in tasks they find interesting, which might have skewed the results away from the inattentive dimension.
Future studies could incorporate reports from friends or family members to provide a more rounded view of how these traits manifest in daily life. Scientists might also test whether these contrasting attitudes exist in children and adolescents, or if they are unique to adults who have had more time to adapt to their neurodevelopmental differences.
The study, “ADHD Individuals’ Positivity About Their Condition Varies by Their Levels of Hyperactivity/Impulsivity Versus Inattention Symptoms,” was authored by Gili Katabi, Merav Huss, Steve Lukito, Tycho J. Dekkers, Edmund Sonuga-Barke, and Nitzan Shahar.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-adults-feel-about-their-adhd-depends-heavily-on-their-specific-symptoms/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ADHD #HyperactivityImpulsivity #Inattention #ADHDPositivity #Neurodiversity #ADHDSymptoms #MentalHealthResearch #AttentionDisorders #PositiveAttitudesADHD #AdultADHD
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Human breasts might have evolved to keep big-brained infants warm
URL: https://www.psypost.org/human-breasts-might-have-evolved-to-keep-big-brained-infants-warm/
A study in Finland measured heating capacity and resilience to temperature changes of breasts of nursing women, non-nursing women, and men. Results showed that breastfeeding women had overall higher breast surface temperature compared to the other groups. Their breasts were also more resilient to cooling. The paper was published in Evolutionary Human Sciences.
Human breasts are unusual among primates because they remain relatively prominent throughout adult life rather than enlarging mainly during lactation. Much of their size and shape is produced by subcutaneous fat and fat around the milk-producing glands rather than by the milk-producing glandular tissue itself. Breast size varies considerably between women, and larger breasts can also create physical disadvantages such as increased strain on the back.
One evolutionary possibility is that permanent breasts emerged as a by-product of increased body fat during human evolution and were later shaped by other selective pressures. Some researchers have proposed that enlarged breasts function partly as sexual signals of fertility, health, or reproductive fitness, although this interpretation is not universally applicable across cultures.
Another hypothesis is that breast size may have helped mothers warm infants during close skin-to-skin contact, particularly after humans lost most of their body hair. Under this view, additional breast tissue could increase the warm surface area surrounding an infant and reduce heat loss. This possibility is especially relevant because human infants have unusually high energetic demands and substantial thermoregulatory needs during early development, largely due to encephalization, which is the evolutionary increase in brain size.
Study author Tiina Kuvaja and her colleagues investigated if the female breast tissue would have a distinct response to changing temperature. If this happened, it would indicate that it has a potential to stabilize the temperature of infants and especially newborns. They also noticed that lactation influences breast skin temperature and that relatively large changes in breast metabolic rate and temperature take place in early pregnancy. That is why they decided to include both breastfeeding women and women who do not breastfeed in their study.
Study participants were 8 currently breastfeeding women, 12 non-breastfeeding women, and 7 men. Participants were 20 to 40 years of age. This age category was selected because it represents the typical age of nursing women and avoided individuals undergoing puberty or menopause. The group of non-breastfeeding women included both women who had not given birth and those who had stopped breastfeeding at least one year prior to the study.
In the study, participants were exposed to three different temperatures in a climatic chamber: 32°C, 27°C, and 18°C. The study authors note that 27°C is a thermoneutral temperature for humans, meaning it is the temperature at which they can maintain their normal body temperature with minimal energy expenditure. It is the mean daytime temperature of the African savanna. The other two temperatures were taken to represent higher and lower extremes. The researchers used thermal imaging to record breast surface temperature at the start of the exposure, after 10 minutes, and at the end of the exposure, which lasted 20 minutes in total.
Results showed that breastfeeding women had overall higher breast surface temperatures compared to the other groups. Furthermore, they showed a distinct resilience against cooling during the 18°C exposure. During this exposure, they lost 2.5°C of their breast surface temperature on average, whereas the other study groups lost 4.3°C and 4.7°C.
“This proof-of-concept study clearly indicated the potential of the nursing women’s breasts to support infant’s thermal balance,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about the evolutionary roles of human breasts. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a very small group of participants, particularly of breastfeeding women. Studies on larger groups might not yield identical results.
The paper, “Infant’s thermal balance and the evolution of the human breast – a proof-of-concept study,” was authored by Tiina Kuvaja, Tiina Väre, Sirkka Rissanen, Hannu Rintamäki, Petri Lehenkari, and Juho-Antti Junno.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/human-breasts-might-have-evolved-to-keep-big-brained-infants-warm/
-------------------------------------------------
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Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #EvolutionaryBreasts #InfantThermalBalance #BreastTemperature #HumanEvolution #BreastScience #Thermoregulation #BreastfeedingBenefits #InfantCare #Thermoneutrality #EvolutionaryHumanSciences
-
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Human breasts might have evolved to keep big-brained infants warm
URL: https://www.psypost.org/human-breasts-might-have-evolved-to-keep-big-brained-infants-warm/
A study in Finland measured heating capacity and resilience to temperature changes of breasts of nursing women, non-nursing women, and men. Results showed that breastfeeding women had overall higher breast surface temperature compared to the other groups. Their breasts were also more resilient to cooling. The paper was published in Evolutionary Human Sciences.
Human breasts are unusual among primates because they remain relatively prominent throughout adult life rather than enlarging mainly during lactation. Much of their size and shape is produced by subcutaneous fat and fat around the milk-producing glands rather than by the milk-producing glandular tissue itself. Breast size varies considerably between women, and larger breasts can also create physical disadvantages such as increased strain on the back.
One evolutionary possibility is that permanent breasts emerged as a by-product of increased body fat during human evolution and were later shaped by other selective pressures. Some researchers have proposed that enlarged breasts function partly as sexual signals of fertility, health, or reproductive fitness, although this interpretation is not universally applicable across cultures.
Another hypothesis is that breast size may have helped mothers warm infants during close skin-to-skin contact, particularly after humans lost most of their body hair. Under this view, additional breast tissue could increase the warm surface area surrounding an infant and reduce heat loss. This possibility is especially relevant because human infants have unusually high energetic demands and substantial thermoregulatory needs during early development, largely due to encephalization, which is the evolutionary increase in brain size.
Study author Tiina Kuvaja and her colleagues investigated if the female breast tissue would have a distinct response to changing temperature. If this happened, it would indicate that it has a potential to stabilize the temperature of infants and especially newborns. They also noticed that lactation influences breast skin temperature and that relatively large changes in breast metabolic rate and temperature take place in early pregnancy. That is why they decided to include both breastfeeding women and women who do not breastfeed in their study.
Study participants were 8 currently breastfeeding women, 12 non-breastfeeding women, and 7 men. Participants were 20 to 40 years of age. This age category was selected because it represents the typical age of nursing women and avoided individuals undergoing puberty or menopause. The group of non-breastfeeding women included both women who had not given birth and those who had stopped breastfeeding at least one year prior to the study.
In the study, participants were exposed to three different temperatures in a climatic chamber: 32°C, 27°C, and 18°C. The study authors note that 27°C is a thermoneutral temperature for humans, meaning it is the temperature at which they can maintain their normal body temperature with minimal energy expenditure. It is the mean daytime temperature of the African savanna. The other two temperatures were taken to represent higher and lower extremes. The researchers used thermal imaging to record breast surface temperature at the start of the exposure, after 10 minutes, and at the end of the exposure, which lasted 20 minutes in total.
Results showed that breastfeeding women had overall higher breast surface temperatures compared to the other groups. Furthermore, they showed a distinct resilience against cooling during the 18°C exposure. During this exposure, they lost 2.5°C of their breast surface temperature on average, whereas the other study groups lost 4.3°C and 4.7°C.
“This proof-of-concept study clearly indicated the potential of the nursing women’s breasts to support infant’s thermal balance,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about the evolutionary roles of human breasts. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a very small group of participants, particularly of breastfeeding women. Studies on larger groups might not yield identical results.
The paper, “Infant’s thermal balance and the evolution of the human breast – a proof-of-concept study,” was authored by Tiina Kuvaja, Tiina Väre, Sirkka Rissanen, Hannu Rintamäki, Petri Lehenkari, and Juho-Antti Junno.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/human-breasts-might-have-evolved-to-keep-big-brained-infants-warm/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #EvolutionaryBreasts #InfantThermalBalance #BreastTemperature #HumanEvolution #BreastScience #Thermoregulation #BreastfeedingBenefits #InfantCare #Thermoneutrality #EvolutionaryHumanSciences