#counseling — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #counseling, aggregated by home.social.
-
DATE: September 5, 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: People with unfulfilled romantic needs form stronger attachments to fictional characters
People who are single or unhappy in their romantic relationships tend to develop stronger romantic feelings for fictional media characters. These findings suggest that one-sided crushes on movie stars or fictional personas can serve as a substitute for unfulfilled emotional needs in real life. The research was published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media.
Psychologists use the term “parasocial phenomena” to describe the one-sided psychological connections viewers form with media figures. First introduced in the 1950s, the concept captures how media consumers can feel as though they are interacting with a character on a screen. These mediated bonds resemble face-to-face social interactions but completely lack any mutual exchange.
Historically, researchers have debated whether these one-sided connections act as a social surrogate. The social surrogacy hypothesis proposes that individuals might use media figures to substitute for real-world social deficits. Past investigations mostly focused on platonic, friendship-like parasocial bonds. The consensus from those studies was generally that lonely individuals do not engage more intensely with media figures than people with active social lives.
Platonic connections represent only one facet of human social behavior. Nicole Liebers, a researcher at the University of Würzburg, conducted this study to explore the neglected romantic dimensions of parasocial phenomena. While platonic media connections might not cure general loneliness, Liebers proposed that romantic media connections might specifically help individuals cope with unfulfilled romantic needs.
Romantic parasocial phenomena involve intense emotional, physical, and sexual attraction toward a character. Liebers designed two studies to test whether relationship status and relationship satisfaction influence how strongly viewers become infatuated with these fictional figures. The research separated these phenomena into immediate parasocial interactions during viewing and long-term parasocial relationships that endure after the screen goes dark.
In the first study, Liebers recruited 96 moviegoers at a public cinema center in Germany. Participants had just watched one of three movies: Wonder Woman, Baywatch, or Transformers 5. These specific films were selected because they all featured at least one male and one female main character that the audience might find attractive.
Researchers asked the participants to complete a smartphone questionnaire immediately after leaving the theater. The viewers identified the specific character they felt most emotionally and sexually attracted to. They then answered questions designed to measure their real-time romantic parasocial interaction, which captures the immediate mental and physical attraction experienced while watching the film.
The researcher divided the participants into three groups based on their social situations. The groups included single individuals who watched the movie with a non-romantic companion, people in relationships who watched with a non-romantic companion, and people who attended the movie with their romantic partner. Individuals who attended the movie alone were excluded from the analysis, as watching a movie alone can alter a viewer’s general immersion in the story.
Liebers found that single individuals experienced more intense romantic parasocial interactions than people who were in a relationship. Specifically, single viewers reported stronger emotional love and a higher desire to interact with the character. The two groups did not differ in their physical attraction to the characters.
The social setting of the theater also influenced the viewers’ experiences. People who attended the movie with their romantic partner reported lower emotional and physical attraction to the characters compared to coupled people who attended without their partner. Having a romantic partner present in the room appeared to dampen the immediate romantic connection to the media figure.
The second study expanded the focus from real-time reactions to long-term romantic attachments. Liebers surveyed 358 volunteers online, asking them to recall a media character from any recently watched movie to whom they felt romantically and sexually attracted. The open-ended prompt resulted in a wide range of reported characters, from Magic Mike to Princess Jasmine in Aladdin.
Participants reported their current relationship status. Those who were currently in a relationship also completed a questionnaire assessing their overall relationship satisfaction, answering questions about how well their partner met their needs. Finally, all participants answered questions measuring their ongoing romantic parasocial relationship with their chosen character.
Unlike the immediate reactions measured in the first study, a parasocial relationship describes a bond that endures well after the movie ends. This survey allowed participants to select from a wide variety of movies. It provided a broader look at how these one-sided romances function in daily life.
Mirroring the first study, single participants developed stronger long-term romantic parasocial relationships than coupled participants. In this broader context, single individuals reported higher levels of both emotional love and physical attraction toward the characters. The data indicated that lacking a real-world romantic partner heightened the overall intensity of the fictional romance.
For participants who were in a relationship, their satisfaction with their real-life partner played a defining role. Lower relationship satisfaction predicted stronger emotional love for the fictional character. However, relationship satisfaction had no statistically significant effect on the physical attraction viewers felt toward the character.
These results suggest that emotional closeness might be a more important driver of parasocial romances than physical attraction. People with unfulfilled romantic needs appear to seek out emotional bonding with fictional characters to compensate for what they lack in real life. This finding aligns with the idea that the human drive for emotional love is often stronger than the drive for physical gratification.
These observational findings rely on self-reported data, which can introduce certain biases. For example, people watching a movie while sitting next to their romantic partner might simply feel more reluctant to admit they are attracted to a fictional character. The social desirability of reporting a crush could vary greatly depending on who is standing nearby.
The research design also prevents definitive conclusions about cause and effect. It is possible that individuals turn to media characters to compensate for romantic deficits. But it is equally possible that engaging in intense parasocial romances creates unrealistic expectations, which then lowers a person’s satisfaction with their real-world partner.
Future research will need to measure subjective feelings of romantic loneliness directly, rather than relying solely on relationship status as a proxy. Tracking these media habits over time could clarify whether fictional romances truly heal unfulfilled needs or simply complicate existing relationships. Accounting for a viewer’s prior exposure to an actor could also help isolate the exact mechanisms driving these one-sided love affairs.
The study, “Unfulfilled Romantic Needs: Effects of Relationship Status, Presence of Romantic Partners, and Relationship Satisfaction on Romantic Parasocial Phenomena,” was authored by Nicole Liebers.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #ParasocialRomance #UnfulfilledRomanticNeeds #RomanticParasocialPhenomena #SingleAndCrushing #FictionalCharacterLove #RelationshipSatisfaction #EmotionalLove #MediaScientists #CinemaRomance #SocialSurrogacy
-
DATE: September 5, 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: Scientists build a more accurate Alzheimer’s risk score using global DNA data
Researchers have developed a new genetic risk scoring method that improves the prediction of Alzheimer’s disease across diverse populations, moving beyond the historical reliance on European genetic data. The findings indicate that blending genetic information from multiple global groups also helps predict biological markers of the disease. The research was published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurological condition that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills. To understand who might be at the highest risk of developing the disease, scientists often use polygenic risk scores. A polygenic risk score is a tool that adds up the tiny effects of thousands of genetic variations across a person’s entire genetic code to estimate their overall inherited risk for a specific condition.
To build these scores, researchers rely on genome-wide association studies. These are large-scale projects that scan the DNA of thousands of people to find small genetic differences linked to a disease. Historically, these massive genetic databases have overwhelmingly featured individuals of European descent. A 2016 study showed that genetic risk scores built primarily from people of European descent lose substantial accuracy when applied to other ancestral groups. Because human genetics vary slightly across populations due to demographic history, a score that works well for a European individual often fails to predict disease risk for someone of African or Asian descent.
The push to solve this problem has led scientists to gather more diverse genetic data. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 found novel Alzheimer’s-linked genes by analyzing multi-ancestry genome data. To make use of this newly available information, statisticians have been designing new ways to combine the data. A 2023 study demonstrated that building risk scores from diverse, multi-ethnic groups consistently outperforms scores built from just one population.
Building on this progress, Meri Okorie, Shea J. Andrews, and their colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, sought to test these new scoring models for Alzheimer’s disease. They wanted to see if a cross-ancestry approach could accurately predict not just the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, but also the underlying physical damage occurring in the brain, across a multiethnic group of older adults.
The researchers gathered genetic summary data from hundreds of thousands of individuals of European, African, Admixed American, East Asian, and Caribbean Hispanic descent. The term Admixed American refers to populations, such as many Latino or Hispanic individuals, whose ancestry is a complex mix of Indigenous American, European, and African genetics.
Using this diverse data, the team built three different types of polygenic risk scores. The first was a single-ancestry score, created using only the European genetic data. The second was a multi-ancestry score, which simply pooled all the genetic data from the different groups together. The third was a cross-ancestry score, an advanced statistical model that jointly analyzed the data from multiple populations to adjust how much weight each genetic variant should carry based on shared genetic effects. The researchers also used a specialized mathematical step called ancestry normalization to ensure the scores were scaled fairly across different genetic backgrounds.
To test these three scores, the researchers applied them to two large groups of patients living in the United States. The first testing group came from the Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project. This sample included 19,398 individuals, with 7,111 diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and 12,287 who were cognitively normal. The participants in this group were of European, Admixed American, and African descent.
The second testing group came from the Health and Aging Brain Study–Health Disparities. This group included 2,559 older adults of European, Admixed American, and African descent. For all analyses, the researchers adjusted for factors like age, sex, and the presence of the APOE gene. The APOE gene is a well-established genetic variation that strongly increases Alzheimer’s risk on its own, so controlling for it allowed the researchers to see the effect of the broader polygenic risk score.
In addition to looking at whether participants were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the researchers looked at objective medical measurements. These included cognitive test scores assessing memory and language, brain scans, and the analysis of cerebrospinal fluid. Cerebrospinal fluid is the liquid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord, and it can be tested for specific proteins that act as warning signs for Alzheimer’s disease.
The researchers found that the single-ancestry score, built only from European data, performed poorly outside of European populations. While it worked well for predicting Alzheimer’s risk in participants of European descent, its accuracy dropped noticeably in Admixed American participants. For participants of African ancestry, the single-ancestry score completely failed to predict Alzheimer’s disease risk.
In contrast, the cross-ancestry score showed the highest predictive performance across the board. When applied to participants of African ancestry, a higher cross-ancestry score was associated with a 71 percent increase in the odds of having an Alzheimer’s diagnosis compared to the baseline risk. This advanced scoring model also maintained high accuracy for Admixed American and European participants, providing a more balanced predictive tool for diverse populations.
Beyond predicting a clinical diagnosis, the cross-ancestry score successfully predicted physical and cognitive signs of the disease. Across the testing groups, higher cross-ancestry risk scores were tied to poorer performance in cognitive domains like memory, language, and executive function. Executive function refers to mental skills that include working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control.
The cross-ancestry score also aligned with biomarkers of the disease in the body. Individuals with higher genetic risk scores tended to have lower levels of amyloid-beta 42 in their cerebrospinal fluid. In the context of Alzheimer’s disease, a drop of this specific protein in the spinal fluid indicates that the protein is clumping together inside the brain to form harmful plaques.
The researchers also looked at autopsy data and advanced brain imaging. They found that participants with the highest cross-ancestry polygenic risk scores had a higher probability of being in the most severe categories of brain pathology. This indicates that the genetic risk score is not only catching surface-level symptoms but is reflecting the advanced physical accumulation of plaques and tangles that destroy brain tissue.
There are a few things to keep in mind regarding this study. The data lacked representation from South and East Asian populations in the testing phase, which limits the ability to know exactly how well the cross-ancestry score performs for those specific groups. Expanding genetic databases to include more global populations is an ongoing challenge in medical research.
The participants tested in this study were all residents of the United States. It is unknown if the models would perform with the exact same accuracy in populations living in other environments or continents, where different lifestyle and environmental factors are at play.
The researchers also point out that these risk scores currently explain only a modest fraction of a person’s total risk for Alzheimer’s disease. A polygenic risk score is just one piece of the puzzle. Age, sex, specific rare genes, and environmental factors like diet and exercise all interact to determine whether someone will actually develop the disease. This study did not look at how a person’s environment might modify their genetic risk.
The study, “Cross-ancestry polygenic risk scores enhance Alzheimer’s disease risk prediction in multiethnic cohorts,” was authored by Meri Okorie, Caroline Jonson, Alexis P. Oddi, Patricia A. Castruita, Brian Fulton-Howard, Kristine Yaffe, Jennifer S. Yokoyama, Chinedu Udeh-Momoh, and Shea J. Andrews.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AlzheimersRisk #PolygenicRiskScore #MultiethnicGenomics #CrossAncestry #GeneticPrediction #DiversityInGenetics #AlzheimersDisease #Biomarkers #BrainHealth #NeurodegenerativeResearch
-
DATE: September 5, 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: Personality impairments link childhood maltreatment to adult anxiety
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-childhood-emotional-abuse-and-neglect-fuel-adult-anxiety-symptoms/
A history of childhood maltreatment is strongly linked to the development of anxiety in adulthood, an association largely explained by disruptions in how a person perceives themselves and connects with others. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Reports details how emotional abuse and neglect shape adult anxiety symptoms by impairing fundamental personality traits. By identifying these underlying psychological pathways, the research points toward more personalized therapeutic strategies for patients dealing with the lasting effects of early trauma.
Generalized anxiety disorder involves excessive, persistent worry about everyday events that is disproportionate to the actual risks. It is one of the most common mental health conditions globally, affecting hundreds of millions of people. Rates of anxiety disorders grew notably during the recent global pandemic.
Childhood maltreatment is an established risk factor for developing severe and treatment-resistant anxiety. This maltreatment encompasses physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect. Stephanie Vaccarezza, a clinical psychologist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, led a research team to investigate the psychological mechanisms connecting early adversity to later anxiety. They were particularly interested in how these dynamics unfold in clinical settings where patients are actively seeking mental health treatment.
The researchers focused on a concept called “personality functioning.” In modern psychiatric models, personality functioning describes how well a person navigates their own identity and their relationships with others. Evaluating this functioning helps clinicians understand the severity of personality disruptions in a highly individualized way.
Personality functioning is divided into two main areas. The first is self-functioning, which encompasses a person’s sense of identity, self-esteem, and ability to set meaningful life goals. It also includes the capacity for emotional regulation and productive self-reflection. The second area is interpersonal functioning, which involves empathy, the desire for closeness, and the ability to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with others.
When these capacities are impaired, individuals often struggle with their self-worth and social interactions. The researchers hypothesized that early emotional and physical maltreatment disrupts the normal development of these core capacities. This disruption leaves individuals more vulnerable to internalized distress, which often surfaces as anxiety later in life.
To test this idea, the researchers recruited 335 adults who were beginning individual psychotherapy. The participants were drawn from four mental health outpatient centers in Santiago, Chile. The group included a mix of patients seeking help for various difficulties, with the majority having completed university or technical education.
The participants completed a series of intake questionnaires designed to assess their early life experiences, current personality functioning, and anxiety levels. The childhood maltreatment survey asked participants to rate how often they experienced different forms of abuse and neglect while growing up. Emotional abuse includes verbal assaults or humiliating actions directed at a child. Emotional neglect refers to a caregiver failing to meet a child’s basic psychological needs for love, belonging, and support.
The researchers measured personality functioning by asking participants to rate statements about their self-perception, emotional regulation, and relationship dynamics. The responses allowed the team to gauge impairments in both self-functioning and interpersonal functioning. Finally, the researchers evaluated the participants for symptoms of generalized anxiety using a standard symptom checklist.
The team then used statistical models to analyze the relationships between the different types of childhood maltreatment, personality impairments, and anxiety levels. They specifically looked for mediation effects, which occur when a third variable explains the relationship between an initial predictor and a final outcome. They utilized a statistical technique that simulates a thousand data samples to ensure the mathematical reliability of their findings.
The researchers found that 64.2 percent of the patients reported experiencing at least one type of childhood maltreatment. Emotional abuse was the most common form, affecting 43 percent of the participants, followed closely by sexual abuse and physical neglect. A smaller subset of patients reported experiencing all five types of maltreatment.
More than half of the total sample met the diagnostic criteria for generalized anxiety disorder. Women in the study had statistically higher odds of experiencing anxiety symptoms compared to men. Women were also more likely to report histories of childhood sexual abuse.
Overall, a higher total score for childhood maltreatment was associated with higher levels of anxiety. When looking at the specific types of maltreatment, only emotional abuse and emotional neglect showed a robust total effect on adult anxiety. Physical abuse, physical neglect, and sexual abuse were not statistically significant predictors of higher anxiety scores in this specific analysis.
Personality functioning proved to be a major factor in connecting early maltreatment to current anxiety. Impairments in overall personality functioning accounted for roughly 73 percent of the total relationship between childhood maltreatment and adult anxiety. Both self-functioning and interpersonal functioning played major roles in this dynamic.
Impairments in self-functioning had a slightly larger impact than impairments in interpersonal relationships. For emotional abuse, self-functioning explained a larger proportion of the resulting anxiety symptoms than interpersonal functioning did. The same pattern held true for emotional neglect, where self-functioning again proved to be the stronger mediator.
For patients who experienced emotional neglect, the relationship with adult anxiety was entirely explained by diminished personality functioning. In other words, emotional neglect did not show a direct statistical link to anxiety except through the way it hindered a person’s self-perception and social skills. Emotional abuse, on the other hand, retained a direct statistical link to adult anxiety, though personality impairments still accounted for more than half of its total effect.
The study relied on retrospective self-reports, meaning participants had to recall events from their childhoods. This method can sometimes introduce memory biases or subjective interpretations of past events. The participants were also predominantly highly educated and recruited mostly from private clinics, which means the results might not perfectly represent the broader public.
Additionally, the data was collected at a single point in time when the patients were starting therapy. This cross-sectional design makes it impossible to establish a firm trajectory of cause and effect, as the researchers could not observe how anxiety symptoms or personality functioning changed over the course of treatment. Future studies will need to track individuals over several years to confirm how these psychological mechanisms unfold during human development.
The researchers noted that therapy for adult anxiety often focuses heavily on reducing immediate symptoms. For patients with a history of emotional maltreatment, clinical interventions might be more successful if they also target core self-esteem, identity, and relationship skills. By treating the underlying personality impairments, clinicians can help patients build the emotional regulation necessary to manage long-term anxiety.
The study, “Childhood Maltreatment and Anxiety in Adulthood: Disentangling the Role of Personality Functioning,” was authored by Stephanie Vaccarezza, Sebastián Opazo, Adrian P. Mundt, Alejandra Cortázar, and Paula Errazuriz.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-childhood-emotional-abuse-and-neglect-fuel-adult-anxiety-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 #ChildhoodMaltreatment #AdultAnxiety #PersonalityFunctioning #SelfFunctioning #InterpersonalFunctioning #EmotionalAbuse #EmotionalNeglect #TraumaTherapy #AnxietyResearch #MentalHealthAwareness
-
DATE: September 5, 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: Personality impairments link childhood maltreatment to adult anxiety
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-childhood-emotional-abuse-and-neglect-fuel-adult-anxiety-symptoms/
A history of childhood maltreatment is strongly linked to the development of anxiety in adulthood, an association largely explained by disruptions in how a person perceives themselves and connects with others. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Reports details how emotional abuse and neglect shape adult anxiety symptoms by impairing fundamental personality traits. By identifying these underlying psychological pathways, the research points toward more personalized therapeutic strategies for patients dealing with the lasting effects of early trauma.
Generalized anxiety disorder involves excessive, persistent worry about everyday events that is disproportionate to the actual risks. It is one of the most common mental health conditions globally, affecting hundreds of millions of people. Rates of anxiety disorders grew notably during the recent global pandemic.
Childhood maltreatment is an established risk factor for developing severe and treatment-resistant anxiety. This maltreatment encompasses physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect. Stephanie Vaccarezza, a clinical psychologist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, led a research team to investigate the psychological mechanisms connecting early adversity to later anxiety. They were particularly interested in how these dynamics unfold in clinical settings where patients are actively seeking mental health treatment.
The researchers focused on a concept called “personality functioning.” In modern psychiatric models, personality functioning describes how well a person navigates their own identity and their relationships with others. Evaluating this functioning helps clinicians understand the severity of personality disruptions in a highly individualized way.
Personality functioning is divided into two main areas. The first is self-functioning, which encompasses a person’s sense of identity, self-esteem, and ability to set meaningful life goals. It also includes the capacity for emotional regulation and productive self-reflection. The second area is interpersonal functioning, which involves empathy, the desire for closeness, and the ability to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with others.
When these capacities are impaired, individuals often struggle with their self-worth and social interactions. The researchers hypothesized that early emotional and physical maltreatment disrupts the normal development of these core capacities. This disruption leaves individuals more vulnerable to internalized distress, which often surfaces as anxiety later in life.
To test this idea, the researchers recruited 335 adults who were beginning individual psychotherapy. The participants were drawn from four mental health outpatient centers in Santiago, Chile. The group included a mix of patients seeking help for various difficulties, with the majority having completed university or technical education.
The participants completed a series of intake questionnaires designed to assess their early life experiences, current personality functioning, and anxiety levels. The childhood maltreatment survey asked participants to rate how often they experienced different forms of abuse and neglect while growing up. Emotional abuse includes verbal assaults or humiliating actions directed at a child. Emotional neglect refers to a caregiver failing to meet a child’s basic psychological needs for love, belonging, and support.
The researchers measured personality functioning by asking participants to rate statements about their self-perception, emotional regulation, and relationship dynamics. The responses allowed the team to gauge impairments in both self-functioning and interpersonal functioning. Finally, the researchers evaluated the participants for symptoms of generalized anxiety using a standard symptom checklist.
The team then used statistical models to analyze the relationships between the different types of childhood maltreatment, personality impairments, and anxiety levels. They specifically looked for mediation effects, which occur when a third variable explains the relationship between an initial predictor and a final outcome. They utilized a statistical technique that simulates a thousand data samples to ensure the mathematical reliability of their findings.
The researchers found that 64.2 percent of the patients reported experiencing at least one type of childhood maltreatment. Emotional abuse was the most common form, affecting 43 percent of the participants, followed closely by sexual abuse and physical neglect. A smaller subset of patients reported experiencing all five types of maltreatment.
More than half of the total sample met the diagnostic criteria for generalized anxiety disorder. Women in the study had statistically higher odds of experiencing anxiety symptoms compared to men. Women were also more likely to report histories of childhood sexual abuse.
Overall, a higher total score for childhood maltreatment was associated with higher levels of anxiety. When looking at the specific types of maltreatment, only emotional abuse and emotional neglect showed a robust total effect on adult anxiety. Physical abuse, physical neglect, and sexual abuse were not statistically significant predictors of higher anxiety scores in this specific analysis.
Personality functioning proved to be a major factor in connecting early maltreatment to current anxiety. Impairments in overall personality functioning accounted for roughly 73 percent of the total relationship between childhood maltreatment and adult anxiety. Both self-functioning and interpersonal functioning played major roles in this dynamic.
Impairments in self-functioning had a slightly larger impact than impairments in interpersonal relationships. For emotional abuse, self-functioning explained a larger proportion of the resulting anxiety symptoms than interpersonal functioning did. The same pattern held true for emotional neglect, where self-functioning again proved to be the stronger mediator.
For patients who experienced emotional neglect, the relationship with adult anxiety was entirely explained by diminished personality functioning. In other words, emotional neglect did not show a direct statistical link to anxiety except through the way it hindered a person’s self-perception and social skills. Emotional abuse, on the other hand, retained a direct statistical link to adult anxiety, though personality impairments still accounted for more than half of its total effect.
The study relied on retrospective self-reports, meaning participants had to recall events from their childhoods. This method can sometimes introduce memory biases or subjective interpretations of past events. The participants were also predominantly highly educated and recruited mostly from private clinics, which means the results might not perfectly represent the broader public.
Additionally, the data was collected at a single point in time when the patients were starting therapy. This cross-sectional design makes it impossible to establish a firm trajectory of cause and effect, as the researchers could not observe how anxiety symptoms or personality functioning changed over the course of treatment. Future studies will need to track individuals over several years to confirm how these psychological mechanisms unfold during human development.
The researchers noted that therapy for adult anxiety often focuses heavily on reducing immediate symptoms. For patients with a history of emotional maltreatment, clinical interventions might be more successful if they also target core self-esteem, identity, and relationship skills. By treating the underlying personality impairments, clinicians can help patients build the emotional regulation necessary to manage long-term anxiety.
The study, “Childhood Maltreatment and Anxiety in Adulthood: Disentangling the Role of Personality Functioning,” was authored by Stephanie Vaccarezza, Sebastián Opazo, Adrian P. Mundt, Alejandra Cortázar, and Paula Errazuriz.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-childhood-emotional-abuse-and-neglect-fuel-adult-anxiety-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 #ChildhoodMaltreatment #AdultAnxiety #PersonalityFunctioning #SelfFunctioning #InterpersonalFunctioning #EmotionalAbuse #EmotionalNeglect #TraumaTherapy #AnxietyResearch #MentalHealthAwareness
-
DATE: September 5, 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: Personality impairments link childhood maltreatment to adult anxiety
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-childhood-emotional-abuse-and-neglect-fuel-adult-anxiety-symptoms/
A history of childhood maltreatment is strongly linked to the development of anxiety in adulthood, an association largely explained by disruptions in how a person perceives themselves and connects with others. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Reports details how emotional abuse and neglect shape adult anxiety symptoms by impairing fundamental personality traits. By identifying these underlying psychological pathways, the research points toward more personalized therapeutic strategies for patients dealing with the lasting effects of early trauma.
Generalized anxiety disorder involves excessive, persistent worry about everyday events that is disproportionate to the actual risks. It is one of the most common mental health conditions globally, affecting hundreds of millions of people. Rates of anxiety disorders grew notably during the recent global pandemic.
Childhood maltreatment is an established risk factor for developing severe and treatment-resistant anxiety. This maltreatment encompasses physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect. Stephanie Vaccarezza, a clinical psychologist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, led a research team to investigate the psychological mechanisms connecting early adversity to later anxiety. They were particularly interested in how these dynamics unfold in clinical settings where patients are actively seeking mental health treatment.
The researchers focused on a concept called “personality functioning.” In modern psychiatric models, personality functioning describes how well a person navigates their own identity and their relationships with others. Evaluating this functioning helps clinicians understand the severity of personality disruptions in a highly individualized way.
Personality functioning is divided into two main areas. The first is self-functioning, which encompasses a person’s sense of identity, self-esteem, and ability to set meaningful life goals. It also includes the capacity for emotional regulation and productive self-reflection. The second area is interpersonal functioning, which involves empathy, the desire for closeness, and the ability to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with others.
When these capacities are impaired, individuals often struggle with their self-worth and social interactions. The researchers hypothesized that early emotional and physical maltreatment disrupts the normal development of these core capacities. This disruption leaves individuals more vulnerable to internalized distress, which often surfaces as anxiety later in life.
To test this idea, the researchers recruited 335 adults who were beginning individual psychotherapy. The participants were drawn from four mental health outpatient centers in Santiago, Chile. The group included a mix of patients seeking help for various difficulties, with the majority having completed university or technical education.
The participants completed a series of intake questionnaires designed to assess their early life experiences, current personality functioning, and anxiety levels. The childhood maltreatment survey asked participants to rate how often they experienced different forms of abuse and neglect while growing up. Emotional abuse includes verbal assaults or humiliating actions directed at a child. Emotional neglect refers to a caregiver failing to meet a child’s basic psychological needs for love, belonging, and support.
The researchers measured personality functioning by asking participants to rate statements about their self-perception, emotional regulation, and relationship dynamics. The responses allowed the team to gauge impairments in both self-functioning and interpersonal functioning. Finally, the researchers evaluated the participants for symptoms of generalized anxiety using a standard symptom checklist.
The team then used statistical models to analyze the relationships between the different types of childhood maltreatment, personality impairments, and anxiety levels. They specifically looked for mediation effects, which occur when a third variable explains the relationship between an initial predictor and a final outcome. They utilized a statistical technique that simulates a thousand data samples to ensure the mathematical reliability of their findings.
The researchers found that 64.2 percent of the patients reported experiencing at least one type of childhood maltreatment. Emotional abuse was the most common form, affecting 43 percent of the participants, followed closely by sexual abuse and physical neglect. A smaller subset of patients reported experiencing all five types of maltreatment.
More than half of the total sample met the diagnostic criteria for generalized anxiety disorder. Women in the study had statistically higher odds of experiencing anxiety symptoms compared to men. Women were also more likely to report histories of childhood sexual abuse.
Overall, a higher total score for childhood maltreatment was associated with higher levels of anxiety. When looking at the specific types of maltreatment, only emotional abuse and emotional neglect showed a robust total effect on adult anxiety. Physical abuse, physical neglect, and sexual abuse were not statistically significant predictors of higher anxiety scores in this specific analysis.
Personality functioning proved to be a major factor in connecting early maltreatment to current anxiety. Impairments in overall personality functioning accounted for roughly 73 percent of the total relationship between childhood maltreatment and adult anxiety. Both self-functioning and interpersonal functioning played major roles in this dynamic.
Impairments in self-functioning had a slightly larger impact than impairments in interpersonal relationships. For emotional abuse, self-functioning explained a larger proportion of the resulting anxiety symptoms than interpersonal functioning did. The same pattern held true for emotional neglect, where self-functioning again proved to be the stronger mediator.
For patients who experienced emotional neglect, the relationship with adult anxiety was entirely explained by diminished personality functioning. In other words, emotional neglect did not show a direct statistical link to anxiety except through the way it hindered a person’s self-perception and social skills. Emotional abuse, on the other hand, retained a direct statistical link to adult anxiety, though personality impairments still accounted for more than half of its total effect.
The study relied on retrospective self-reports, meaning participants had to recall events from their childhoods. This method can sometimes introduce memory biases or subjective interpretations of past events. The participants were also predominantly highly educated and recruited mostly from private clinics, which means the results might not perfectly represent the broader public.
Additionally, the data was collected at a single point in time when the patients were starting therapy. This cross-sectional design makes it impossible to establish a firm trajectory of cause and effect, as the researchers could not observe how anxiety symptoms or personality functioning changed over the course of treatment. Future studies will need to track individuals over several years to confirm how these psychological mechanisms unfold during human development.
The researchers noted that therapy for adult anxiety often focuses heavily on reducing immediate symptoms. For patients with a history of emotional maltreatment, clinical interventions might be more successful if they also target core self-esteem, identity, and relationship skills. By treating the underlying personality impairments, clinicians can help patients build the emotional regulation necessary to manage long-term anxiety.
The study, “Childhood Maltreatment and Anxiety in Adulthood: Disentangling the Role of Personality Functioning,” was authored by Stephanie Vaccarezza, Sebastián Opazo, Adrian P. Mundt, Alejandra Cortázar, and Paula Errazuriz.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-childhood-emotional-abuse-and-neglect-fuel-adult-anxiety-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 #ChildhoodMaltreatment #AdultAnxiety #PersonalityFunctioning #SelfFunctioning #InterpersonalFunctioning #EmotionalAbuse #EmotionalNeglect #TraumaTherapy #AnxietyResearch #MentalHealthAwareness
-
DATE: September 5, 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: First human trial of psilocin since the 1960s reveals better tolerability than psilocybin
Recent research suggests that consuming psilocin, the active compound in “magic” mushrooms, might cause fewer side effects than taking psilocybin. The study also explored taking the drug under the tongue, finding it well tolerated though less intense at the tested doses. The findings were published in Journal of Psychopharmacology.
Psilocybin is a naturally occurring compound found in certain hallucinogenic mushrooms. In recent years, it has gained attention as a potential treatment for mental health conditions. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2021 noted that psilocybin therapy could offer symptom relief comparable to some conventional antidepressants.
However, psilocybin itself does not directly cause psychedelic effects. It is a prodrug, meaning the body must break it down to activate it. When a person swallows psilocybin, enzymes in the gut and liver strip away a phosphate molecule, converting it into a new chemical called psilocin.
Psilocin is the active substance that enters the brain and alters perception. In fact, a 2019 study indicated that the intensity of a person’s psychedelic experience closely matches the concentration of psilocin circulating in their blood. Because the body’s conversion process can vary from person to person, standard oral psilocybin often yields unpredictable results and tends to cause unpleasant side effects.
“Nearly every modern psilocybin trial has used the same thing: synthetic psilocybin, 25 mg, in a capsule,” Josh Woolley, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco and director of the Translational Psychedelic Research Program, told PsyPost. “There are reasons to think other options might work better. Psilocybin is a prodrug, so the body has to convert it to psilocin, and people vary a lot in how efficiently they do that. That may be part of why responses to a fixed dose are so variable.”
Researchers wanted to know if administering psilocin directly would skip this metabolic step, potentially offering a gentler and more predictable experience. They also wanted to test a sublingual route, which involves placing a dissolving tablet under the tongue. Sublingual administration allows a drug to absorb directly into the bloodstream through the tissues of the mouth, completely bypassing the digestive system.
“Nobody had given psilocin directly to a human since the 1960s, and nobody had tried a sublingual formulation of any of these compounds,” Woolley noted.
Additionally, the research team used botanical extracts rather than lab-made synthetic chemicals. These whole-mushroom formulations contain natural trace compounds, known as alkaloids, alongside the primary drug. Alkaloids are naturally occurring chemical compounds found in plants and fungi that produce physiological effects on the body, and some researchers suspect they might influence the overall experience. “Mushrooms contain other alkaloids besides psilocybin, and standardized botanical extracts now make it possible to test whole-mushroom formulations under pharmaceutical conditions, which hadn’t been done,” Woolley said.
The research, led by Marlene L. Tai and Woolley, aimed to compare these different methods in a controlled setting. The scientists recruited 20 healthy adults between the ages of 25 and 50. All participants had prior experience with psychedelics and reported mild feelings of social disconnection. The study used a crossover design, meaning each person received multiple different treatments on separate days to compare the effects within the same individual.
Participants attended up to four drug administration sessions spaced four weeks apart. During these sessions, they received either an oral capsule of psilocybin (25 milligrams), an oral capsule of psilocin (17.5 milligrams, a dose designed to match the psilocybin strength), or a sublingual tablet of psilocin. The initial sublingual dose was set low at 2.18 milligrams and later increased to 4.36 milligrams or 8 milligrams to assess safety and tolerability.
All sessions took place in a comfortable clinic room where participants wore eyeshades and listened to music. A therapist and an assistant stayed in the room to provide psychological support. Throughout the day, the research team measured blood pressure and heart rate, while participants rated the intensity of the drug’s effects every 15 to 30 minutes.
At the end of each session, participants completed several questionnaires. These surveys measured the emotional and psychological qualities of their experience, including feelings of unity, emotional breakthroughs, and challenging states like fear or paranoia.
When comparing the two oral capsules, the scientists found that psilocin produced a psychological and physical journey that was very similar to psilocybin. The onset time, peak intensity, and duration of the experiences were mostly indistinguishable. Both drugs reliably produced deep psychological insights and mystical-type experiences.
“We expected psilocin to come on faster, since it skips a metabolic step, and it didn’t,” Woolley explained. “The two were hard to tell apart on almost every measure.”
However, oral psilocin was associated with a lower overall burden of adverse side effects. While almost all participants experienced mild issues on both drugs, oral psilocybin was linked to more moderate and severe events. These included headaches, anxiety, and one instance of transient loss of consciousness. Interestingly, gastrointestinal issues like nausea were similar between the two oral drugs, suggesting that stomach upset is not solely caused by the body breaking down psilocybin.
“The tolerability difference was modest, not dramatic,” Woolley said. “Fewer and milder adverse events on average, mostly headache and anxiety, rather than a categorical improvement. Whether that matters clinically depends on the setting. In a treatment where one session already requires eight hours of monitoring, small reductions in burden can add up. But this was 18 people per condition, so it’s a signal worth following, not an established difference.”
The sublingual psilocin tablets proved safe and were well tolerated by the participants. But the physical and psychological effects were much milder than the oral doses. The subjective intensity and cardiovascular responses were noticeably lower, indicating that less of the drug made its way into the systemic circulation at the tested amounts.
“At the cautious doses we used with FDA input, we clearly didn’t reach the exposure needed to test whether the route has real advantages,” Woolley noted. “This is an early study in 20 healthy volunteers. It’s a first look, not a verdict.”
Despite the milder overall intensity, sublingual psilocin still facilitated notable psychological responses. Participants reported scores on measures of emotional breakthrough and psychological insight that rivaled those typically seen with much higher oral doses. The authors noted that this suggests even mild psychedelic exposures might offer some therapeutic benefit.
“One result we’re still thinking about,” the researcher stated. “Even the very mild sublingual doses produced emotional breakthrough scores comparable to the full 25 mg doses. That could be a false positive, or an effect of the psychotherapy rather than the drug. But if it holds, it raises a real question about whether an intense psychedelic experience is necessary for the psychological benefits people are after.”
In an exploratory analysis, the researchers also compared their botanical mushroom extracts to data from a separate trial that used synthetic psilocybin. The psychological effects were broadly similar. This provides evidence that standardized whole-mushroom extracts function much like lab-made versions, offering a viable alternative for future treatments.
“On the botanical question, our comparison was with data from a previously published trial of synthetic psilocybin, not with a synthetic arm in our own study,” Woolley explained. “Two different populations, two different settings. So the fair statement is that we saw nothing that would suggest a big difference, not that we ruled one out. Testing the ‘entourage effect’ properly would require a head-to-head comparison in the same trial.” This entourage effect is the theory that multiple natural compounds within a plant or mushroom work together synergistically to produce stronger or different effects than an isolated chemical alone.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study included a small group of healthy, highly educated volunteers who already had experience with psychedelics. Because of this, it is not guaranteed that people with severe mental health conditions or those entirely new to psychedelics would respond in the exact same way.
The researchers also emphasized the strict clinical environment used during the trial. “The main one is that nothing here suggests people should be taking mushroom extracts on their own or trying to convert psilocybin to psilocin at home,” Woolley warned. “These were pharmaceutical grade products made to Good Manufacturing Practice standards, given under continuous medical supervision with a licensed therapist present throughout. That matters. One participant briefly lost consciousness during a psilocybin session, which we’ve reported separately, and it was handled because clinicians were in the room.”
The trial also lacked a pure inactive placebo group. Because the sublingual doses produced noticeably milder physical sensations than the oral capsules, participants and therapists were often able to guess which treatment had been administered. This awareness could have influenced the subjective survey responses.
Finally, the research team did not collect blood samples during the sessions. Without measuring the actual concentration of psilocin in the blood, it is difficult to know exactly how much of the sublingual drug was absorbed or how individual metabolisms processed the oral capsules. Future studies will need to incorporate blood testing and try higher sublingual doses to fully evaluate this delivery method.
“Measuring actual psilocin levels is what would let us link formulation to exposure to effect, and its absence was our main limitation here,” Woolley observed. “Sublingual psilocin needs a proper dose-ranging study at higher doses. And eventually this has to be tested in people with the conditions these drugs might treat, not just healthy volunteers.”
Moving forward, the team intends to share additional findings from the current participants. “We have a companion paper in preparation from this same trial looking at longer-term psychological outcomes, including loneliness, out to six months,” Woolley, who also serves as a staff psychiatrist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, added. “That’s the other half of the story and we’ll have more to say when it’s out.”
The study, “A randomized crossover trial comparing the acute physiological and psychological effects of botanical formulations of oral psilocybin, oral psilocin, and sublingual psilocin,” was authored by Marlene L. Tai, Balázs Szigeti, Amanda E. Downey, Jacob S. Aday, Lisa Fredenburg, Kimberly Sakai, Cesar Molina, Gisele Fernandes-Osterhold, Ellen R. Bradley, Maddie Pantoni, Ryan Moss, Benjamin Lightburn, Franziska Plessow, Aoife O’Donovan, and Josh D. Woolley.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #psilocin #psilocybin #psychedelicresearch #mentalhealth #sublingual #botanicalextracts #psychopharmacology #entourageeffect #clinicaltrial #psychedelics
-
DATE: September 5, 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: Watching violent online pornography is linked to poorer sexual health
URL: https://www.psypost.org/watching-violent-online-pornography-is-linked-to-poorer-sexual-health/
Young adults who watch violent online pornography tend to report worse sexual well-being, lower empathy, and more acceptance of violence against women than those who watch nonviolent content. These patterns, which look different for men and women, suggest that the specific types of sexual media people consume might shape their interpersonal relationships and physical experiences. The research was published in the journal Behavioral Sciences.
The World Health Organization defines sexual health as a broad state of physical, emotional, and social well-being. This definition goes beyond the mere absence of disease to include psychosocial skills that help people form healthy relationships. Two of these foundational skills are empathy, which involves understanding and sharing the feelings of another person, and sexual assertiveness.
Sexual assertiveness refers to a person’s ability to communicate their desires, initiate wanted encounters, and refuse unwanted sexual activity. Higher levels of this skill protect against sexual coercion and encourage safer sexual practices. Empathy also plays a role in sexual health by fostering mutual satisfaction and reducing the likelihood of aggressive behaviors.
While people consume large amounts of online pornography, research on how different types of explicit media relate to sexual well-being remains mixed. Prior studies often grouped all pornography together, masking how specific content might correlate with different outcomes. Psychological models of media consumption suggest that the consequences of watching pornography depend heavily on the specific context and material viewed.
In recent years, highly accessible online platforms have exposed young viewers to increasingly extreme content during their formative years. To address the knowledge gap regarding specific content, public health researcher Belén Sanz-Barbero from Spain’s National School of Public Health and her colleagues investigated how different forms of violent pornography associate with various dimensions of sexual health.
The researchers organized a large online survey of 3,607 young adults living in Spain between the ages of 18 and 35. For their primary analysis, they isolated a subgroup of 1,985 individuals who reported being sexually active and having watched pornography in the past year. This final group included 1,249 men and 736 women.
The participants answered detailed questionnaires regarding their pornography viewing habits and sexual experiences. To avoid social desirability bias, the tendency for survey respondents to answer questions in a way that will be viewed favorably by others, the researchers avoided using extreme words like rape. Instead, they provided subtle descriptions of sexual encounters and asked participants to rate how often they watched those specific scenarios.
The researchers then categorized the participants based on the most extreme type of pornography they regularly consumed. The three categories were pornography with no explicit violence, pornography featuring degrading or humiliating acts without physical violence, and pornography featuring physical violence. Degrading content included scenes featuring insults, threats, or domination practices that did not inflict physical pain.
Physically violent content included depictions of nonconsensual acts, the use of force, or painful submission practices. The survey instrument also measured the participants’ empathy, sexual assertiveness, and acceptance of violence against women. Additional sections of the questionnaire asked respondents about their sexual satisfaction, their ability to reach orgasm, and whether they had been recently diagnosed with any sexually transmitted infections.
The researchers found that consuming violent pornography was widespread among the study participants. More than 63 percent of the men and nearly 51 percent of the women reported watching pornography that contained physical violence. Men who watched these physically violent videos scored lower on psychological tests measuring empathy and sexual assertiveness compared to men who watched nonviolent pornography.
Both men and women who watched physically violent pornography demonstrated a higher acceptance of violence against women. Men who watched degrading or humiliating content also showed this increased acceptance. The researchers noticed distinct differences between men and women regarding physical sexual function and interpersonal satisfaction.
Men who watched physically violent content were more likely to report enjoying and having fun during sexual activities than those watching nonviolent videos. At the same time, these men were more likely to report feeling discomfort during real world sexual encounters. They also experienced greater difficulty getting or maintaining an erection and were much more likely to use sexual enhancement drugs.
Past studies have shown that the prevalence of erectile dysfunction in men under 40 has increased in recent decades. The researchers proposed that unrealistic sexual fantasies created by violent pornography might cause feelings of distress or moral incongruence when they are not fulfilled in real life. This distress could ultimately interfere with physical sexual function and satisfaction.
For women, watching physically violent pornography was associated with a higher likelihood of struggling to reach orgasm when with a partner. However, these women did not report this same difficulty when experiencing sexual activity alone. The researchers proposed that unrealistic expectations created by violent media might make it harder for viewers to communicate their boundaries or achieve satisfaction with real partners.
The survey also tracked recent diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections like gonorrhea, human papillomavirus, and chlamydia. Individuals of both sexes who watched violent pornography reported higher rates of these recent infections. However, the differences were not statistically significant after the researchers adjusted the data for other demographic variables.
Because this research relied on a survey administered at a single point in time, it cannot prove that watching violent pornography causes these negative sexual health outcomes. The relationship might work in the opposite direction. For example, individuals who already struggle with low empathy or sexual dysfunction might seek out more extreme or violent material to achieve sexual arousal.
The psychological theory of empathy suggests that media consumers often identify with one specific actor in a scene, leading to an empathetic disconnection from the other people involved. It is possible that men with naturally lower empathy are drawn to media that allows them to disconnect from the experiences of women. Women might possess a greater emotional resilience to the effects of violent pornography due to different patterns of empathetic identification.
The survey also depended on participants accurately and honestly reporting their viewing habits. Even with built-in statistical adjustments for social desirability, people might naturally underreport socially unacceptable behaviors and overreport positive traits. The researchers also noted that their sample focused heavily on sexually active individuals, which might limit how well the findings apply to broader populations.
Future longitudinal studies tracking viewers over several years will help determine whether exposure to violent pornography directly alters psychosocial development. Until then, public health interventions targeting young adults could focus on building communication skills and critical thinking regarding the sexual scripts modeled in digital media. Recognizing violent pornography as an emerging factor in sexual health could help educators promote safer and more respectful relationships.
The findings offer a new perspective on how digital media habits align with physical and emotional well-being. The study, “Violent Content in Online Pornography Is Associated with Sexual Health of Women and Men,” was authored by Belén Sanz-Barbero, Vanesa Pérez-Martínez, Ana Rico, Laura Otero-García, Marta Fernández-López, Ariadna Cerdán-Torregrosa, and Carmen Vives-Cases.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/watching-violent-online-pornography-is-linked-to-poorer-sexual-health/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #ViolentPornography #SexualHealth #Empathy #SexualAssertiveness # PornographyResearch #SexualWellBeing #MediaInfluence #HealthyRelationships #STIsAwareness #DigitalMediaEducation
-
DATE: September 5, 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: Scientists map the brain pathway that links social isolation to increased alcohol consumption
A recent study in mice suggests that social isolation drives increased alcohol consumption by strengthening a specific neural pathway in the brain, though this effect appears to operate differently in males and females. The findings provide a biological mechanism for how negative social environments can heighten the risk of alcohol misuse. The research was published in Nature Neuroscience.
The basolateral amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain that processes emotions and stress. The medial prefrontal cortex is a region at the front of the brain responsible for decision-making, executive control, and evaluating rewards. Researchers know that social isolation is a major risk factor for heavy drinking, and past work laid the foundation for understanding how the brain handles these specific stressors.
For example, a 2017 study showed that signals flowing from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex guide decisions when animals face competing reward and threat cues. Building on this, a 2020 study found that stress physically strengthens the pathway connecting the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex, increasing anxiety-like behaviors. This progression led researchers to explore whether this specific communication highway, the pathway from the basolateral amygdala to the medial prefrontal cortex, drives isolation-induced alcohol misuse and whether the effects differ by sex.
The new research was led by Reesha R. Patel, an assistant professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Kay M. Tye, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The scientists aimed to map exactly how social isolation alters this brain circuit to influence drinking habits.
“Social isolation is increasingly recognized as an important risk factor for problematic alcohol use, but we know surprisingly little about how social experience actually changes the brain in ways that can influence drinking,” Patel told PsyPost. “We wanted to move beyond the association between isolation and alcohol use and identify the specific neural circuit changes that could contribute to this vulnerability.”
The researchers began by observing 14 male and 11 female mice in a choice setup, where the animals had access to both water and a 15% alcohol solution. They tracked the animals’ drinking while group-housed and then over 11 days of social isolation.
The isolation produced opposite behavioral effects depending on the sex of the mouse. Isolated males progressively increased their alcohol intake, while isolated females drank less alcohol. The researchers also noted that an animal’s social rank influenced its habits, as subordinate mice of both sexes tended to drink more alcohol than dominant mice even before being isolated.
“One other interesting finding was that social rank also predicted how much the mice drank even before isolation,” Patel said. “That suggests that alcohol drinking is shaped not just by whether an animal is socially isolated, but also by its social experience more broadly. We’re interested in understanding how different aspects of the social environment influence the brain and drinking behavior.”
Next, the team examined the brain cells connecting the basolateral amygdala to the medial prefrontal cortex. They used a technique called patch-clamp electrophysiology, which uses tiny glass electrodes to measure the electrical activity of individual neurons. The electrical excitability of these specific neurons closely mirrored the drinking behaviors.
In males, social isolation increased the excitability of these connecting neurons, making them more likely to fire. In females, isolation decreased this excitability. Because only males reliably escalated their drinking during isolation, the researchers focused the rest of their experiments on male mice to isolate the biological mechanisms driving increased alcohol use.
To see how this circuit behaves in real time, the team used cellular-resolution calcium imaging. They implanted miniature microscopes to track the activity of specific neurons while the male mice participated in a cued drinking task, where a light signaled the availability of alcohol or water. The neurons strongly encoded and predicted alcohol drinking.
Higher electrical activity in this specific brain pathway was linked to a higher frequency of alcohol drinking bouts. The pathway did not show the same predictive relationship for water consumption. The scientists then tested whether activating this pathway could directly influence behavior.
They used optogenetics, a technique where neurons are genetically modified to respond to light. By shining a laser through an implanted fiber, they could manually turn on the pathway from the basolateral amygdala to the medial prefrontal cortex whenever a mouse licked the drinking spout. Activating the circuit specifically increased alcohol intake, prompting the mice to engage in longer drinking bouts and take more licks per bout.
This light stimulation did not affect how much water or sugar water the mice drank. To understand how this signal changes the brain’s broader evaluation of rewards, the team tracked the activity of downstream neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex. During social isolation, the prefrontal cortex became much more responsive to alcohol but less responsive to natural rewards like sugar water.
“One of many actually surprising findings was that isolation changed how the prefrontal cortex represented different rewards,” Patel noted. “That raises the possibility that social experience can alter the relative value the brain assigns to different rewards.”
When the researchers artificially stimulated the pathway in group-housed mice, the prefrontal cortex reacted exactly as it did in isolated mice, showing heightened responses to alcohol and dampened responses to sugar. Finally, the researchers used optogenetics to inhibit, or silence, the pathway in socially isolated male mice. Turning off this circuit reduced the number of alcohol drinking bouts the isolated mice initiated, without affecting their water consumption.
This indicates that this specific neural pathway actively drives the escalation in alcohol use following social isolation. “Social isolation does not simply make animals drink more — it changes how one specific amygdala-to-prefrontal pathway represents alcohol relative to natural rewards,” said Jun Wang, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Experimental Therapeutics at Texas A& M University Health Science Center, who was not involved in the research.
“That coupling is the striking part,” Wang told PsyPost. “It offers a circuit-level account of how a social risk factor gets converted into a change in what the brain treats as worth pursuing, rather than just a change in how much an animal consumes.”
“I think the biggest takeaway is that our social experiences can have very real effects on the brain,” Patel said. “Social isolation didn’t just change how much the mice drank, it changed the activity of a specific brain circuit that helped drive that increase in alcohol use. To me, that really emphasizes that our social environment is an important part of understanding vulnerability to things like excessive drinking.”
“The broader significance is that social isolation may not simply be a circumstance that accompanies increased alcohol use—it can produce biological changes in the brain that actively contribute to drinking behavior,” she explained. “Understanding those mechanisms could ultimately help explain why social isolation increases vulnerability to problematic alcohol use in some individuals and may point toward new ways of identifying or reducing that vulnerability.”
Wang noted that the study’s strength lies in pinning the behavioral change directly to this specific brain projection and demonstrating that it is both necessary and sufficient. “The sex difference is the most interesting extension,” he added. “Two opposite behavioral outcomes, one consistent circuit signature.”
He also pointed out that the social-rank findings are a “genuinely new addition, and a reminder that the relevant social variable is not only isolation.”
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost earlier this year, which found that social isolation increased alcohol intake and altered reward processing in the brain. However, that previous study examined the long-term effects of adolescent isolation in rats, whereas the new research focused on concurrent adult isolation in mice.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Wang expressed reasonably high confidence in the findings for male mice due to the convergence of multiple methods, noting that “together they are difficult to explain away.” However, he pointed out that group sizes were typical for the field but relatively small, and that the experimental drinking model represents escalated voluntary intake, not addiction.
“Nothing here tests compulsive drinking, drinking despite negative consequences, or withdrawal, so ‘isolation causes alcohol use disorder’ is a step beyond the data,” Wang explained. Patel echoed this sentiment, emphasizing that the study relies on animal models, and human social dynamics involve far more complex psychological factors.
“I would be cautious about interpreting the study as showing that loneliness inevitably causes people to drink more,” Patel cautioned. “We experimentally manipulated social isolation in mice, which is not the same thing as the subjective experience of loneliness in humans, and we actually observed very different responses in males and females. What the study provides is evidence that social experience can directly alter neural circuits controlling alcohol-related behavior.”
The researchers and Wang both highlight the unresolved questions regarding female mice, as the exact biological reasons why female mice reduced their drinking during isolation remain unconfirmed. Wang noted that the female mice drank more at baseline, adding that “‘Males escalate, females do not’ is a statement about one mouse strain over about two weeks of isolation.” Because the mechanistic experiments were done only in males, the circuit’s exact role in females remains unknown.
The researchers note that females showed higher baseline excitability in this brain pathway compared to males, suggesting that sex-specific hormonal or physiological mechanisms dictate how these neurons adapt to stress. “One major question is why the same social experience produces such different adaptations across individuals and between males and females,” Patel said.
Wang agreed, emphasizing the need to causally test the pathway in females to see if its downstream consequences differ. He also suggested investigating which prefrontal output pathways actually carry the effect on drinking, and whether the behavioral and brain changes are reversible.
“Does returning animals to group housing normalize both the excitability change and the drinking, and is there a duration of isolation past which it does not?” Wang asked. “That question matters most for the human parallel.”
“We also want to understand the molecular mechanisms that make these circuits sensitive to social experience and whether the resulting neural changes can be reversed,” Patel added. “Ultimately, the broader goal is to understand why adverse social environments increase vulnerability to psychiatric and substance-use disorders in some individuals but not others.”
The study, “Social isolation recruits amygdala–medial prefrontal cortex projections to escalate alcohol drinking in male mice,” was authored by Reesha R. Patel, Kelly N. Kim, Makenzie Patarino, Rachelle Pamintuan, Felix H. Taschbach, Hao Li, Bitna Joo, Anna Pallé, Xianru Yu, Christopher R. Lee, Aniek van Hoek, Jesse White, Rogelio Castro, Christian Cazares, Raymundo L. Miranda, Caroline Jia, Jeremy Delahanty, Kanha Batra, Laurel R. Keyes, Avraham Libster, Romy Wichmann, Talmo D. Pereira, Marcus K. Benna, and Kay M. Tye.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #SocialIsolation #AlcoholUse #AmygdalaToPrefrontalCircuit #Neuroscience #SexDifferences #MiceStudy #NeuralPathways #NatureNeuroscience #RewardProcessing #Optogenetics
-
DATE: September 5, 2026 at 07:00AM
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: Brain damage reveals how a specific region generates mind-wandering
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-damage-reveals-how-a-specific-region-generates-mind-wandering/
Damage to a specific area of the brain limits a person’s ability to let their mind wander, according to a small study. Researchers found that this frontal brain region is necessary for generating the internal thoughts and memories that pull our attention away from the present moment. The findings were published in the journal Neuropsychologia.
The human mind frequently detaches from the immediate environment to focus on internal matters, such as planning for the future or recalling past events. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thought. In everyday language, it is more commonly known as mind-wandering.
Brain imaging studies have linked mind-wandering to the default mode network. This is a group of interconnected brain regions that activate when a person is resting or engaged in internal mental processes. One specific region in this network is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area located in the lower front of the brain.
Past research indicated that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reduces mind-wandering, but the exact mechanism remained elusive. Scientists debated whether this brain region actually generates the wandering thoughts, or if it simply allows a person to become aware that their mind has wandered. A team of researchers based in Italy, led by Elisa Ciaramelli of the University of Bologna, designed an experiment to test these competing ideas.
If the ventromedial prefrontal cortex only controls a person’s awareness of their thoughts, damage to the region would cause individuals to underreport all types of distractions. However, if the region is responsible for generating internal thoughts, patients would specifically lack mind-wandering while still noticing external distractions. The researchers recruited 42 participants for a small study to investigate this distinction.
The study sample included nine patients with localized damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The researchers also included a control group of 14 patients with brain damage in other areas, along with a second control group of 19 healthy adults.
In the first phase of the experiment, known as the standard condition, participants completed a repetitive attention task on a computer. They watched a screen and pressed a button every time a pattern of vertical lines appeared among frequent patterns of horizontal lines.
Roughly every 40 trials, the program paused and asked the participants to rate their attention. If participants reported that their attention had drifted away from the task, they had to categorize the nature of the distraction.
Participants noted whether their distraction was an internal thought, a thought related to the repetitive nature of the task itself, or an external distraction like a noise in the room. If they reported an internal thought, they also specified whether the mental image was focused on the past, the present, or the future.
The patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reported drastically fewer internal thoughts compared to both the healthy adults and the other brain-damaged patients. They specifically lacked wandering thoughts focused on the past and the future.
These patients experienced the same amount of task-related thoughts and external distractions as the other groups. This suggests that their brains could still lose focus on the main activity, but they lacked the internal mental content needed to drift into true mind-wandering.
In a separate phase of the experiment, called the cued condition, the researchers altered the repetitive line task. Random cue words like the word seaside occasionally appeared on the screen beneath the center fixation point.
These words were designed to act as subtle triggers for autobiographical memories and wandering thoughts. When the thought probes appeared in this version of the task, participants could report if their mind-wandering had been sparked by one of the specific cue words.
When provided with these external cues, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex still struggled to generate wandering thoughts. They reported fewer internal thoughts triggered by the cue words than the healthy adults did.
As in the first experiment, this reduction was isolated to internal mind-wandering. The patients continued to report typical levels of external distractions and thoughts regarding the test itself.
The combined results indicate that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is necessary for the spontaneous construction of internal events. The researchers propose that without this brain region initiating personal memories and future projections, a person’s attention is less likely to turn inward.
This finding aligns with the idea that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex helps build the mental scenes that fuel our daydreams. Because the patients retained the ability to notice external distractions, their lack of mind-wandering cannot be explained by a general failure to monitor their own thoughts.
The small number of participants in the study limits the sensitivity of the statistical analysis, meaning subtle differences between the patient groups might have gone undetected. The study format also required participants to be self-aware enough to categorize their own thoughts when prompted by the computer.
Future research will need to measure instances where people spontaneously catch themselves daydreaming, rather than relying on external computer prompts. This would help researchers confirm that the reported lack of mind-wandering holds true across different methods of measuring human attention.
Researchers might also investigate how this specific type of brain damage impacts daily functioning. A reduced capacity for mind-wandering could limit a person’s ability to plan for the future, reflect on past experiences, and engage in creative problem solving.
The study, “vmPFC damage reduces mind-wandering, but not other classes of off-task thought,” was authored by Elisa Ciaramelli, Virginia Pollarini, Andrea Crisafulli, Alessia Ferretti, and Manila Vannucci.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-damage-reveals-how-a-specific-region-generates-mind-wandering/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #MindWandering #vmPFC #VentromedialPrefrontalCortex #BrainDamage #Neuroscience #DefaultModeNetwork #AutobiographicalMemory #InternalThoughts #FuturePlanning #CognitiveScience
-
DATE: September 5, 2026 at 07:00AM
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: Brain damage reveals how a specific region generates mind-wandering
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-damage-reveals-how-a-specific-region-generates-mind-wandering/
Damage to a specific area of the brain limits a person’s ability to let their mind wander, according to a small study. Researchers found that this frontal brain region is necessary for generating the internal thoughts and memories that pull our attention away from the present moment. The findings were published in the journal Neuropsychologia.
The human mind frequently detaches from the immediate environment to focus on internal matters, such as planning for the future or recalling past events. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thought. In everyday language, it is more commonly known as mind-wandering.
Brain imaging studies have linked mind-wandering to the default mode network. This is a group of interconnected brain regions that activate when a person is resting or engaged in internal mental processes. One specific region in this network is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area located in the lower front of the brain.
Past research indicated that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reduces mind-wandering, but the exact mechanism remained elusive. Scientists debated whether this brain region actually generates the wandering thoughts, or if it simply allows a person to become aware that their mind has wandered. A team of researchers based in Italy, led by Elisa Ciaramelli of the University of Bologna, designed an experiment to test these competing ideas.
If the ventromedial prefrontal cortex only controls a person’s awareness of their thoughts, damage to the region would cause individuals to underreport all types of distractions. However, if the region is responsible for generating internal thoughts, patients would specifically lack mind-wandering while still noticing external distractions. The researchers recruited 42 participants for a small study to investigate this distinction.
The study sample included nine patients with localized damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The researchers also included a control group of 14 patients with brain damage in other areas, along with a second control group of 19 healthy adults.
In the first phase of the experiment, known as the standard condition, participants completed a repetitive attention task on a computer. They watched a screen and pressed a button every time a pattern of vertical lines appeared among frequent patterns of horizontal lines.
Roughly every 40 trials, the program paused and asked the participants to rate their attention. If participants reported that their attention had drifted away from the task, they had to categorize the nature of the distraction.
Participants noted whether their distraction was an internal thought, a thought related to the repetitive nature of the task itself, or an external distraction like a noise in the room. If they reported an internal thought, they also specified whether the mental image was focused on the past, the present, or the future.
The patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reported drastically fewer internal thoughts compared to both the healthy adults and the other brain-damaged patients. They specifically lacked wandering thoughts focused on the past and the future.
These patients experienced the same amount of task-related thoughts and external distractions as the other groups. This suggests that their brains could still lose focus on the main activity, but they lacked the internal mental content needed to drift into true mind-wandering.
In a separate phase of the experiment, called the cued condition, the researchers altered the repetitive line task. Random cue words like the word seaside occasionally appeared on the screen beneath the center fixation point.
These words were designed to act as subtle triggers for autobiographical memories and wandering thoughts. When the thought probes appeared in this version of the task, participants could report if their mind-wandering had been sparked by one of the specific cue words.
When provided with these external cues, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex still struggled to generate wandering thoughts. They reported fewer internal thoughts triggered by the cue words than the healthy adults did.
As in the first experiment, this reduction was isolated to internal mind-wandering. The patients continued to report typical levels of external distractions and thoughts regarding the test itself.
The combined results indicate that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is necessary for the spontaneous construction of internal events. The researchers propose that without this brain region initiating personal memories and future projections, a person’s attention is less likely to turn inward.
This finding aligns with the idea that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex helps build the mental scenes that fuel our daydreams. Because the patients retained the ability to notice external distractions, their lack of mind-wandering cannot be explained by a general failure to monitor their own thoughts.
The small number of participants in the study limits the sensitivity of the statistical analysis, meaning subtle differences between the patient groups might have gone undetected. The study format also required participants to be self-aware enough to categorize their own thoughts when prompted by the computer.
Future research will need to measure instances where people spontaneously catch themselves daydreaming, rather than relying on external computer prompts. This would help researchers confirm that the reported lack of mind-wandering holds true across different methods of measuring human attention.
Researchers might also investigate how this specific type of brain damage impacts daily functioning. A reduced capacity for mind-wandering could limit a person’s ability to plan for the future, reflect on past experiences, and engage in creative problem solving.
The study, “vmPFC damage reduces mind-wandering, but not other classes of off-task thought,” was authored by Elisa Ciaramelli, Virginia Pollarini, Andrea Crisafulli, Alessia Ferretti, and Manila Vannucci.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-damage-reveals-how-a-specific-region-generates-mind-wandering/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #MindWandering #vmPFC #VentromedialPrefrontalCortex #BrainDamage #Neuroscience #DefaultModeNetwork #AutobiographicalMemory #InternalThoughts #FuturePlanning #CognitiveScience
-
DATE: September 5, 2026 at 07:00AM
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: Brain damage reveals how a specific region generates mind-wandering
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-damage-reveals-how-a-specific-region-generates-mind-wandering/
Damage to a specific area of the brain limits a person’s ability to let their mind wander, according to a small study. Researchers found that this frontal brain region is necessary for generating the internal thoughts and memories that pull our attention away from the present moment. The findings were published in the journal Neuropsychologia.
The human mind frequently detaches from the immediate environment to focus on internal matters, such as planning for the future or recalling past events. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thought. In everyday language, it is more commonly known as mind-wandering.
Brain imaging studies have linked mind-wandering to the default mode network. This is a group of interconnected brain regions that activate when a person is resting or engaged in internal mental processes. One specific region in this network is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area located in the lower front of the brain.
Past research indicated that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reduces mind-wandering, but the exact mechanism remained elusive. Scientists debated whether this brain region actually generates the wandering thoughts, or if it simply allows a person to become aware that their mind has wandered. A team of researchers based in Italy, led by Elisa Ciaramelli of the University of Bologna, designed an experiment to test these competing ideas.
If the ventromedial prefrontal cortex only controls a person’s awareness of their thoughts, damage to the region would cause individuals to underreport all types of distractions. However, if the region is responsible for generating internal thoughts, patients would specifically lack mind-wandering while still noticing external distractions. The researchers recruited 42 participants for a small study to investigate this distinction.
The study sample included nine patients with localized damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The researchers also included a control group of 14 patients with brain damage in other areas, along with a second control group of 19 healthy adults.
In the first phase of the experiment, known as the standard condition, participants completed a repetitive attention task on a computer. They watched a screen and pressed a button every time a pattern of vertical lines appeared among frequent patterns of horizontal lines.
Roughly every 40 trials, the program paused and asked the participants to rate their attention. If participants reported that their attention had drifted away from the task, they had to categorize the nature of the distraction.
Participants noted whether their distraction was an internal thought, a thought related to the repetitive nature of the task itself, or an external distraction like a noise in the room. If they reported an internal thought, they also specified whether the mental image was focused on the past, the present, or the future.
The patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reported drastically fewer internal thoughts compared to both the healthy adults and the other brain-damaged patients. They specifically lacked wandering thoughts focused on the past and the future.
These patients experienced the same amount of task-related thoughts and external distractions as the other groups. This suggests that their brains could still lose focus on the main activity, but they lacked the internal mental content needed to drift into true mind-wandering.
In a separate phase of the experiment, called the cued condition, the researchers altered the repetitive line task. Random cue words like the word seaside occasionally appeared on the screen beneath the center fixation point.
These words were designed to act as subtle triggers for autobiographical memories and wandering thoughts. When the thought probes appeared in this version of the task, participants could report if their mind-wandering had been sparked by one of the specific cue words.
When provided with these external cues, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex still struggled to generate wandering thoughts. They reported fewer internal thoughts triggered by the cue words than the healthy adults did.
As in the first experiment, this reduction was isolated to internal mind-wandering. The patients continued to report typical levels of external distractions and thoughts regarding the test itself.
The combined results indicate that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is necessary for the spontaneous construction of internal events. The researchers propose that without this brain region initiating personal memories and future projections, a person’s attention is less likely to turn inward.
This finding aligns with the idea that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex helps build the mental scenes that fuel our daydreams. Because the patients retained the ability to notice external distractions, their lack of mind-wandering cannot be explained by a general failure to monitor their own thoughts.
The small number of participants in the study limits the sensitivity of the statistical analysis, meaning subtle differences between the patient groups might have gone undetected. The study format also required participants to be self-aware enough to categorize their own thoughts when prompted by the computer.
Future research will need to measure instances where people spontaneously catch themselves daydreaming, rather than relying on external computer prompts. This would help researchers confirm that the reported lack of mind-wandering holds true across different methods of measuring human attention.
Researchers might also investigate how this specific type of brain damage impacts daily functioning. A reduced capacity for mind-wandering could limit a person’s ability to plan for the future, reflect on past experiences, and engage in creative problem solving.
The study, “vmPFC damage reduces mind-wandering, but not other classes of off-task thought,” was authored by Elisa Ciaramelli, Virginia Pollarini, Andrea Crisafulli, Alessia Ferretti, and Manila Vannucci.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-damage-reveals-how-a-specific-region-generates-mind-wandering/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #MindWandering #vmPFC #VentromedialPrefrontalCortex #BrainDamage #Neuroscience #DefaultModeNetwork #AutobiographicalMemory #InternalThoughts #FuturePlanning #CognitiveScience
-
DATE: September 5, 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: Over half the risk for postpartum psychosis is tied to genetics, large study finds
New research published in Molecular Psychiatry indicates that postpartum psychosis is heavily influenced by both common and rare genetic factors, with about half of the risk tied to genetics. The study also identified a specific gene involved in cholesterol production that provides evidence for shared biological pathways between postpartum psychosis, schizophrenia, and certain autoimmune conditions.
Postpartum psychosis is a rare but severe mental health emergency that occurs in roughly 1 to 2 out of every 1,000 mothers shortly after childbirth. It involves an abrupt onset of symptoms like mania, severe depression, confusion, and psychosis, which is when a person loses touch with reality through hallucinations or delusions. The condition poses heavy risks to both the mother and the infant, often requiring immediate medical hospitalization.
Earlier research established that this vulnerability has deep biological roots. A 2001 study showed that the tendency to experience a severe psychotic episode triggered specifically by childbirth runs strongly in families. Moving beyond familial history, a 2013 study discovered that women experiencing their first episode of postpartum psychosis show disruptions in their immune systems.
Alongside these immune factors, metabolic changes have also been implicated, as a 2017 meta-analysis suggested that people going through their first psychotic episode tend to have altered cholesterol levels. These findings paved the way for large-scale genetic sequencing to pinpoint the exact genes and shared biological pathways involved. To build on these insights, researchers led by Seulgi Jung and study co-author Behrang Mahjani, an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who directs the Mahjani Lab, aimed to detail the specific genetic architecture of postpartum psychosis.
“Postpartum psychosis is a severe but understudied psychiatric disorder,” Mahjani told PsyPost. “Our previous study showed that sisters of women with postpartum psychosis have a markedly elevated risk, but its heritability had not been quantified and no specific risk genes had been identified. We therefore examined the contribution of both common and rare genetic variation to the disorder.”
The researchers first used data from Swedish national registers to estimate the overall genetic risk of the disorder. They examined health records from over 1.6 million mothers who gave birth to their first child between 1980 and 2017. Among this massive group, 2,514 mothers, or 0.15 percent, developed postpartum psychosis.
By tracking the health records of the mothers’ sisters and cousins, the researchers estimated the heritability of postpartum psychosis to be 55 percent. This indicates that more than half of the variation in who develops the condition can be attributed to genetic factors, a rate similar to that of bipolar disorder.
“The genetic contribution is substantial,” Mahjani explained. “Heritability in this range means that inherited variation accounts for a large share of the differences in vulnerability between individuals, comparable to what is seen for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.”
“This supports the view that postpartum psychosis reflects an underlying biological vulnerability rather than being simply a psychological reaction to the stress of childbirth,” he added.
To see how much of this heritability comes from common genetic variations, the team turned to the All of Us Research Program, a large national database of genetic and health information. They focused on whole-genome sequencing data from 198 mothers of European ancestry who had experienced postpartum psychosis, comparing them to 2,013 matched controls.
The team found that common genetic variants explained about 45.6 percent of the risk for postpartum psychosis. Because this is slightly lower than the 55 percent heritability estimated from family histories, it suggests that rarer genetic variations also play a role in the disorder.
The researchers then looked closely at rare genetic changes, specifically focusing on protein-truncating variants. These are severe mutations that essentially break a gene, preventing it from producing a functional protein. They analyzed a larger sample of 461 cases of postpartum psychosis and 4,610 unaffected controls.
Women with postpartum psychosis had an unusually high number of these disruptive mutations in genes that are generally highly constrained, meaning the genes do not usually tolerate mutations well without causing major biological problems. Based on these mutation patterns, the researchers estimated that there are around 81 specific genes that contribute to the risk of postpartum psychosis.
When analyzing which individual genes were most affected, the gene HMGCR stood out strongly. This gene contains the instructions for making a key enzyme that controls how the body produces cholesterol. A second gene, DNMT1, which helps maintain how DNA is regulated and read by the body, also showed a possible, though less certain, link to the disorder.
“The rare variants in HMGCR have large effects in the people who carry them, which is what allowed us to detect the gene despite a relatively modest sample,” Mahjani noted.
However, he cautioned against oversimplifying this connection. “HMGCR should not be read as ‘the postpartum psychosis gene,'” he said. “It is one of the many genes contributing to risk, and like other severe psychiatric disorders the condition is highly polygenic.”
To explore the broader impact of these genes, the researchers checked for mutations in HMGCR and DNMT1 across hundreds of thousands of individuals in two large medical biobanks. They found that rare mutations in HMGCR were also linked to conditions like vascular dementia and unspecified mental disorders, indicating the gene influences brain health outside of the postpartum period.
Finally, the researchers compared their list of genetic risk factors for postpartum psychosis against genes known to cause other illnesses. They found that a substantial percentage of the top risk genes for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia were also linked to postpartum psychosis. Additionally, they noted a genetic overlap with autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, myasthenia gravis, and Crohn’s disease, with HMGCR appearing as a top risk gene for both schizophrenia and rheumatoid arthritis.
“The results were largely consistent with what genetic studies of related psychiatric disorders would predict,” Mahjani said.
There are a few things to keep in mind regarding this study. First, definitions of postpartum psychosis can vary across different medical records. The registry data used in the study often lacked the precise end dates of episodes, which makes it harder to classify the exact duration of the illness.
The researchers also did not separate women whose postpartum psychosis was their very first psychiatric episode from those who had a pre-existing condition, such as bipolar disorder. As a result, some of the genetic patterns they found might reflect severe mental illness in general rather than factors entirely unique to the postpartum period.
Additionally, the genetic sequencing data relied heavily on individuals of European ancestry, meaning the results might not fully capture the genetic risk factors present in other populations. Future studies with more diverse groups will help provide a more complete picture of the condition’s genetic roots.
“Our immediate priority is to replicate these findings in larger samples,” Mahjani said of the team’s next steps. “Beyond that, we want to understand how the genes we identified actually function in the disorder, and how genetic vulnerability interacts with the hormonal and immune changes that occur during and after pregnancy.”
“Mainly that postpartum psychosis has been remarkably understudied relative to its severity,” he concluded. “Progress will depend on continued access to the kind of large-scale genomic resources that made this work possible, such as the All of Us Research Program, and on studies large enough to identify additional risk genes with confidence.”
The study, “Genetic architecture of postpartum psychosis: from common to rare genetic variation,” was authored by Seulgi Jung, Madison Caballero, Adrianna Kępińska, Shelby Smout, Trine Munk-Olsen, Thalia K. Robakis, Veerle Bergink, and Behrang Mahjani.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #PostpartumPsychosis #GeneticRisk #MentalHealthResearch #HMGCR #DNMT1 #CholesterolGenes #SchizophreniaOverlap #BipolarDisorder #AutoimmuneLinks #GenomicsStudy
-
DATE: September 5, 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: Over half the risk for postpartum psychosis is tied to genetics, large study finds
New research published in Molecular Psychiatry indicates that postpartum psychosis is heavily influenced by both common and rare genetic factors, with about half of the risk tied to genetics. The study also identified a specific gene involved in cholesterol production that provides evidence for shared biological pathways between postpartum psychosis, schizophrenia, and certain autoimmune conditions.
Postpartum psychosis is a rare but severe mental health emergency that occurs in roughly 1 to 2 out of every 1,000 mothers shortly after childbirth. It involves an abrupt onset of symptoms like mania, severe depression, confusion, and psychosis, which is when a person loses touch with reality through hallucinations or delusions. The condition poses heavy risks to both the mother and the infant, often requiring immediate medical hospitalization.
Earlier research established that this vulnerability has deep biological roots. A 2001 study showed that the tendency to experience a severe psychotic episode triggered specifically by childbirth runs strongly in families. Moving beyond familial history, a 2013 study discovered that women experiencing their first episode of postpartum psychosis show disruptions in their immune systems.
Alongside these immune factors, metabolic changes have also been implicated, as a 2017 meta-analysis suggested that people going through their first psychotic episode tend to have altered cholesterol levels. These findings paved the way for large-scale genetic sequencing to pinpoint the exact genes and shared biological pathways involved. To build on these insights, researchers led by Seulgi Jung and study co-author Behrang Mahjani, an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who directs the Mahjani Lab, aimed to detail the specific genetic architecture of postpartum psychosis.
“Postpartum psychosis is a severe but understudied psychiatric disorder,” Mahjani told PsyPost. “Our previous study showed that sisters of women with postpartum psychosis have a markedly elevated risk, but its heritability had not been quantified and no specific risk genes had been identified. We therefore examined the contribution of both common and rare genetic variation to the disorder.”
The researchers first used data from Swedish national registers to estimate the overall genetic risk of the disorder. They examined health records from over 1.6 million mothers who gave birth to their first child between 1980 and 2017. Among this massive group, 2,514 mothers, or 0.15 percent, developed postpartum psychosis.
By tracking the health records of the mothers’ sisters and cousins, the researchers estimated the heritability of postpartum psychosis to be 55 percent. This indicates that more than half of the variation in who develops the condition can be attributed to genetic factors, a rate similar to that of bipolar disorder.
“The genetic contribution is substantial,” Mahjani explained. “Heritability in this range means that inherited variation accounts for a large share of the differences in vulnerability between individuals, comparable to what is seen for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.”
“This supports the view that postpartum psychosis reflects an underlying biological vulnerability rather than being simply a psychological reaction to the stress of childbirth,” he added.
To see how much of this heritability comes from common genetic variations, the team turned to the All of Us Research Program, a large national database of genetic and health information. They focused on whole-genome sequencing data from 198 mothers of European ancestry who had experienced postpartum psychosis, comparing them to 2,013 matched controls.
The team found that common genetic variants explained about 45.6 percent of the risk for postpartum psychosis. Because this is slightly lower than the 55 percent heritability estimated from family histories, it suggests that rarer genetic variations also play a role in the disorder.
The researchers then looked closely at rare genetic changes, specifically focusing on protein-truncating variants. These are severe mutations that essentially break a gene, preventing it from producing a functional protein. They analyzed a larger sample of 461 cases of postpartum psychosis and 4,610 unaffected controls.
Women with postpartum psychosis had an unusually high number of these disruptive mutations in genes that are generally highly constrained, meaning the genes do not usually tolerate mutations well without causing major biological problems. Based on these mutation patterns, the researchers estimated that there are around 81 specific genes that contribute to the risk of postpartum psychosis.
When analyzing which individual genes were most affected, the gene HMGCR stood out strongly. This gene contains the instructions for making a key enzyme that controls how the body produces cholesterol. A second gene, DNMT1, which helps maintain how DNA is regulated and read by the body, also showed a possible, though less certain, link to the disorder.
“The rare variants in HMGCR have large effects in the people who carry them, which is what allowed us to detect the gene despite a relatively modest sample,” Mahjani noted.
However, he cautioned against oversimplifying this connection. “HMGCR should not be read as ‘the postpartum psychosis gene,'” he said. “It is one of the many genes contributing to risk, and like other severe psychiatric disorders the condition is highly polygenic.”
To explore the broader impact of these genes, the researchers checked for mutations in HMGCR and DNMT1 across hundreds of thousands of individuals in two large medical biobanks. They found that rare mutations in HMGCR were also linked to conditions like vascular dementia and unspecified mental disorders, indicating the gene influences brain health outside of the postpartum period.
Finally, the researchers compared their list of genetic risk factors for postpartum psychosis against genes known to cause other illnesses. They found that a substantial percentage of the top risk genes for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia were also linked to postpartum psychosis. Additionally, they noted a genetic overlap with autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, myasthenia gravis, and Crohn’s disease, with HMGCR appearing as a top risk gene for both schizophrenia and rheumatoid arthritis.
“The results were largely consistent with what genetic studies of related psychiatric disorders would predict,” Mahjani said.
There are a few things to keep in mind regarding this study. First, definitions of postpartum psychosis can vary across different medical records. The registry data used in the study often lacked the precise end dates of episodes, which makes it harder to classify the exact duration of the illness.
The researchers also did not separate women whose postpartum psychosis was their very first psychiatric episode from those who had a pre-existing condition, such as bipolar disorder. As a result, some of the genetic patterns they found might reflect severe mental illness in general rather than factors entirely unique to the postpartum period.
Additionally, the genetic sequencing data relied heavily on individuals of European ancestry, meaning the results might not fully capture the genetic risk factors present in other populations. Future studies with more diverse groups will help provide a more complete picture of the condition’s genetic roots.
“Our immediate priority is to replicate these findings in larger samples,” Mahjani said of the team’s next steps. “Beyond that, we want to understand how the genes we identified actually function in the disorder, and how genetic vulnerability interacts with the hormonal and immune changes that occur during and after pregnancy.”
“Mainly that postpartum psychosis has been remarkably understudied relative to its severity,” he concluded. “Progress will depend on continued access to the kind of large-scale genomic resources that made this work possible, such as the All of Us Research Program, and on studies large enough to identify additional risk genes with confidence.”
The study, “Genetic architecture of postpartum psychosis: from common to rare genetic variation,” was authored by Seulgi Jung, Madison Caballero, Adrianna Kępińska, Shelby Smout, Trine Munk-Olsen, Thalia K. Robakis, Veerle Bergink, and Behrang Mahjani.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #PostpartumPsychosis #GeneticRisk #MentalHealthResearch #HMGCR #DNMT1 #CholesterolGenes #SchizophreniaOverlap #BipolarDisorder #AutoimmuneLinks #GenomicsStudy
-
DATE: September 5, 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: Over half the risk for postpartum psychosis is tied to genetics, large study finds
New research published in Molecular Psychiatry indicates that postpartum psychosis is heavily influenced by both common and rare genetic factors, with about half of the risk tied to genetics. The study also identified a specific gene involved in cholesterol production that provides evidence for shared biological pathways between postpartum psychosis, schizophrenia, and certain autoimmune conditions.
Postpartum psychosis is a rare but severe mental health emergency that occurs in roughly 1 to 2 out of every 1,000 mothers shortly after childbirth. It involves an abrupt onset of symptoms like mania, severe depression, confusion, and psychosis, which is when a person loses touch with reality through hallucinations or delusions. The condition poses heavy risks to both the mother and the infant, often requiring immediate medical hospitalization.
Earlier research established that this vulnerability has deep biological roots. A 2001 study showed that the tendency to experience a severe psychotic episode triggered specifically by childbirth runs strongly in families. Moving beyond familial history, a 2013 study discovered that women experiencing their first episode of postpartum psychosis show disruptions in their immune systems.
Alongside these immune factors, metabolic changes have also been implicated, as a 2017 meta-analysis suggested that people going through their first psychotic episode tend to have altered cholesterol levels. These findings paved the way for large-scale genetic sequencing to pinpoint the exact genes and shared biological pathways involved. To build on these insights, researchers led by Seulgi Jung and study co-author Behrang Mahjani, an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who directs the Mahjani Lab, aimed to detail the specific genetic architecture of postpartum psychosis.
“Postpartum psychosis is a severe but understudied psychiatric disorder,” Mahjani told PsyPost. “Our previous study showed that sisters of women with postpartum psychosis have a markedly elevated risk, but its heritability had not been quantified and no specific risk genes had been identified. We therefore examined the contribution of both common and rare genetic variation to the disorder.”
The researchers first used data from Swedish national registers to estimate the overall genetic risk of the disorder. They examined health records from over 1.6 million mothers who gave birth to their first child between 1980 and 2017. Among this massive group, 2,514 mothers, or 0.15 percent, developed postpartum psychosis.
By tracking the health records of the mothers’ sisters and cousins, the researchers estimated the heritability of postpartum psychosis to be 55 percent. This indicates that more than half of the variation in who develops the condition can be attributed to genetic factors, a rate similar to that of bipolar disorder.
“The genetic contribution is substantial,” Mahjani explained. “Heritability in this range means that inherited variation accounts for a large share of the differences in vulnerability between individuals, comparable to what is seen for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.”
“This supports the view that postpartum psychosis reflects an underlying biological vulnerability rather than being simply a psychological reaction to the stress of childbirth,” he added.
To see how much of this heritability comes from common genetic variations, the team turned to the All of Us Research Program, a large national database of genetic and health information. They focused on whole-genome sequencing data from 198 mothers of European ancestry who had experienced postpartum psychosis, comparing them to 2,013 matched controls.
The team found that common genetic variants explained about 45.6 percent of the risk for postpartum psychosis. Because this is slightly lower than the 55 percent heritability estimated from family histories, it suggests that rarer genetic variations also play a role in the disorder.
The researchers then looked closely at rare genetic changes, specifically focusing on protein-truncating variants. These are severe mutations that essentially break a gene, preventing it from producing a functional protein. They analyzed a larger sample of 461 cases of postpartum psychosis and 4,610 unaffected controls.
Women with postpartum psychosis had an unusually high number of these disruptive mutations in genes that are generally highly constrained, meaning the genes do not usually tolerate mutations well without causing major biological problems. Based on these mutation patterns, the researchers estimated that there are around 81 specific genes that contribute to the risk of postpartum psychosis.
When analyzing which individual genes were most affected, the gene HMGCR stood out strongly. This gene contains the instructions for making a key enzyme that controls how the body produces cholesterol. A second gene, DNMT1, which helps maintain how DNA is regulated and read by the body, also showed a possible, though less certain, link to the disorder.
“The rare variants in HMGCR have large effects in the people who carry them, which is what allowed us to detect the gene despite a relatively modest sample,” Mahjani noted.
However, he cautioned against oversimplifying this connection. “HMGCR should not be read as ‘the postpartum psychosis gene,'” he said. “It is one of the many genes contributing to risk, and like other severe psychiatric disorders the condition is highly polygenic.”
To explore the broader impact of these genes, the researchers checked for mutations in HMGCR and DNMT1 across hundreds of thousands of individuals in two large medical biobanks. They found that rare mutations in HMGCR were also linked to conditions like vascular dementia and unspecified mental disorders, indicating the gene influences brain health outside of the postpartum period.
Finally, the researchers compared their list of genetic risk factors for postpartum psychosis against genes known to cause other illnesses. They found that a substantial percentage of the top risk genes for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia were also linked to postpartum psychosis. Additionally, they noted a genetic overlap with autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, myasthenia gravis, and Crohn’s disease, with HMGCR appearing as a top risk gene for both schizophrenia and rheumatoid arthritis.
“The results were largely consistent with what genetic studies of related psychiatric disorders would predict,” Mahjani said.
There are a few things to keep in mind regarding this study. First, definitions of postpartum psychosis can vary across different medical records. The registry data used in the study often lacked the precise end dates of episodes, which makes it harder to classify the exact duration of the illness.
The researchers also did not separate women whose postpartum psychosis was their very first psychiatric episode from those who had a pre-existing condition, such as bipolar disorder. As a result, some of the genetic patterns they found might reflect severe mental illness in general rather than factors entirely unique to the postpartum period.
Additionally, the genetic sequencing data relied heavily on individuals of European ancestry, meaning the results might not fully capture the genetic risk factors present in other populations. Future studies with more diverse groups will help provide a more complete picture of the condition’s genetic roots.
“Our immediate priority is to replicate these findings in larger samples,” Mahjani said of the team’s next steps. “Beyond that, we want to understand how the genes we identified actually function in the disorder, and how genetic vulnerability interacts with the hormonal and immune changes that occur during and after pregnancy.”
“Mainly that postpartum psychosis has been remarkably understudied relative to its severity,” he concluded. “Progress will depend on continued access to the kind of large-scale genomic resources that made this work possible, such as the All of Us Research Program, and on studies large enough to identify additional risk genes with confidence.”
The study, “Genetic architecture of postpartum psychosis: from common to rare genetic variation,” was authored by Seulgi Jung, Madison Caballero, Adrianna Kępińska, Shelby Smout, Trine Munk-Olsen, Thalia K. Robakis, Veerle Bergink, and Behrang Mahjani.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #PostpartumPsychosis #GeneticRisk #MentalHealthResearch #HMGCR #DNMT1 #CholesterolGenes #SchizophreniaOverlap #BipolarDisorder #AutoimmuneLinks #GenomicsStudy
-
DATE: September 5, 2026 at 04:30AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS MENTAL HEALTHTITLE: Opinion: What STAT readers think about M.D. vs. D.O., AI in medicine, surrogacy, and more
First Opinion is STAT’s platform for interesting, illuminating, and provocative articles about the life sciences writ large, written by biotech insiders, health care workers, researchers, and others.
To encourage robust, good-faith discussion about issues raised in First Opinion essays, STAT publishes selected Letters to the Editor received in response to them. You can submit a Letter to the Editor here, or find the submission form at the end of any First Opinion essay.
Read the rest…
-------------------------------------------------
STAT News reports "from the frontiers of health and medicine".
Learn more at https://www.statnews.com/topic/mental-health/ .
See also their complete Mastodon account at @STAT .
This robot is NOT affiliated with STAT news and merely rebroadcasts from their site. Responses posted here are not monitored.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #STATFirstOpinion #MDvsDO #AIinMedicine #Surrogacy #Bioethics #MedicalDebate #HealthcareTech #LettersToTheEditor #BiotechNews #LifeSciencesOpinion
-
DATE: September 5, 2026 at 04:30AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS MENTAL HEALTHTITLE: Opinion: What STAT readers think about M.D. vs. D.O., AI in medicine, surrogacy, and more
First Opinion is STAT’s platform for interesting, illuminating, and provocative articles about the life sciences writ large, written by biotech insiders, health care workers, researchers, and others.
To encourage robust, good-faith discussion about issues raised in First Opinion essays, STAT publishes selected Letters to the Editor received in response to them. You can submit a Letter to the Editor here, or find the submission form at the end of any First Opinion essay.
Read the rest…
-------------------------------------------------
STAT News reports "from the frontiers of health and medicine".
Learn more at https://www.statnews.com/topic/mental-health/ .
See also their complete Mastodon account at @STAT .
This robot is NOT affiliated with STAT news and merely rebroadcasts from their site. Responses posted here are not monitored.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #STATFirstOpinion #MDvsDO #AIinMedicine #Surrogacy #Bioethics #MedicalDebate #HealthcareTech #LettersToTheEditor #BiotechNews #LifeSciencesOpinion
-
DATE: September 5, 2026 at 04:30AM
SOURCE: STAT NEWS MENTAL HEALTHTITLE: Opinion: What STAT readers think about M.D. vs. D.O., AI in medicine, surrogacy, and more
First Opinion is STAT’s platform for interesting, illuminating, and provocative articles about the life sciences writ large, written by biotech insiders, health care workers, researchers, and others.
To encourage robust, good-faith discussion about issues raised in First Opinion essays, STAT publishes selected Letters to the Editor received in response to them. You can submit a Letter to the Editor here, or find the submission form at the end of any First Opinion essay.
Read the rest…
-------------------------------------------------
STAT News reports "from the frontiers of health and medicine".
Learn more at https://www.statnews.com/topic/mental-health/ .
See also their complete Mastodon account at @STAT .
This robot is NOT affiliated with STAT news and merely rebroadcasts from their site. Responses posted here are not monitored.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #STATFirstOpinion #MDvsDO #AIinMedicine #Surrogacy #Bioethics #MedicalDebate #HealthcareTech #LettersToTheEditor #BiotechNews #LifeSciencesOpinion
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Study reveals a double standard in how we view AI-assisted communication
URL: https://www.psypost.org/study-reveals-a-double-standard-in-how-we-view-ai-assisted-communication/
People expected others to use AI-assisted communication tools more often than they would use them themselves, according to a study published in the British Journal of Psychology. The research also discovered that people viewed openly disclosed AI use more favorably than secret use when the two options were directly compared.
AI-mediated communication includes technologies that assist in communication by changing or generating part of a message. Examples include writing assistants, tools that improve the sound of someone’s voice and video software that changes a person’s appearance or facial expressions. These technologies can make communication faster or more polished, but they may also raise questions about whether a message is authentic.
The researchers were interested in the social rules people apply to these tools. Individuals often hold ideas about the acceptability of behavior, and beliefs about what others are likely to do, but those two judgments do not always match.
Led by Zoe A. Purcell of Université Paris Cité in Paris, the team conducted two online studies. Study 1 included 477 UK adults (mean age 48.48 years; 200 males, 266 females, and 11 participants in other categories). Study 2 included 765 U.S. adults (mean age 45.47 years; 379 males, 375 females, and 11 participants who were nonbinary or preferred not to say).
Participants viewed examples involving text, audio and video. In Study 1, they rated both openly disclosed and secret AI use on a five-point scale. They also rated how likely they would be to use the technology and how likely they thought other people would be to use it. Study 2 used a preregistered design in which participants were placed into separate conditions and rated acceptability and likelihood on a scale from zero to 100.
In Study 1, participants rated open AI use as more acceptable than secret use, with average scores of 3.41 and 2.72 out of 5, respectively. They also expected others to use AI communication tools more than themselves, with average likelihood ratings of 3.73 for others and 2.80 for themselves.
Study 2 produced a more nuanced result. When participants were not shown open and secret versions side by side, the difference in acceptability was small and not statistically significant. Open use received an average rating of 56.87 out of 100, compared with 53.62 for secret use. Transparency also did not change expectations about use. However, the self-other difference remained strong: participants rated the likelihood that others would use the tools at 71.41, compared with 40.44 for themselves.
Participants also considered AI use slightly more acceptable when judging other people than when judging themselves. Acceptability was more closely connected to expected behavior when people considered their own use than when they considered others’ use.
Additionally, greater familiarity with AI was associated with higher acceptability and greater expectations of use. By contrast, people who believed AI communication caused information loss or revealed something negative about a user’s character tended to rate it less favorably. These results suggest that concerns regarding AI-assisted communication may ease as these tools become more mainstream and individuals become more accustomed to them.
Purcell and colleagues summarized their findings: “Self-other differences are a central factor for understanding people’s attitudes and expectations for AI-mediated communication.”
Some limitations are to be noted. For instance, the word “others” was deliberately broad and did not specify whether participants were thinking about friends, colleagues, strangers or family members. In addition, data were collected in 2021 and 2022, before many current AI communication tools became widely used.
The study, “People have different expectations for their own versus others’ use of AI-mediated communication tools,” was authored by Zoe A. Purcell, Mengchen Dong, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Nils Köbis, and Maurice Jakesch.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/study-reveals-a-double-standard-in-how-we-view-ai-assisted-communication/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AIcommunication #AIAssistedCommunication #SelfVsOtherBias #TransparencyInAI #AIethics #AuthenticityInMessaging #TechTrust #AItools #SocialPerception #FutureOfCommunication
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Study reveals a double standard in how we view AI-assisted communication
URL: https://www.psypost.org/study-reveals-a-double-standard-in-how-we-view-ai-assisted-communication/
People expected others to use AI-assisted communication tools more often than they would use them themselves, according to a study published in the British Journal of Psychology. The research also discovered that people viewed openly disclosed AI use more favorably than secret use when the two options were directly compared.
AI-mediated communication includes technologies that assist in communication by changing or generating part of a message. Examples include writing assistants, tools that improve the sound of someone’s voice and video software that changes a person’s appearance or facial expressions. These technologies can make communication faster or more polished, but they may also raise questions about whether a message is authentic.
The researchers were interested in the social rules people apply to these tools. Individuals often hold ideas about the acceptability of behavior, and beliefs about what others are likely to do, but those two judgments do not always match.
Led by Zoe A. Purcell of Université Paris Cité in Paris, the team conducted two online studies. Study 1 included 477 UK adults (mean age 48.48 years; 200 males, 266 females, and 11 participants in other categories). Study 2 included 765 U.S. adults (mean age 45.47 years; 379 males, 375 females, and 11 participants who were nonbinary or preferred not to say).
Participants viewed examples involving text, audio and video. In Study 1, they rated both openly disclosed and secret AI use on a five-point scale. They also rated how likely they would be to use the technology and how likely they thought other people would be to use it. Study 2 used a preregistered design in which participants were placed into separate conditions and rated acceptability and likelihood on a scale from zero to 100.
In Study 1, participants rated open AI use as more acceptable than secret use, with average scores of 3.41 and 2.72 out of 5, respectively. They also expected others to use AI communication tools more than themselves, with average likelihood ratings of 3.73 for others and 2.80 for themselves.
Study 2 produced a more nuanced result. When participants were not shown open and secret versions side by side, the difference in acceptability was small and not statistically significant. Open use received an average rating of 56.87 out of 100, compared with 53.62 for secret use. Transparency also did not change expectations about use. However, the self-other difference remained strong: participants rated the likelihood that others would use the tools at 71.41, compared with 40.44 for themselves.
Participants also considered AI use slightly more acceptable when judging other people than when judging themselves. Acceptability was more closely connected to expected behavior when people considered their own use than when they considered others’ use.
Additionally, greater familiarity with AI was associated with higher acceptability and greater expectations of use. By contrast, people who believed AI communication caused information loss or revealed something negative about a user’s character tended to rate it less favorably. These results suggest that concerns regarding AI-assisted communication may ease as these tools become more mainstream and individuals become more accustomed to them.
Purcell and colleagues summarized their findings: “Self-other differences are a central factor for understanding people’s attitudes and expectations for AI-mediated communication.”
Some limitations are to be noted. For instance, the word “others” was deliberately broad and did not specify whether participants were thinking about friends, colleagues, strangers or family members. In addition, data were collected in 2021 and 2022, before many current AI communication tools became widely used.
The study, “People have different expectations for their own versus others’ use of AI-mediated communication tools,” was authored by Zoe A. Purcell, Mengchen Dong, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Nils Köbis, and Maurice Jakesch.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/study-reveals-a-double-standard-in-how-we-view-ai-assisted-communication/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AIcommunication #AIAssistedCommunication #SelfVsOtherBias #TransparencyInAI #AIethics #AuthenticityInMessaging #TechTrust #AItools #SocialPerception #FutureOfCommunication
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Study reveals a double standard in how we view AI-assisted communication
URL: https://www.psypost.org/study-reveals-a-double-standard-in-how-we-view-ai-assisted-communication/
People expected others to use AI-assisted communication tools more often than they would use them themselves, according to a study published in the British Journal of Psychology. The research also discovered that people viewed openly disclosed AI use more favorably than secret use when the two options were directly compared.
AI-mediated communication includes technologies that assist in communication by changing or generating part of a message. Examples include writing assistants, tools that improve the sound of someone’s voice and video software that changes a person’s appearance or facial expressions. These technologies can make communication faster or more polished, but they may also raise questions about whether a message is authentic.
The researchers were interested in the social rules people apply to these tools. Individuals often hold ideas about the acceptability of behavior, and beliefs about what others are likely to do, but those two judgments do not always match.
Led by Zoe A. Purcell of Université Paris Cité in Paris, the team conducted two online studies. Study 1 included 477 UK adults (mean age 48.48 years; 200 males, 266 females, and 11 participants in other categories). Study 2 included 765 U.S. adults (mean age 45.47 years; 379 males, 375 females, and 11 participants who were nonbinary or preferred not to say).
Participants viewed examples involving text, audio and video. In Study 1, they rated both openly disclosed and secret AI use on a five-point scale. They also rated how likely they would be to use the technology and how likely they thought other people would be to use it. Study 2 used a preregistered design in which participants were placed into separate conditions and rated acceptability and likelihood on a scale from zero to 100.
In Study 1, participants rated open AI use as more acceptable than secret use, with average scores of 3.41 and 2.72 out of 5, respectively. They also expected others to use AI communication tools more than themselves, with average likelihood ratings of 3.73 for others and 2.80 for themselves.
Study 2 produced a more nuanced result. When participants were not shown open and secret versions side by side, the difference in acceptability was small and not statistically significant. Open use received an average rating of 56.87 out of 100, compared with 53.62 for secret use. Transparency also did not change expectations about use. However, the self-other difference remained strong: participants rated the likelihood that others would use the tools at 71.41, compared with 40.44 for themselves.
Participants also considered AI use slightly more acceptable when judging other people than when judging themselves. Acceptability was more closely connected to expected behavior when people considered their own use than when they considered others’ use.
Additionally, greater familiarity with AI was associated with higher acceptability and greater expectations of use. By contrast, people who believed AI communication caused information loss or revealed something negative about a user’s character tended to rate it less favorably. These results suggest that concerns regarding AI-assisted communication may ease as these tools become more mainstream and individuals become more accustomed to them.
Purcell and colleagues summarized their findings: “Self-other differences are a central factor for understanding people’s attitudes and expectations for AI-mediated communication.”
Some limitations are to be noted. For instance, the word “others” was deliberately broad and did not specify whether participants were thinking about friends, colleagues, strangers or family members. In addition, data were collected in 2021 and 2022, before many current AI communication tools became widely used.
The study, “People have different expectations for their own versus others’ use of AI-mediated communication tools,” was authored by Zoe A. Purcell, Mengchen Dong, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Nils Köbis, and Maurice Jakesch.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/study-reveals-a-double-standard-in-how-we-view-ai-assisted-communication/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AIcommunication #AIAssistedCommunication #SelfVsOtherBias #TransparencyInAI #AIethics #AuthenticityInMessaging #TechTrust #AItools #SocialPerception #FutureOfCommunication
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder are less successful in recognizing the emotions of others
A study conducted in Sweden found that individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder were less accurate in recognizing the emotions of others compared to healthy controls. Moreover, among participants with psychotic spectrum disorder, those with a history of interpersonal aggression tended to be less accurate than those without such a history. The paper was published in Schizophrenia.
Emotion recognition is a basic part of human social interaction, helping people understand what others are feeling from facial expressions, tone of voice, and body movements. When this ability is impaired, social situations become harder to interpret and misunderstandings become more likely.
Such difficulties are especially relevant in psychotic spectrum disorders. Psychotic spectrum disorders are a group of mental disorders characterized by symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking or behavior, and impaired reality testing. These include schizophrenia and related conditions. The emotion recognition impairments found in individuals suffering from these disorders are not limited to static facial expressions, but can also appear when people interpret changing facial expressions, body movements, or other dynamic social signals.
Difficulties in recognizing emotions in these individuals tend to be particularly pronounced for negative emotions, although positive emotions can also be misidentified. People with schizophrenia may, for example, confuse one negative emotion with another or sometimes interpret neutral or positive expressions as negative. These problems usually reflect broader disturbances in perception, memory, attention, language, and other cognitive processes that contribute to understanding social information.
Study author Gabriela Gavalova and her colleagues wanted to compare the emotion recognition abilities of healthy individuals and those suffering from psychotic spectrum disorders. They also wanted to compare individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders who have a history of interpersonal aggression with individuals without such a history. Additionally, they wanted to see whether their recognition abilities depend on the way emotions are presented. With this in mind, they conducted a study in which they used three modes of presenting emotions to be recognized: visual (videos presented without sound), auditory (sound only), and multimodal (videos presented with sound).
Study participants were 79 individuals suffering from psychotic spectrum disorders and a history of interpersonal aggression (recruited from Forensic Psychiatry Stockholm, Sweden), 72 participants with psychotic spectrum disorders but without a history of interpersonal aggression (recruited from psychiatric outpatient clinics in Stockholm), and 86 healthy individuals (recruited via the State Person Address Registry in Sweden). The study authors note that the healthy control group had a higher level of education than the two psychotic spectrum disorder groups.
All participants underwent a short semi-structured demographic interview and were asked about the presence of the studied psychiatric disorders in first- and second-degree relatives, prior interpersonal aggression, as well as prior alcohol and substance abuse. Healthy participants and those without a history of interpersonal aggression also completed assessments of alcohol and drug use disorder symptoms.
The study authors collected data about the type and number of aggressive acts for the group with a history of interpersonal aggression from crime reports, forensic psychiatric assessments, hospital case reports, and participants’ own self-reports. Participants completed an intelligence test to measure fluid intelligence, which is the ability to reason and solve novel problems, a psychomotor speed test to measure the physical speed of responses to cognitive processing, and an assessment of their semantic understanding, or knowledge of the meaning, of emotion words using a synonym test.
Finally, participants completed a series of emotion recognition tasks called the Emotion Recognition Assessment in Multiple modalities test. These tasks contained 72 unique emotional stimuli displaying 12 different emotions. The participants’ task was to select the emotion being presented in the stimulus.
Results showed that participants from all three groups were able to recognize emotions in the emotion recognition task better than chance, meaning their responses were not random guessing. All three groups tended to misclassify some emotions. For example, they all tended to misclassify pride as happiness or interest, happiness as relief or as fear and despair, irritation as anxiety, and anger as irritation. Some other misclassifications were common as well.
Participants with a history of interpersonal aggression tended to also uniquely misclassify happiness as anxiety. The psychotic spectrum disorder group without a history of interpersonal aggression tended to misclassify pride as irritation, while healthy participants tended to mistake interest for anxiety. Crucially, the researchers found an unexpected and clinically significant pattern: participants with a history of interpersonal aggression were much more likely to misclassify negative emotions as positive emotions compared to both the non-aggressive psychotic spectrum group and the healthy controls. The authors suggest this could lead these individuals to miss negative social cues and fail to withdraw from escalating situations.
Healthy participants were much more accurate in recognizing emotions compared to the two other groups. In particular, participants with psychotic spectrum disorder and a history of interpersonal aggression were much less accurate in recognizing emotions than participants with psychotic spectrum disorder but without a history of interpersonal aggression.
Other than this, participants were more successful in recognizing emotions when they were presented with both video and sound compared to situations when one of these was missing. Overall, among individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder, participants with higher fluid intelligence, those who knew more words for emotions, and those who had better education tended to be better at recognizing emotions. Within this group, women and those without a history of interpersonal aggression tended to be better at recognizing emotions. Interestingly, when controlling for other factors, those with a history of alcohol or substance use disorder in remission also tended to score higher. However, the researchers caution that this might be a statistical anomaly known as a suppression effect, rather than proof that past substance abuse improves emotion recognition.
“In summary, individuals with PSD [psychotic spectrum disorders] and a history of interpersonal aggression exhibit more pronounced deficits in emotion recognition than those with PSD alone. This underscores the potential value of incorporating emotion recognition assessment and training into clinical interventions to reduce aggression risk and improve social functioning in individuals with PSD,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychological specificities of individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders. However, it should be noted that all participants with these disorders were recruited from Stockholm, Sweden. Results in other cultural groups might differ.
The paper, “Emotion recognition misclassification patterns in individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders and history of interpersonal aggression,” was authored by Gabriela Gavalova, Petri Laukka, Lennart Högman, Malin V. Källman, Marianne Kristiansson, Märta Wallinius, Håkan Fischer, and Anette G. M. Johansson.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #EmotionRecognition #PsychoticSpectrumDisorders #SchizophreniaResearch #AggressionHistory #SocialCognition #MentalHealthAwareness #EmotionProcessing #ForensicPsychiatry #SwedenStudy #ClinicalInterventions
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder are less successful in recognizing the emotions of others
A study conducted in Sweden found that individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder were less accurate in recognizing the emotions of others compared to healthy controls. Moreover, among participants with psychotic spectrum disorder, those with a history of interpersonal aggression tended to be less accurate than those without such a history. The paper was published in Schizophrenia.
Emotion recognition is a basic part of human social interaction, helping people understand what others are feeling from facial expressions, tone of voice, and body movements. When this ability is impaired, social situations become harder to interpret and misunderstandings become more likely.
Such difficulties are especially relevant in psychotic spectrum disorders. Psychotic spectrum disorders are a group of mental disorders characterized by symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking or behavior, and impaired reality testing. These include schizophrenia and related conditions. The emotion recognition impairments found in individuals suffering from these disorders are not limited to static facial expressions, but can also appear when people interpret changing facial expressions, body movements, or other dynamic social signals.
Difficulties in recognizing emotions in these individuals tend to be particularly pronounced for negative emotions, although positive emotions can also be misidentified. People with schizophrenia may, for example, confuse one negative emotion with another or sometimes interpret neutral or positive expressions as negative. These problems usually reflect broader disturbances in perception, memory, attention, language, and other cognitive processes that contribute to understanding social information.
Study author Gabriela Gavalova and her colleagues wanted to compare the emotion recognition abilities of healthy individuals and those suffering from psychotic spectrum disorders. They also wanted to compare individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders who have a history of interpersonal aggression with individuals without such a history. Additionally, they wanted to see whether their recognition abilities depend on the way emotions are presented. With this in mind, they conducted a study in which they used three modes of presenting emotions to be recognized: visual (videos presented without sound), auditory (sound only), and multimodal (videos presented with sound).
Study participants were 79 individuals suffering from psychotic spectrum disorders and a history of interpersonal aggression (recruited from Forensic Psychiatry Stockholm, Sweden), 72 participants with psychotic spectrum disorders but without a history of interpersonal aggression (recruited from psychiatric outpatient clinics in Stockholm), and 86 healthy individuals (recruited via the State Person Address Registry in Sweden). The study authors note that the healthy control group had a higher level of education than the two psychotic spectrum disorder groups.
All participants underwent a short semi-structured demographic interview and were asked about the presence of the studied psychiatric disorders in first- and second-degree relatives, prior interpersonal aggression, as well as prior alcohol and substance abuse. Healthy participants and those without a history of interpersonal aggression also completed assessments of alcohol and drug use disorder symptoms.
The study authors collected data about the type and number of aggressive acts for the group with a history of interpersonal aggression from crime reports, forensic psychiatric assessments, hospital case reports, and participants’ own self-reports. Participants completed an intelligence test to measure fluid intelligence, which is the ability to reason and solve novel problems, a psychomotor speed test to measure the physical speed of responses to cognitive processing, and an assessment of their semantic understanding, or knowledge of the meaning, of emotion words using a synonym test.
Finally, participants completed a series of emotion recognition tasks called the Emotion Recognition Assessment in Multiple modalities test. These tasks contained 72 unique emotional stimuli displaying 12 different emotions. The participants’ task was to select the emotion being presented in the stimulus.
Results showed that participants from all three groups were able to recognize emotions in the emotion recognition task better than chance, meaning their responses were not random guessing. All three groups tended to misclassify some emotions. For example, they all tended to misclassify pride as happiness or interest, happiness as relief or as fear and despair, irritation as anxiety, and anger as irritation. Some other misclassifications were common as well.
Participants with a history of interpersonal aggression tended to also uniquely misclassify happiness as anxiety. The psychotic spectrum disorder group without a history of interpersonal aggression tended to misclassify pride as irritation, while healthy participants tended to mistake interest for anxiety. Crucially, the researchers found an unexpected and clinically significant pattern: participants with a history of interpersonal aggression were much more likely to misclassify negative emotions as positive emotions compared to both the non-aggressive psychotic spectrum group and the healthy controls. The authors suggest this could lead these individuals to miss negative social cues and fail to withdraw from escalating situations.
Healthy participants were much more accurate in recognizing emotions compared to the two other groups. In particular, participants with psychotic spectrum disorder and a history of interpersonal aggression were much less accurate in recognizing emotions than participants with psychotic spectrum disorder but without a history of interpersonal aggression.
Other than this, participants were more successful in recognizing emotions when they were presented with both video and sound compared to situations when one of these was missing. Overall, among individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder, participants with higher fluid intelligence, those who knew more words for emotions, and those who had better education tended to be better at recognizing emotions. Within this group, women and those without a history of interpersonal aggression tended to be better at recognizing emotions. Interestingly, when controlling for other factors, those with a history of alcohol or substance use disorder in remission also tended to score higher. However, the researchers caution that this might be a statistical anomaly known as a suppression effect, rather than proof that past substance abuse improves emotion recognition.
“In summary, individuals with PSD [psychotic spectrum disorders] and a history of interpersonal aggression exhibit more pronounced deficits in emotion recognition than those with PSD alone. This underscores the potential value of incorporating emotion recognition assessment and training into clinical interventions to reduce aggression risk and improve social functioning in individuals with PSD,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychological specificities of individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders. However, it should be noted that all participants with these disorders were recruited from Stockholm, Sweden. Results in other cultural groups might differ.
The paper, “Emotion recognition misclassification patterns in individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders and history of interpersonal aggression,” was authored by Gabriela Gavalova, Petri Laukka, Lennart Högman, Malin V. Källman, Marianne Kristiansson, Märta Wallinius, Håkan Fischer, and Anette G. M. Johansson.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #EmotionRecognition #PsychoticSpectrumDisorders #SchizophreniaResearch #AggressionHistory #SocialCognition #MentalHealthAwareness #EmotionProcessing #ForensicPsychiatry #SwedenStudy #ClinicalInterventions
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder are less successful in recognizing the emotions of others
A study conducted in Sweden found that individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder were less accurate in recognizing the emotions of others compared to healthy controls. Moreover, among participants with psychotic spectrum disorder, those with a history of interpersonal aggression tended to be less accurate than those without such a history. The paper was published in Schizophrenia.
Emotion recognition is a basic part of human social interaction, helping people understand what others are feeling from facial expressions, tone of voice, and body movements. When this ability is impaired, social situations become harder to interpret and misunderstandings become more likely.
Such difficulties are especially relevant in psychotic spectrum disorders. Psychotic spectrum disorders are a group of mental disorders characterized by symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking or behavior, and impaired reality testing. These include schizophrenia and related conditions. The emotion recognition impairments found in individuals suffering from these disorders are not limited to static facial expressions, but can also appear when people interpret changing facial expressions, body movements, or other dynamic social signals.
Difficulties in recognizing emotions in these individuals tend to be particularly pronounced for negative emotions, although positive emotions can also be misidentified. People with schizophrenia may, for example, confuse one negative emotion with another or sometimes interpret neutral or positive expressions as negative. These problems usually reflect broader disturbances in perception, memory, attention, language, and other cognitive processes that contribute to understanding social information.
Study author Gabriela Gavalova and her colleagues wanted to compare the emotion recognition abilities of healthy individuals and those suffering from psychotic spectrum disorders. They also wanted to compare individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders who have a history of interpersonal aggression with individuals without such a history. Additionally, they wanted to see whether their recognition abilities depend on the way emotions are presented. With this in mind, they conducted a study in which they used three modes of presenting emotions to be recognized: visual (videos presented without sound), auditory (sound only), and multimodal (videos presented with sound).
Study participants were 79 individuals suffering from psychotic spectrum disorders and a history of interpersonal aggression (recruited from Forensic Psychiatry Stockholm, Sweden), 72 participants with psychotic spectrum disorders but without a history of interpersonal aggression (recruited from psychiatric outpatient clinics in Stockholm), and 86 healthy individuals (recruited via the State Person Address Registry in Sweden). The study authors note that the healthy control group had a higher level of education than the two psychotic spectrum disorder groups.
All participants underwent a short semi-structured demographic interview and were asked about the presence of the studied psychiatric disorders in first- and second-degree relatives, prior interpersonal aggression, as well as prior alcohol and substance abuse. Healthy participants and those without a history of interpersonal aggression also completed assessments of alcohol and drug use disorder symptoms.
The study authors collected data about the type and number of aggressive acts for the group with a history of interpersonal aggression from crime reports, forensic psychiatric assessments, hospital case reports, and participants’ own self-reports. Participants completed an intelligence test to measure fluid intelligence, which is the ability to reason and solve novel problems, a psychomotor speed test to measure the physical speed of responses to cognitive processing, and an assessment of their semantic understanding, or knowledge of the meaning, of emotion words using a synonym test.
Finally, participants completed a series of emotion recognition tasks called the Emotion Recognition Assessment in Multiple modalities test. These tasks contained 72 unique emotional stimuli displaying 12 different emotions. The participants’ task was to select the emotion being presented in the stimulus.
Results showed that participants from all three groups were able to recognize emotions in the emotion recognition task better than chance, meaning their responses were not random guessing. All three groups tended to misclassify some emotions. For example, they all tended to misclassify pride as happiness or interest, happiness as relief or as fear and despair, irritation as anxiety, and anger as irritation. Some other misclassifications were common as well.
Participants with a history of interpersonal aggression tended to also uniquely misclassify happiness as anxiety. The psychotic spectrum disorder group without a history of interpersonal aggression tended to misclassify pride as irritation, while healthy participants tended to mistake interest for anxiety. Crucially, the researchers found an unexpected and clinically significant pattern: participants with a history of interpersonal aggression were much more likely to misclassify negative emotions as positive emotions compared to both the non-aggressive psychotic spectrum group and the healthy controls. The authors suggest this could lead these individuals to miss negative social cues and fail to withdraw from escalating situations.
Healthy participants were much more accurate in recognizing emotions compared to the two other groups. In particular, participants with psychotic spectrum disorder and a history of interpersonal aggression were much less accurate in recognizing emotions than participants with psychotic spectrum disorder but without a history of interpersonal aggression.
Other than this, participants were more successful in recognizing emotions when they were presented with both video and sound compared to situations when one of these was missing. Overall, among individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder, participants with higher fluid intelligence, those who knew more words for emotions, and those who had better education tended to be better at recognizing emotions. Within this group, women and those without a history of interpersonal aggression tended to be better at recognizing emotions. Interestingly, when controlling for other factors, those with a history of alcohol or substance use disorder in remission also tended to score higher. However, the researchers caution that this might be a statistical anomaly known as a suppression effect, rather than proof that past substance abuse improves emotion recognition.
“In summary, individuals with PSD [psychotic spectrum disorders] and a history of interpersonal aggression exhibit more pronounced deficits in emotion recognition than those with PSD alone. This underscores the potential value of incorporating emotion recognition assessment and training into clinical interventions to reduce aggression risk and improve social functioning in individuals with PSD,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychological specificities of individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders. However, it should be noted that all participants with these disorders were recruited from Stockholm, Sweden. Results in other cultural groups might differ.
The paper, “Emotion recognition misclassification patterns in individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders and history of interpersonal aggression,” was authored by Gabriela Gavalova, Petri Laukka, Lennart Högman, Malin V. Källman, Marianne Kristiansson, Märta Wallinius, Håkan Fischer, and Anette G. M. Johansson.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #EmotionRecognition #PsychoticSpectrumDisorders #SchizophreniaResearch #AggressionHistory #SocialCognition #MentalHealthAwareness #EmotionProcessing #ForensicPsychiatry #SwedenStudy #ClinicalInterventions
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder are less successful in recognizing the emotions of others
A study conducted in Sweden found that individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder were less accurate in recognizing the emotions of others compared to healthy controls. Moreover, among participants with psychotic spectrum disorder, those with a history of interpersonal aggression tended to be less accurate than those without such a history. The paper was published in Schizophrenia.
Emotion recognition is a basic part of human social interaction, helping people understand what others are feeling from facial expressions, tone of voice, and body movements. When this ability is impaired, social situations become harder to interpret and misunderstandings become more likely.
Such difficulties are especially relevant in psychotic spectrum disorders. Psychotic spectrum disorders are a group of mental disorders characterized by symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking or behavior, and impaired reality testing. These include schizophrenia and related conditions. The emotion recognition impairments found in individuals suffering from these disorders are not limited to static facial expressions, but can also appear when people interpret changing facial expressions, body movements, or other dynamic social signals.
Difficulties in recognizing emotions in these individuals tend to be particularly pronounced for negative emotions, although positive emotions can also be misidentified. People with schizophrenia may, for example, confuse one negative emotion with another or sometimes interpret neutral or positive expressions as negative. These problems usually reflect broader disturbances in perception, memory, attention, language, and other cognitive processes that contribute to understanding social information.
Study author Gabriela Gavalova and her colleagues wanted to compare the emotion recognition abilities of healthy individuals and those suffering from psychotic spectrum disorders. They also wanted to compare individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders who have a history of interpersonal aggression with individuals without such a history. Additionally, they wanted to see whether their recognition abilities depend on the way emotions are presented. With this in mind, they conducted a study in which they used three modes of presenting emotions to be recognized: visual (videos presented without sound), auditory (sound only), and multimodal (videos presented with sound).
Study participants were 79 individuals suffering from psychotic spectrum disorders and a history of interpersonal aggression (recruited from Forensic Psychiatry Stockholm, Sweden), 72 participants with psychotic spectrum disorders but without a history of interpersonal aggression (recruited from psychiatric outpatient clinics in Stockholm), and 86 healthy individuals (recruited via the State Person Address Registry in Sweden). The study authors note that the healthy control group had a higher level of education than the two psychotic spectrum disorder groups.
All participants underwent a short semi-structured demographic interview and were asked about the presence of the studied psychiatric disorders in first- and second-degree relatives, prior interpersonal aggression, as well as prior alcohol and substance abuse. Healthy participants and those without a history of interpersonal aggression also completed assessments of alcohol and drug use disorder symptoms.
The study authors collected data about the type and number of aggressive acts for the group with a history of interpersonal aggression from crime reports, forensic psychiatric assessments, hospital case reports, and participants’ own self-reports. Participants completed an intelligence test to measure fluid intelligence, which is the ability to reason and solve novel problems, a psychomotor speed test to measure the physical speed of responses to cognitive processing, and an assessment of their semantic understanding, or knowledge of the meaning, of emotion words using a synonym test.
Finally, participants completed a series of emotion recognition tasks called the Emotion Recognition Assessment in Multiple modalities test. These tasks contained 72 unique emotional stimuli displaying 12 different emotions. The participants’ task was to select the emotion being presented in the stimulus.
Results showed that participants from all three groups were able to recognize emotions in the emotion recognition task better than chance, meaning their responses were not random guessing. All three groups tended to misclassify some emotions. For example, they all tended to misclassify pride as happiness or interest, happiness as relief or as fear and despair, irritation as anxiety, and anger as irritation. Some other misclassifications were common as well.
Participants with a history of interpersonal aggression tended to also uniquely misclassify happiness as anxiety. The psychotic spectrum disorder group without a history of interpersonal aggression tended to misclassify pride as irritation, while healthy participants tended to mistake interest for anxiety. Crucially, the researchers found an unexpected and clinically significant pattern: participants with a history of interpersonal aggression were much more likely to misclassify negative emotions as positive emotions compared to both the non-aggressive psychotic spectrum group and the healthy controls. The authors suggest this could lead these individuals to miss negative social cues and fail to withdraw from escalating situations.
Healthy participants were much more accurate in recognizing emotions compared to the two other groups. In particular, participants with psychotic spectrum disorder and a history of interpersonal aggression were much less accurate in recognizing emotions than participants with psychotic spectrum disorder but without a history of interpersonal aggression.
Other than this, participants were more successful in recognizing emotions when they were presented with both video and sound compared to situations when one of these was missing. Overall, among individuals with psychotic spectrum disorder, participants with higher fluid intelligence, those who knew more words for emotions, and those who had better education tended to be better at recognizing emotions. Within this group, women and those without a history of interpersonal aggression tended to be better at recognizing emotions. Interestingly, when controlling for other factors, those with a history of alcohol or substance use disorder in remission also tended to score higher. However, the researchers caution that this might be a statistical anomaly known as a suppression effect, rather than proof that past substance abuse improves emotion recognition.
“In summary, individuals with PSD [psychotic spectrum disorders] and a history of interpersonal aggression exhibit more pronounced deficits in emotion recognition than those with PSD alone. This underscores the potential value of incorporating emotion recognition assessment and training into clinical interventions to reduce aggression risk and improve social functioning in individuals with PSD,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychological specificities of individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders. However, it should be noted that all participants with these disorders were recruited from Stockholm, Sweden. Results in other cultural groups might differ.
The paper, “Emotion recognition misclassification patterns in individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders and history of interpersonal aggression,” was authored by Gabriela Gavalova, Petri Laukka, Lennart Högman, Malin V. Källman, Marianne Kristiansson, Märta Wallinius, Håkan Fischer, and Anette G. M. Johansson.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #EmotionRecognition #PsychoticSpectrumDisorders #SchizophreniaResearch #AggressionHistory #SocialCognition #MentalHealthAwareness #EmotionProcessing #ForensicPsychiatry #SwedenStudy #ClinicalInterventions
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Treatment-resistant depression linked to reduced brain entropy
People who suffer from depression that does not respond to standard treatments may experience a loss of complexity in their resting brain activity. A recent brain imaging study found that patients with treatment-resistant depression display reduced neural entropy, meaning their brain signals are more rigid and less unpredictable than those of healthy individuals. The research, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, suggests that system-wide reductions in brain flexibility could serve as a biological marker for this severe form of the illness.
Major depressive disorder is a chronic condition that ranks among the leading causes of disability worldwide. While many patients find relief through standard medications, a substantial portion do not. Treatment-resistant depression is typically diagnosed when a patient fails to achieve remission after at least two adequate trials of antidepressant therapy.
Individuals dealing with this form of depression often experience severe symptoms, including persistent low mood, an inability to feel pleasure, and cognitive difficulties. They also face a higher risk of relapse and suicidal thoughts. Understanding the biological mechanisms behind this resistance to treatment is a major goal for psychiatric research.
To explore these underlying mechanisms, researchers often look at brain entropy. In the context of neuroscience, entropy refers to the level of complexity, irregularity, and unpredictability in spontaneous brain signals. A healthy brain exhibits high entropy, which allows it to flexibly adapt to new information, process emotions, and perform cognitive tasks.
Conversely, lower brain entropy indicates a more constrained and stereotyped pattern of brain activity. Previous imaging studies have linked lower entropy to poorer emotional regulation and cognitive rigidity. However, the concept had not been extensively mapped in individuals specifically diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression.
A team of scientists based at Taipei Veterans General Hospital and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan conducted the recent investigation. The study was led by researchers Wei-Chen Lin and Li-Kai Cheng, alongside senior author Mu-Hong Chen. They wanted to see if the severe clinical features of treatment-resistant depression were reflected in a loss of neural complexity across specific brain networks.
The researchers recruited 48 adults diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression and 38 healthy adults with no history of psychiatric disorders. The patients with depression had all failed to respond to at least three adequate courses of antidepressants, classifying their condition as moderately treatment-resistant. Both groups were matched in terms of age and sex distribution.
To measure brain entropy, all participants underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. This type of brain scan tracks blood oxygenation levels in the brain over time. Because active brain regions require more oxygen, these fluctuating blood oxygen levels serve as a proxy for neural activity.
During the scans, participants were instructed to simply rest with their eyes closed, stay awake, and let their minds wander. This allowed the researchers to capture the brain’s spontaneous, baseline activity rather than its response to a specific task. The team then calculated the sample entropy of these brain signals across 166 distinct anatomical regions.
Sample entropy is a mathematical formula that quantifies how unpredictable a time series is. The researchers applied two different mathematical thresholds to their entropy calculations. One threshold was more permissive, designed to catch the most robust and pronounced drops in brain complexity. The other was more stringent, designed to detect subtle, widespread reductions in signal irregularity.
Using the more permissive threshold, the researchers found that patients with treatment-resistant depression exhibited lower brain entropy in three specific areas. These included the right angular gyrus, the left cerebellar Crus II, and the median raphe nucleus. The median raphe nucleus is located in the brainstem and serves as a major source of serotonin, a chemical messenger heavily involved in mood regulation. The right angular gyrus and cerebellar Crus II help integrate sensory information and support social and emotional processing.
When the researchers applied the more stringent threshold, they observed a much broader pattern of reduced entropy. The patients displayed lower neural complexity across 24 distinct brain regions compared to the healthy adults. This widespread reduction affected several large-scale brain systems, including the default mode network, the salience network, and the reward network. These systems collectively govern how humans process emotions, assign value to external stimuli, and navigate social environments.
Affected regions within these networks included the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with decision making and cognitive control. The researchers also saw reduced entropy in the thalamus, a central hub that relays sensory signals, and the nucleus accumbens, a key node in the brain’s reward circuitry. This extensive pattern suggests that treatment-resistant depression involves a global disruption of neural flexibility rather than an isolated defect in a single anatomical structure.
The researchers also looked for relationships between entropy levels and the severity of a patient’s treatment resistance. They noticed a preliminary trend in a specific part of the cerebellum where higher entropy correlated with more severe treatment resistance. The researchers suspect this might represent the brain attempting to compensate for dysfunction elsewhere, though the finding was not statistically significant after adjusting for multiple mathematical comparisons.
The study relied on a cross-sectional design, meaning the researchers observed the participants at a single point in time. Because of this, it is impossible to determine whether reduced brain entropy contributes to the development of treatment-resistant depression or if the prolonged illness causes the brain to lose its complexity. Tracking patients over several years could help clarify the direction of this relationship.
Another detail to consider is the use of medication among the study participants. All the patients with depression were taking antidepressants during the brain scans, and many were taking additional medications such as mood stabilizers or atypical antipsychotics. While this reflects the reality of treating severe depression, it leaves open the possibility that the medications themselves might influence the complexity of resting brain signals.
The research team also did not include a control group of patients whose depression responds well to standard treatments. Without this group, it is difficult to isolate which entropy reductions are unique to treatment resistance versus those that are common to depression in general. Future studies comparing treatment-resistant patients directly with treatment-responsive patients could highlight the specific biological signatures of treatment failure.
Finally, the researchers noted the need for accompanying cognitive and behavioral tests in future work. Incorporating detailed psychological assessments alongside brain scans would help connect the observed reductions in brain entropy to specific real-world challenges, such as memory deficits or emotional blunting.
The study, “Treatment-resistant depression is associated with reduced brain entropy,” was authored by Wei-Chen Lin, Li-Kai Cheng, Tung-Ping Su, Li-Fen Chen, Pei-Chi Tu, Cheng-Ta Li, Ya-Mei Bai, Shih-Jen Tsai, and Mu-Hong Chen.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #TreatmentResistantDepression #BrainEntropy #Neuroscience #MentalHealthResearch #RestingStatefMRI #NeuralFlexibility #DepressionBiology #MoodDisorders #DefaultModeNetwork #SerotoninBrainSafety
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Treatment-resistant depression linked to reduced brain entropy
People who suffer from depression that does not respond to standard treatments may experience a loss of complexity in their resting brain activity. A recent brain imaging study found that patients with treatment-resistant depression display reduced neural entropy, meaning their brain signals are more rigid and less unpredictable than those of healthy individuals. The research, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, suggests that system-wide reductions in brain flexibility could serve as a biological marker for this severe form of the illness.
Major depressive disorder is a chronic condition that ranks among the leading causes of disability worldwide. While many patients find relief through standard medications, a substantial portion do not. Treatment-resistant depression is typically diagnosed when a patient fails to achieve remission after at least two adequate trials of antidepressant therapy.
Individuals dealing with this form of depression often experience severe symptoms, including persistent low mood, an inability to feel pleasure, and cognitive difficulties. They also face a higher risk of relapse and suicidal thoughts. Understanding the biological mechanisms behind this resistance to treatment is a major goal for psychiatric research.
To explore these underlying mechanisms, researchers often look at brain entropy. In the context of neuroscience, entropy refers to the level of complexity, irregularity, and unpredictability in spontaneous brain signals. A healthy brain exhibits high entropy, which allows it to flexibly adapt to new information, process emotions, and perform cognitive tasks.
Conversely, lower brain entropy indicates a more constrained and stereotyped pattern of brain activity. Previous imaging studies have linked lower entropy to poorer emotional regulation and cognitive rigidity. However, the concept had not been extensively mapped in individuals specifically diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression.
A team of scientists based at Taipei Veterans General Hospital and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan conducted the recent investigation. The study was led by researchers Wei-Chen Lin and Li-Kai Cheng, alongside senior author Mu-Hong Chen. They wanted to see if the severe clinical features of treatment-resistant depression were reflected in a loss of neural complexity across specific brain networks.
The researchers recruited 48 adults diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression and 38 healthy adults with no history of psychiatric disorders. The patients with depression had all failed to respond to at least three adequate courses of antidepressants, classifying their condition as moderately treatment-resistant. Both groups were matched in terms of age and sex distribution.
To measure brain entropy, all participants underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. This type of brain scan tracks blood oxygenation levels in the brain over time. Because active brain regions require more oxygen, these fluctuating blood oxygen levels serve as a proxy for neural activity.
During the scans, participants were instructed to simply rest with their eyes closed, stay awake, and let their minds wander. This allowed the researchers to capture the brain’s spontaneous, baseline activity rather than its response to a specific task. The team then calculated the sample entropy of these brain signals across 166 distinct anatomical regions.
Sample entropy is a mathematical formula that quantifies how unpredictable a time series is. The researchers applied two different mathematical thresholds to their entropy calculations. One threshold was more permissive, designed to catch the most robust and pronounced drops in brain complexity. The other was more stringent, designed to detect subtle, widespread reductions in signal irregularity.
Using the more permissive threshold, the researchers found that patients with treatment-resistant depression exhibited lower brain entropy in three specific areas. These included the right angular gyrus, the left cerebellar Crus II, and the median raphe nucleus. The median raphe nucleus is located in the brainstem and serves as a major source of serotonin, a chemical messenger heavily involved in mood regulation. The right angular gyrus and cerebellar Crus II help integrate sensory information and support social and emotional processing.
When the researchers applied the more stringent threshold, they observed a much broader pattern of reduced entropy. The patients displayed lower neural complexity across 24 distinct brain regions compared to the healthy adults. This widespread reduction affected several large-scale brain systems, including the default mode network, the salience network, and the reward network. These systems collectively govern how humans process emotions, assign value to external stimuli, and navigate social environments.
Affected regions within these networks included the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with decision making and cognitive control. The researchers also saw reduced entropy in the thalamus, a central hub that relays sensory signals, and the nucleus accumbens, a key node in the brain’s reward circuitry. This extensive pattern suggests that treatment-resistant depression involves a global disruption of neural flexibility rather than an isolated defect in a single anatomical structure.
The researchers also looked for relationships between entropy levels and the severity of a patient’s treatment resistance. They noticed a preliminary trend in a specific part of the cerebellum where higher entropy correlated with more severe treatment resistance. The researchers suspect this might represent the brain attempting to compensate for dysfunction elsewhere, though the finding was not statistically significant after adjusting for multiple mathematical comparisons.
The study relied on a cross-sectional design, meaning the researchers observed the participants at a single point in time. Because of this, it is impossible to determine whether reduced brain entropy contributes to the development of treatment-resistant depression or if the prolonged illness causes the brain to lose its complexity. Tracking patients over several years could help clarify the direction of this relationship.
Another detail to consider is the use of medication among the study participants. All the patients with depression were taking antidepressants during the brain scans, and many were taking additional medications such as mood stabilizers or atypical antipsychotics. While this reflects the reality of treating severe depression, it leaves open the possibility that the medications themselves might influence the complexity of resting brain signals.
The research team also did not include a control group of patients whose depression responds well to standard treatments. Without this group, it is difficult to isolate which entropy reductions are unique to treatment resistance versus those that are common to depression in general. Future studies comparing treatment-resistant patients directly with treatment-responsive patients could highlight the specific biological signatures of treatment failure.
Finally, the researchers noted the need for accompanying cognitive and behavioral tests in future work. Incorporating detailed psychological assessments alongside brain scans would help connect the observed reductions in brain entropy to specific real-world challenges, such as memory deficits or emotional blunting.
The study, “Treatment-resistant depression is associated with reduced brain entropy,” was authored by Wei-Chen Lin, Li-Kai Cheng, Tung-Ping Su, Li-Fen Chen, Pei-Chi Tu, Cheng-Ta Li, Ya-Mei Bai, Shih-Jen Tsai, and Mu-Hong Chen.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #TreatmentResistantDepression #BrainEntropy #Neuroscience #MentalHealthResearch #RestingStatefMRI #NeuralFlexibility #DepressionBiology #MoodDisorders #DefaultModeNetwork #SerotoninBrainSafety
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Treatment-resistant depression linked to reduced brain entropy
People who suffer from depression that does not respond to standard treatments may experience a loss of complexity in their resting brain activity. A recent brain imaging study found that patients with treatment-resistant depression display reduced neural entropy, meaning their brain signals are more rigid and less unpredictable than those of healthy individuals. The research, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, suggests that system-wide reductions in brain flexibility could serve as a biological marker for this severe form of the illness.
Major depressive disorder is a chronic condition that ranks among the leading causes of disability worldwide. While many patients find relief through standard medications, a substantial portion do not. Treatment-resistant depression is typically diagnosed when a patient fails to achieve remission after at least two adequate trials of antidepressant therapy.
Individuals dealing with this form of depression often experience severe symptoms, including persistent low mood, an inability to feel pleasure, and cognitive difficulties. They also face a higher risk of relapse and suicidal thoughts. Understanding the biological mechanisms behind this resistance to treatment is a major goal for psychiatric research.
To explore these underlying mechanisms, researchers often look at brain entropy. In the context of neuroscience, entropy refers to the level of complexity, irregularity, and unpredictability in spontaneous brain signals. A healthy brain exhibits high entropy, which allows it to flexibly adapt to new information, process emotions, and perform cognitive tasks.
Conversely, lower brain entropy indicates a more constrained and stereotyped pattern of brain activity. Previous imaging studies have linked lower entropy to poorer emotional regulation and cognitive rigidity. However, the concept had not been extensively mapped in individuals specifically diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression.
A team of scientists based at Taipei Veterans General Hospital and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan conducted the recent investigation. The study was led by researchers Wei-Chen Lin and Li-Kai Cheng, alongside senior author Mu-Hong Chen. They wanted to see if the severe clinical features of treatment-resistant depression were reflected in a loss of neural complexity across specific brain networks.
The researchers recruited 48 adults diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression and 38 healthy adults with no history of psychiatric disorders. The patients with depression had all failed to respond to at least three adequate courses of antidepressants, classifying their condition as moderately treatment-resistant. Both groups were matched in terms of age and sex distribution.
To measure brain entropy, all participants underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. This type of brain scan tracks blood oxygenation levels in the brain over time. Because active brain regions require more oxygen, these fluctuating blood oxygen levels serve as a proxy for neural activity.
During the scans, participants were instructed to simply rest with their eyes closed, stay awake, and let their minds wander. This allowed the researchers to capture the brain’s spontaneous, baseline activity rather than its response to a specific task. The team then calculated the sample entropy of these brain signals across 166 distinct anatomical regions.
Sample entropy is a mathematical formula that quantifies how unpredictable a time series is. The researchers applied two different mathematical thresholds to their entropy calculations. One threshold was more permissive, designed to catch the most robust and pronounced drops in brain complexity. The other was more stringent, designed to detect subtle, widespread reductions in signal irregularity.
Using the more permissive threshold, the researchers found that patients with treatment-resistant depression exhibited lower brain entropy in three specific areas. These included the right angular gyrus, the left cerebellar Crus II, and the median raphe nucleus. The median raphe nucleus is located in the brainstem and serves as a major source of serotonin, a chemical messenger heavily involved in mood regulation. The right angular gyrus and cerebellar Crus II help integrate sensory information and support social and emotional processing.
When the researchers applied the more stringent threshold, they observed a much broader pattern of reduced entropy. The patients displayed lower neural complexity across 24 distinct brain regions compared to the healthy adults. This widespread reduction affected several large-scale brain systems, including the default mode network, the salience network, and the reward network. These systems collectively govern how humans process emotions, assign value to external stimuli, and navigate social environments.
Affected regions within these networks included the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with decision making and cognitive control. The researchers also saw reduced entropy in the thalamus, a central hub that relays sensory signals, and the nucleus accumbens, a key node in the brain’s reward circuitry. This extensive pattern suggests that treatment-resistant depression involves a global disruption of neural flexibility rather than an isolated defect in a single anatomical structure.
The researchers also looked for relationships between entropy levels and the severity of a patient’s treatment resistance. They noticed a preliminary trend in a specific part of the cerebellum where higher entropy correlated with more severe treatment resistance. The researchers suspect this might represent the brain attempting to compensate for dysfunction elsewhere, though the finding was not statistically significant after adjusting for multiple mathematical comparisons.
The study relied on a cross-sectional design, meaning the researchers observed the participants at a single point in time. Because of this, it is impossible to determine whether reduced brain entropy contributes to the development of treatment-resistant depression or if the prolonged illness causes the brain to lose its complexity. Tracking patients over several years could help clarify the direction of this relationship.
Another detail to consider is the use of medication among the study participants. All the patients with depression were taking antidepressants during the brain scans, and many were taking additional medications such as mood stabilizers or atypical antipsychotics. While this reflects the reality of treating severe depression, it leaves open the possibility that the medications themselves might influence the complexity of resting brain signals.
The research team also did not include a control group of patients whose depression responds well to standard treatments. Without this group, it is difficult to isolate which entropy reductions are unique to treatment resistance versus those that are common to depression in general. Future studies comparing treatment-resistant patients directly with treatment-responsive patients could highlight the specific biological signatures of treatment failure.
Finally, the researchers noted the need for accompanying cognitive and behavioral tests in future work. Incorporating detailed psychological assessments alongside brain scans would help connect the observed reductions in brain entropy to specific real-world challenges, such as memory deficits or emotional blunting.
The study, “Treatment-resistant depression is associated with reduced brain entropy,” was authored by Wei-Chen Lin, Li-Kai Cheng, Tung-Ping Su, Li-Fen Chen, Pei-Chi Tu, Cheng-Ta Li, Ya-Mei Bai, Shih-Jen Tsai, and Mu-Hong Chen.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #TreatmentResistantDepression #BrainEntropy #Neuroscience #MentalHealthResearch #RestingStatefMRI #NeuralFlexibility #DepressionBiology #MoodDisorders #DefaultModeNetwork #SerotoninBrainSafety
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Singlehood is increasingly celebrated among women, but the pressure to couple up persists
“Single positivity” celebrates women’s independence, but that approval seems to fade as women age and face renewed pressure to find a partner, according to research published in Sociological Research Online.
Single women have historically been portrayed as lonely, undesirable, or personally deficient because couplehood is treated as the normal and preferable way to live. These judgments are particularly gendered. For example, women may be expected to reach milestones such as partnership, marriage, and motherhood in a prescribed order and within a socially acceptable timeframe. Although being single may be considered normal during young adulthood, previous research suggests that it becomes increasingly stigmatized as women age and their single status is seen as long-term.
More recently, popular culture has promoted “single positivity,” presenting singlehood as an empowering opportunity for independence, personal growth, and self-love. Yet these messages may also reflect a postfeminist and neoliberal culture in which women are encouraged to solve difficulties through confidence, positive thinking, and continual self-improvement.
Alicia Denby examined whether this newer, more celebratory portrayal had genuinely transformed attitudes toward single women in the United Kingdom or whether it continued to preserve the expectation that women should eventually couple.
The qualitative study included 19 single women between the ages of 21 and 52. Participants were recruited through a public advertisement posted on the author’s social-media profiles. Seventeen women responded directly, while two were recruited through referrals from existing participants. Eligibility participants were between ages 18-65 who identified as single; participants defined singlehood for themselves. The final sample included women who had never been partnered, women who were divorced, and women who were dating but not in committed relationships.
The sample was predominantly White British and disproportionately composed of heterosexual women in their twenties. Between June 2022 and April 2023, participants completed life-story interviews lasting from 30 minutes to two hours. Eleven interviews took place in person at locations chosen by participants, including university study spaces, cafés, restaurants, homes, and workplaces; six were conducted through Zoom and two through Microsoft Teams. With participants’ consent, interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, anonymized using pseudonyms, and examined through reflexive thematic analysis.
Women in their twenties and early thirties commonly described singlehood as a period of self-discovery, self-prioritization, and self-love. Being single gave them space to pursue careers, friendships, travel, hobbies, and personal interests without accommodating a partner. Some credited feminist self-help books, podcasts, and social-media content with helping them become more confident and accepting of single life.
Several had become “defiantly single”—rather than entering an unsatisfying relationship simply to avoid being alone, they would consider a partner only if that person added something meaningful to an already fulfilling life. Denby found that this seemingly empowering message presented another ideal women were expected to meet: the confident, self-reliant single woman who had successfully “worked on herself.” Feelings such as loneliness could consequently become difficult to acknowledge because they conflicted with the demand to remain positive.
For most participants, single positivity also had an expiry date. Although women generally viewed singlehood as acceptable or enjoyable in their twenties, many expected to feel mounting pressure as they approached 30 or their late thirties. Partnership remained the anticipated long-term destination, while singlehood was treated as a temporary period of preparation and personal growth. Women who remained happily and voluntarily single in their forties and fifties described having their contentment questioned or dismissed because others assumed that a relationship was necessary for happiness. Single positivity therefore appeared to broaden the identities available to younger single women without displacing the underlying couple norm; women could celebrate being single, but were still expected to settle down eventually.
Denby notes that the sample predominantly included White, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied women in their twenties and early thirties. Consequently, the study could not adequately determine how single-positive messages intersect with race, socioeconomic class, disability, or other identities.
This study shows that replacing negative stereotypes with upbeat messages about singlehood does not necessarily eliminate social pressure. It may simply make singlehood acceptable for a limited period before conventional expectations surrounding partnership re-emerge.
The study, “The Temporal Limits of Single Positivity: Single Women in Postfeminist Culture,” was authored by Alicia Denby.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #SinglePositivity #Singlehood #WomenInTheCity #Postfeminism #CoupleNorm #IndependentWomen #WomenAndRelationships #SingleLifeStigma #DefiantlySingle #NeoliberalCulture
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Singlehood is increasingly celebrated among women, but the pressure to couple up persists
“Single positivity” celebrates women’s independence, but that approval seems to fade as women age and face renewed pressure to find a partner, according to research published in Sociological Research Online.
Single women have historically been portrayed as lonely, undesirable, or personally deficient because couplehood is treated as the normal and preferable way to live. These judgments are particularly gendered. For example, women may be expected to reach milestones such as partnership, marriage, and motherhood in a prescribed order and within a socially acceptable timeframe. Although being single may be considered normal during young adulthood, previous research suggests that it becomes increasingly stigmatized as women age and their single status is seen as long-term.
More recently, popular culture has promoted “single positivity,” presenting singlehood as an empowering opportunity for independence, personal growth, and self-love. Yet these messages may also reflect a postfeminist and neoliberal culture in which women are encouraged to solve difficulties through confidence, positive thinking, and continual self-improvement.
Alicia Denby examined whether this newer, more celebratory portrayal had genuinely transformed attitudes toward single women in the United Kingdom or whether it continued to preserve the expectation that women should eventually couple.
The qualitative study included 19 single women between the ages of 21 and 52. Participants were recruited through a public advertisement posted on the author’s social-media profiles. Seventeen women responded directly, while two were recruited through referrals from existing participants. Eligibility participants were between ages 18-65 who identified as single; participants defined singlehood for themselves. The final sample included women who had never been partnered, women who were divorced, and women who were dating but not in committed relationships.
The sample was predominantly White British and disproportionately composed of heterosexual women in their twenties. Between June 2022 and April 2023, participants completed life-story interviews lasting from 30 minutes to two hours. Eleven interviews took place in person at locations chosen by participants, including university study spaces, cafés, restaurants, homes, and workplaces; six were conducted through Zoom and two through Microsoft Teams. With participants’ consent, interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, anonymized using pseudonyms, and examined through reflexive thematic analysis.
Women in their twenties and early thirties commonly described singlehood as a period of self-discovery, self-prioritization, and self-love. Being single gave them space to pursue careers, friendships, travel, hobbies, and personal interests without accommodating a partner. Some credited feminist self-help books, podcasts, and social-media content with helping them become more confident and accepting of single life.
Several had become “defiantly single”—rather than entering an unsatisfying relationship simply to avoid being alone, they would consider a partner only if that person added something meaningful to an already fulfilling life. Denby found that this seemingly empowering message presented another ideal women were expected to meet: the confident, self-reliant single woman who had successfully “worked on herself.” Feelings such as loneliness could consequently become difficult to acknowledge because they conflicted with the demand to remain positive.
For most participants, single positivity also had an expiry date. Although women generally viewed singlehood as acceptable or enjoyable in their twenties, many expected to feel mounting pressure as they approached 30 or their late thirties. Partnership remained the anticipated long-term destination, while singlehood was treated as a temporary period of preparation and personal growth. Women who remained happily and voluntarily single in their forties and fifties described having their contentment questioned or dismissed because others assumed that a relationship was necessary for happiness. Single positivity therefore appeared to broaden the identities available to younger single women without displacing the underlying couple norm; women could celebrate being single, but were still expected to settle down eventually.
Denby notes that the sample predominantly included White, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied women in their twenties and early thirties. Consequently, the study could not adequately determine how single-positive messages intersect with race, socioeconomic class, disability, or other identities.
This study shows that replacing negative stereotypes with upbeat messages about singlehood does not necessarily eliminate social pressure. It may simply make singlehood acceptable for a limited period before conventional expectations surrounding partnership re-emerge.
The study, “The Temporal Limits of Single Positivity: Single Women in Postfeminist Culture,” was authored by Alicia Denby.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #SinglePositivity #Singlehood #WomenInTheCity #Postfeminism #CoupleNorm #IndependentWomen #WomenAndRelationships #SingleLifeStigma #DefiantlySingle #NeoliberalCulture
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Singlehood is increasingly celebrated among women, but the pressure to couple up persists
“Single positivity” celebrates women’s independence, but that approval seems to fade as women age and face renewed pressure to find a partner, according to research published in Sociological Research Online.
Single women have historically been portrayed as lonely, undesirable, or personally deficient because couplehood is treated as the normal and preferable way to live. These judgments are particularly gendered. For example, women may be expected to reach milestones such as partnership, marriage, and motherhood in a prescribed order and within a socially acceptable timeframe. Although being single may be considered normal during young adulthood, previous research suggests that it becomes increasingly stigmatized as women age and their single status is seen as long-term.
More recently, popular culture has promoted “single positivity,” presenting singlehood as an empowering opportunity for independence, personal growth, and self-love. Yet these messages may also reflect a postfeminist and neoliberal culture in which women are encouraged to solve difficulties through confidence, positive thinking, and continual self-improvement.
Alicia Denby examined whether this newer, more celebratory portrayal had genuinely transformed attitudes toward single women in the United Kingdom or whether it continued to preserve the expectation that women should eventually couple.
The qualitative study included 19 single women between the ages of 21 and 52. Participants were recruited through a public advertisement posted on the author’s social-media profiles. Seventeen women responded directly, while two were recruited through referrals from existing participants. Eligibility participants were between ages 18-65 who identified as single; participants defined singlehood for themselves. The final sample included women who had never been partnered, women who were divorced, and women who were dating but not in committed relationships.
The sample was predominantly White British and disproportionately composed of heterosexual women in their twenties. Between June 2022 and April 2023, participants completed life-story interviews lasting from 30 minutes to two hours. Eleven interviews took place in person at locations chosen by participants, including university study spaces, cafés, restaurants, homes, and workplaces; six were conducted through Zoom and two through Microsoft Teams. With participants’ consent, interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, anonymized using pseudonyms, and examined through reflexive thematic analysis.
Women in their twenties and early thirties commonly described singlehood as a period of self-discovery, self-prioritization, and self-love. Being single gave them space to pursue careers, friendships, travel, hobbies, and personal interests without accommodating a partner. Some credited feminist self-help books, podcasts, and social-media content with helping them become more confident and accepting of single life.
Several had become “defiantly single”—rather than entering an unsatisfying relationship simply to avoid being alone, they would consider a partner only if that person added something meaningful to an already fulfilling life. Denby found that this seemingly empowering message presented another ideal women were expected to meet: the confident, self-reliant single woman who had successfully “worked on herself.” Feelings such as loneliness could consequently become difficult to acknowledge because they conflicted with the demand to remain positive.
For most participants, single positivity also had an expiry date. Although women generally viewed singlehood as acceptable or enjoyable in their twenties, many expected to feel mounting pressure as they approached 30 or their late thirties. Partnership remained the anticipated long-term destination, while singlehood was treated as a temporary period of preparation and personal growth. Women who remained happily and voluntarily single in their forties and fifties described having their contentment questioned or dismissed because others assumed that a relationship was necessary for happiness. Single positivity therefore appeared to broaden the identities available to younger single women without displacing the underlying couple norm; women could celebrate being single, but were still expected to settle down eventually.
Denby notes that the sample predominantly included White, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied women in their twenties and early thirties. Consequently, the study could not adequately determine how single-positive messages intersect with race, socioeconomic class, disability, or other identities.
This study shows that replacing negative stereotypes with upbeat messages about singlehood does not necessarily eliminate social pressure. It may simply make singlehood acceptable for a limited period before conventional expectations surrounding partnership re-emerge.
The study, “The Temporal Limits of Single Positivity: Single Women in Postfeminist Culture,” was authored by Alicia Denby.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #SinglePositivity #Singlehood #WomenInTheCity #Postfeminism #CoupleNorm #IndependentWomen #WomenAndRelationships #SingleLifeStigma #DefiantlySingle #NeoliberalCulture
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:19AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMESDirect article link at end of text block below.
🧠💊 The latest "Brain Trust" episode is now live! Joseph Goldberg, and guest Anita Clayton discuss how to spot and treat sexual dysfunction in psychiatric care: https://t.co/rnmfNuRQdy https://t.co/ihth3zIpkp
Here are any URLs found in the article text:
Articles can be found by scrolling down the page at Articles can be found at https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/news".
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #psychotherapist #BrainTrust #SexualDysfunction #PsychiatryCare #MentalHealthAwareness #JosephGoldberg
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:19AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMESDirect article link at end of text block below.
🧠💊 The latest "Brain Trust" episode is now live! Joseph Goldberg, and guest Anita Clayton discuss how to spot and treat sexual dysfunction in psychiatric care: https://t.co/rnmfNuRQdy https://t.co/ihth3zIpkp
Here are any URLs found in the article text:
Articles can be found by scrolling down the page at Articles can be found at https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/news".
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #psychotherapist #BrainTrust #SexualDysfunction #PsychiatryCare #MentalHealthAwareness #JosephGoldberg
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:19AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMESDirect article link at end of text block below.
🧠💊 The latest "Brain Trust" episode is now live! Joseph Goldberg, and guest Anita Clayton discuss how to spot and treat sexual dysfunction in psychiatric care: https://t.co/rnmfNuRQdy https://t.co/ihth3zIpkp
Here are any URLs found in the article text:
Articles can be found by scrolling down the page at Articles can be found at https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/news".
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #psychotherapist #BrainTrust #SexualDysfunction #PsychiatryCare #MentalHealthAwareness #JosephGoldberg
-
DATE: September 4, 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: People with more social freedom tend to be more willing to put off immediate gratification
People living in societies where it is easy to form new friendships and leave old ones tend to be more willing to sacrifice immediate joy for long-term rewards. This tendency seems to be driven by a stronger sense of personal control and optimism about the future. The findings were published in Emotion.
Delaying happiness is a behavioral concept that describes the belief that sacrificing some amount of current pleasure will lead to greater happiness in the future. This might mean skipping a fun outing to study for an exam, or saving money instead of spending it on immediate entertainment. Behind this mindset is a calculation of whether the future payoff is worth the present cost.
The research, led by Kuan-Ju Huang of Kyoto University, explored how this mindset varies across different countries.
“East Asian cultures are often seen as long-term oriented compared to Western ones due to Confucian values,” Huang, currently a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Psychology at The University of Tokyo, told PsyPost. “In fact, the concept of long-term orientation was originally called ‘Confucian dynamism.'”
“I wanted to know whether this future orientation reflects what people want or what they feel they must do,” he added.
To understand these global differences, the researcher focused on a concept called relational mobility. This term refers to the flexibility of social networks within a society. In places with high relational mobility, such as North and Latin America, people have a high degree of freedom to choose their friends, partners, and groups.
In societies with low relational mobility, such as many in East Asia, people have more rigid social structures where it is difficult to form new connections or leave undesirable ones. This rigidity has broad psychological effects. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 indicated that East Asian countries often report lower average happiness than Western nations partly due to cultural tendencies like low relational mobility, which can systematically dampen individual well-being.
Huang wanted to see if this social flexibility also shapes how people approach their future happiness. The idea is that when people feel they have choices in their social lives, they might feel more in control of their life trajectory and more optimistic about what is to come. This optimism and sense of control might encourage them to put current happiness on hold for better outcomes later.
In the first phase of the research, Huang analyzed data from the Global Flourishing Study. The sample included 202,070 participants from 22 countries. Participants answered a single question asking how well the statement “I am always able to give up some happiness now for greater happiness later” described them.
The survey also measured three domains of well-being: general happiness and life satisfaction, a sense of meaning and purpose, and a feeling of balance and harmony in life. Additionally, participants answered questions to gauge their overall optimism. At the national level, the researcher looked at data for relational mobility, national wealth, economic inequality, and how individualistic or collectivistic the culture is.
The results showed that people in countries with high relational mobility were more likely to delay happiness than those in countries with lower relational mobility. Other national factors, such as wealth, income inequality, and cultural individualism, did not consistently predict this tendency once the researcher adjusted for general response biases.
“Surprisingly, people in Japan and Hong Kong were among the least likely to believe that sacrificing current happiness would lead to future well-being,” Huang noted. “This was explained by the especially low relational mobility (how much freedom people have to form and leave relationships) in these societies.”
“In other words, people may persevere and sacrifice in the present in more fixed social networks but not necessarily believe that these sacrifices will pay off in future happiness,” he said.
The data indicated that optimism was a major reason for this link. People in highly mobile societies reported higher levels of optimism, which in turn predicted a stronger willingness to delay happiness. Delaying happiness was also associated with better well-being across the board, particularly with having a stronger sense of meaning and purpose in life.
To build on these initial findings, the researcher conducted a second study to test these ideas with more detailed questionnaires. This online survey included 785 participants, split relatively evenly between Japan, representing a low-mobility society, and the United States, representing a high-mobility society.
Instead of single questions, this phase used established multi-item surveys to measure delaying happiness, optimism, and a sense of personal control. Participants also rated the relational mobility of their immediate social environment by answering questions about how easily the people around them can make new friends or choose their social groups.
The results of the second study mirrored the global data. Participants from the United States reported higher relational mobility, a stronger sense of control, greater optimism, and more willingness to delay happiness compared to the Japanese participants.
Statistical models demonstrated a chain reaction connecting these factors. Living in a high-mobility society was associated with experiencing a greater sense of control and optimism. These two psychological states then predicted a stronger tendency to delay current happiness for future gains.
“Whether you are willing to trade some happiness now for more happiness later is not just a personality trait,” Huang explained. “It is shaped by the social environment you live in.”
“Not everyone has the relational opportunities ‘out there’ that make people believe a better future is waiting for them,” he said. “That sense of open possibility is what fuels optimism and the willingness to invest in future happiness.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The first study only had access to relational mobility scores for 15 of the 22 countries, which limits how broadly the results can be applied. Adding more diverse countries in future research would help verify these patterns.
The second study relied on participants self-reporting the social mobility of their surroundings. This method might blur the lines between a person’s own social freedom and the actual, objective flexibility of their broader society. Developing ways to measure relational mobility objectively could strengthen future findings.
Finally, this research relied on data collected at a single point in time. Because of this design, the results cannot confirm a strict cause-and-effect relationship between social environments and psychological mindsets. Long-term studies would be needed to see how changes in a person’s social environment directly alter their willingness to delay happiness over time.
Moving forward, Huang plans to investigate the broader consequences of these social environments. “One line of research I am pursuing is how relational mobility may disproportionately affect people across social stratification,” he said.
“In my recent paper, I found that people from lower social class backgrounds feel less control over their lives especially in societies with low relational mobility,” he added.
“‘Interpersonal wealth’ (having more options in relationships) may be an important driver of well-being alongside financial wealth,” Huang concluded. “Who benefits most from relational mobility, and whether people can have too much of it, are the questions I want to answer next.”
The study, “Relational Mobility Promotes Optimism and Willingness to Delay Happiness,” was authored by Kuan-Ju Huang.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #RelationalMobility #DelayHappiness #FutureOriented #Optimism #SocialFreedom #LongTermOrientation #RelationalOpportunities #PersonalControl #WellBeing #CrossCulturalResearch
-
DATE: September 4, 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: People with more social freedom tend to be more willing to put off immediate gratification
People living in societies where it is easy to form new friendships and leave old ones tend to be more willing to sacrifice immediate joy for long-term rewards. This tendency seems to be driven by a stronger sense of personal control and optimism about the future. The findings were published in Emotion.
Delaying happiness is a behavioral concept that describes the belief that sacrificing some amount of current pleasure will lead to greater happiness in the future. This might mean skipping a fun outing to study for an exam, or saving money instead of spending it on immediate entertainment. Behind this mindset is a calculation of whether the future payoff is worth the present cost.
The research, led by Kuan-Ju Huang of Kyoto University, explored how this mindset varies across different countries.
“East Asian cultures are often seen as long-term oriented compared to Western ones due to Confucian values,” Huang, currently a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Psychology at The University of Tokyo, told PsyPost. “In fact, the concept of long-term orientation was originally called ‘Confucian dynamism.'”
“I wanted to know whether this future orientation reflects what people want or what they feel they must do,” he added.
To understand these global differences, the researcher focused on a concept called relational mobility. This term refers to the flexibility of social networks within a society. In places with high relational mobility, such as North and Latin America, people have a high degree of freedom to choose their friends, partners, and groups.
In societies with low relational mobility, such as many in East Asia, people have more rigid social structures where it is difficult to form new connections or leave undesirable ones. This rigidity has broad psychological effects. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 indicated that East Asian countries often report lower average happiness than Western nations partly due to cultural tendencies like low relational mobility, which can systematically dampen individual well-being.
Huang wanted to see if this social flexibility also shapes how people approach their future happiness. The idea is that when people feel they have choices in their social lives, they might feel more in control of their life trajectory and more optimistic about what is to come. This optimism and sense of control might encourage them to put current happiness on hold for better outcomes later.
In the first phase of the research, Huang analyzed data from the Global Flourishing Study. The sample included 202,070 participants from 22 countries. Participants answered a single question asking how well the statement “I am always able to give up some happiness now for greater happiness later” described them.
The survey also measured three domains of well-being: general happiness and life satisfaction, a sense of meaning and purpose, and a feeling of balance and harmony in life. Additionally, participants answered questions to gauge their overall optimism. At the national level, the researcher looked at data for relational mobility, national wealth, economic inequality, and how individualistic or collectivistic the culture is.
The results showed that people in countries with high relational mobility were more likely to delay happiness than those in countries with lower relational mobility. Other national factors, such as wealth, income inequality, and cultural individualism, did not consistently predict this tendency once the researcher adjusted for general response biases.
“Surprisingly, people in Japan and Hong Kong were among the least likely to believe that sacrificing current happiness would lead to future well-being,” Huang noted. “This was explained by the especially low relational mobility (how much freedom people have to form and leave relationships) in these societies.”
“In other words, people may persevere and sacrifice in the present in more fixed social networks but not necessarily believe that these sacrifices will pay off in future happiness,” he said.
The data indicated that optimism was a major reason for this link. People in highly mobile societies reported higher levels of optimism, which in turn predicted a stronger willingness to delay happiness. Delaying happiness was also associated with better well-being across the board, particularly with having a stronger sense of meaning and purpose in life.
To build on these initial findings, the researcher conducted a second study to test these ideas with more detailed questionnaires. This online survey included 785 participants, split relatively evenly between Japan, representing a low-mobility society, and the United States, representing a high-mobility society.
Instead of single questions, this phase used established multi-item surveys to measure delaying happiness, optimism, and a sense of personal control. Participants also rated the relational mobility of their immediate social environment by answering questions about how easily the people around them can make new friends or choose their social groups.
The results of the second study mirrored the global data. Participants from the United States reported higher relational mobility, a stronger sense of control, greater optimism, and more willingness to delay happiness compared to the Japanese participants.
Statistical models demonstrated a chain reaction connecting these factors. Living in a high-mobility society was associated with experiencing a greater sense of control and optimism. These two psychological states then predicted a stronger tendency to delay current happiness for future gains.
“Whether you are willing to trade some happiness now for more happiness later is not just a personality trait,” Huang explained. “It is shaped by the social environment you live in.”
“Not everyone has the relational opportunities ‘out there’ that make people believe a better future is waiting for them,” he said. “That sense of open possibility is what fuels optimism and the willingness to invest in future happiness.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The first study only had access to relational mobility scores for 15 of the 22 countries, which limits how broadly the results can be applied. Adding more diverse countries in future research would help verify these patterns.
The second study relied on participants self-reporting the social mobility of their surroundings. This method might blur the lines between a person’s own social freedom and the actual, objective flexibility of their broader society. Developing ways to measure relational mobility objectively could strengthen future findings.
Finally, this research relied on data collected at a single point in time. Because of this design, the results cannot confirm a strict cause-and-effect relationship between social environments and psychological mindsets. Long-term studies would be needed to see how changes in a person’s social environment directly alter their willingness to delay happiness over time.
Moving forward, Huang plans to investigate the broader consequences of these social environments. “One line of research I am pursuing is how relational mobility may disproportionately affect people across social stratification,” he said.
“In my recent paper, I found that people from lower social class backgrounds feel less control over their lives especially in societies with low relational mobility,” he added.
“‘Interpersonal wealth’ (having more options in relationships) may be an important driver of well-being alongside financial wealth,” Huang concluded. “Who benefits most from relational mobility, and whether people can have too much of it, are the questions I want to answer next.”
The study, “Relational Mobility Promotes Optimism and Willingness to Delay Happiness,” was authored by Kuan-Ju Huang.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #RelationalMobility #DelayHappiness #FutureOriented #Optimism #SocialFreedom #LongTermOrientation #RelationalOpportunities #PersonalControl #WellBeing #CrossCulturalResearch
-
DATE: September 4, 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: People with more social freedom tend to be more willing to put off immediate gratification
People living in societies where it is easy to form new friendships and leave old ones tend to be more willing to sacrifice immediate joy for long-term rewards. This tendency seems to be driven by a stronger sense of personal control and optimism about the future. The findings were published in Emotion.
Delaying happiness is a behavioral concept that describes the belief that sacrificing some amount of current pleasure will lead to greater happiness in the future. This might mean skipping a fun outing to study for an exam, or saving money instead of spending it on immediate entertainment. Behind this mindset is a calculation of whether the future payoff is worth the present cost.
The research, led by Kuan-Ju Huang of Kyoto University, explored how this mindset varies across different countries.
“East Asian cultures are often seen as long-term oriented compared to Western ones due to Confucian values,” Huang, currently a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Psychology at The University of Tokyo, told PsyPost. “In fact, the concept of long-term orientation was originally called ‘Confucian dynamism.'”
“I wanted to know whether this future orientation reflects what people want or what they feel they must do,” he added.
To understand these global differences, the researcher focused on a concept called relational mobility. This term refers to the flexibility of social networks within a society. In places with high relational mobility, such as North and Latin America, people have a high degree of freedom to choose their friends, partners, and groups.
In societies with low relational mobility, such as many in East Asia, people have more rigid social structures where it is difficult to form new connections or leave undesirable ones. This rigidity has broad psychological effects. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 indicated that East Asian countries often report lower average happiness than Western nations partly due to cultural tendencies like low relational mobility, which can systematically dampen individual well-being.
Huang wanted to see if this social flexibility also shapes how people approach their future happiness. The idea is that when people feel they have choices in their social lives, they might feel more in control of their life trajectory and more optimistic about what is to come. This optimism and sense of control might encourage them to put current happiness on hold for better outcomes later.
In the first phase of the research, Huang analyzed data from the Global Flourishing Study. The sample included 202,070 participants from 22 countries. Participants answered a single question asking how well the statement “I am always able to give up some happiness now for greater happiness later” described them.
The survey also measured three domains of well-being: general happiness and life satisfaction, a sense of meaning and purpose, and a feeling of balance and harmony in life. Additionally, participants answered questions to gauge their overall optimism. At the national level, the researcher looked at data for relational mobility, national wealth, economic inequality, and how individualistic or collectivistic the culture is.
The results showed that people in countries with high relational mobility were more likely to delay happiness than those in countries with lower relational mobility. Other national factors, such as wealth, income inequality, and cultural individualism, did not consistently predict this tendency once the researcher adjusted for general response biases.
“Surprisingly, people in Japan and Hong Kong were among the least likely to believe that sacrificing current happiness would lead to future well-being,” Huang noted. “This was explained by the especially low relational mobility (how much freedom people have to form and leave relationships) in these societies.”
“In other words, people may persevere and sacrifice in the present in more fixed social networks but not necessarily believe that these sacrifices will pay off in future happiness,” he said.
The data indicated that optimism was a major reason for this link. People in highly mobile societies reported higher levels of optimism, which in turn predicted a stronger willingness to delay happiness. Delaying happiness was also associated with better well-being across the board, particularly with having a stronger sense of meaning and purpose in life.
To build on these initial findings, the researcher conducted a second study to test these ideas with more detailed questionnaires. This online survey included 785 participants, split relatively evenly between Japan, representing a low-mobility society, and the United States, representing a high-mobility society.
Instead of single questions, this phase used established multi-item surveys to measure delaying happiness, optimism, and a sense of personal control. Participants also rated the relational mobility of their immediate social environment by answering questions about how easily the people around them can make new friends or choose their social groups.
The results of the second study mirrored the global data. Participants from the United States reported higher relational mobility, a stronger sense of control, greater optimism, and more willingness to delay happiness compared to the Japanese participants.
Statistical models demonstrated a chain reaction connecting these factors. Living in a high-mobility society was associated with experiencing a greater sense of control and optimism. These two psychological states then predicted a stronger tendency to delay current happiness for future gains.
“Whether you are willing to trade some happiness now for more happiness later is not just a personality trait,” Huang explained. “It is shaped by the social environment you live in.”
“Not everyone has the relational opportunities ‘out there’ that make people believe a better future is waiting for them,” he said. “That sense of open possibility is what fuels optimism and the willingness to invest in future happiness.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The first study only had access to relational mobility scores for 15 of the 22 countries, which limits how broadly the results can be applied. Adding more diverse countries in future research would help verify these patterns.
The second study relied on participants self-reporting the social mobility of their surroundings. This method might blur the lines between a person’s own social freedom and the actual, objective flexibility of their broader society. Developing ways to measure relational mobility objectively could strengthen future findings.
Finally, this research relied on data collected at a single point in time. Because of this design, the results cannot confirm a strict cause-and-effect relationship between social environments and psychological mindsets. Long-term studies would be needed to see how changes in a person’s social environment directly alter their willingness to delay happiness over time.
Moving forward, Huang plans to investigate the broader consequences of these social environments. “One line of research I am pursuing is how relational mobility may disproportionately affect people across social stratification,” he said.
“In my recent paper, I found that people from lower social class backgrounds feel less control over their lives especially in societies with low relational mobility,” he added.
“‘Interpersonal wealth’ (having more options in relationships) may be an important driver of well-being alongside financial wealth,” Huang concluded. “Who benefits most from relational mobility, and whether people can have too much of it, are the questions I want to answer next.”
The study, “Relational Mobility Promotes Optimism and Willingness to Delay Happiness,” was authored by Kuan-Ju Huang.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #RelationalMobility #DelayHappiness #FutureOriented #Optimism #SocialFreedom #LongTermOrientation #RelationalOpportunities #PersonalControl #WellBeing #CrossCulturalResearch
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:19AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: U.S. Government Is Rolling Out AI Interviews for Some Hires
Source: CBS News - U.S. News
The U.S. government, which employs nearly 2 million people, will begin using artificial intelligence in the interview process for some job applicants in the coming days, according to officials. The change came last week from the Office of Personnel Management—the government's Human Resources unit—which issued guidance nudging agencies to use AI in the hiring process, but it called for human oversight, especially in certain crucial personnel...
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AIinHiring #GovernmentHiring #AIFutureOfWork #HiringTechnology #OfficeOfPersonnelManagement #GSHiring #AIInterview #PublicSectorTech #HRTech #WorkforceAutomation
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:19AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: A Focus on Appearance Increases Benevolent Sexism in Men and Women
Source: PsyPost
New research suggests that when men and women focus on their physical appearance, they tend to become more supportive of benevolent sexism. These findings indicate that everyday situations emphasizing how we look might inadvertently reinforce traditional gender roles and preserve the societal status quo. The study, published in Japanese Journal of Social Psychology, used a simulated online shopping platform to induce a focus on appearance.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AFocusOnAppearance #BenevolentSexism #GenderStudies #SocialPsychology #AppearanceFocus #MenAndWomen #GenderRoles #SocietalStatusQuo #OnlineShoppingExperiment #PsychologyResearch
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:19AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: U.S. Government Is Rolling Out AI Interviews for Some Hires
Source: CBS News - U.S. News
The U.S. government, which employs nearly 2 million people, will begin using artificial intelligence in the interview process for some job applicants in the coming days, according to officials. The change came last week from the Office of Personnel Management—the government's Human Resources unit—which issued guidance nudging agencies to use AI in the hiring process, but it called for human oversight, especially in certain crucial personnel...
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AIinHiring #GovernmentHiring #AIFutureOfWork #HiringTechnology #OfficeOfPersonnelManagement #GSHiring #AIInterview #PublicSectorTech #HRTech #WorkforceAutomation
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:19AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: A Focus on Appearance Increases Benevolent Sexism in Men and Women
Source: PsyPost
New research suggests that when men and women focus on their physical appearance, they tend to become more supportive of benevolent sexism. These findings indicate that everyday situations emphasizing how we look might inadvertently reinforce traditional gender roles and preserve the societal status quo. The study, published in Japanese Journal of Social Psychology, used a simulated online shopping platform to induce a focus on appearance.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AFocusOnAppearance #BenevolentSexism #GenderStudies #SocialPsychology #AppearanceFocus #MenAndWomen #GenderRoles #SocietalStatusQuo #OnlineShoppingExperiment #PsychologyResearch
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:19AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: U.S. Government Is Rolling Out AI Interviews for Some Hires
Source: CBS News - U.S. News
The U.S. government, which employs nearly 2 million people, will begin using artificial intelligence in the interview process for some job applicants in the coming days, according to officials. The change came last week from the Office of Personnel Management—the government's Human Resources unit—which issued guidance nudging agencies to use AI in the hiring process, but it called for human oversight, especially in certain crucial personnel...
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AIinHiring #GovernmentHiring #AIFutureOfWork #HiringTechnology #OfficeOfPersonnelManagement #GSHiring #AIInterview #PublicSectorTech #HRTech #WorkforceAutomation
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:19AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: A Focus on Appearance Increases Benevolent Sexism in Men and Women
Source: PsyPost
New research suggests that when men and women focus on their physical appearance, they tend to become more supportive of benevolent sexism. These findings indicate that everyday situations emphasizing how we look might inadvertently reinforce traditional gender roles and preserve the societal status quo. The study, published in Japanese Journal of Social Psychology, used a simulated online shopping platform to induce a focus on appearance.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AFocusOnAppearance #BenevolentSexism #GenderStudies #SocialPsychology #AppearanceFocus #MenAndWomen #GenderRoles #SocietalStatusQuo #OnlineShoppingExperiment #PsychologyResearch
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:18AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Global Warming Will Top 1.5-Degree Limit, U.N. Reports
Source: PBS News Hour
In a first-of-its-kind report issued Wednesday, the United Nations has said that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming's harms. Now, the world must figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety, officials warn. Earth is soon going to exceed the safe temperature threshold agreed upon by the world in the 2015 Paris climate agreement because of warming from the burning of coal, oil,...
-------------------------------------------------
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 #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #1point5Degrees #UNReport #ParisAgreement #ClimateCrisis #GlobalHeating #SustainableFuture #CarbonEmissions #EnvironmentNews
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:18AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Global Warming Will Top 1.5-Degree Limit, U.N. Reports
Source: PBS News Hour
In a first-of-its-kind report issued Wednesday, the United Nations has said that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming's harms. Now, the world must figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety, officials warn. Earth is soon going to exceed the safe temperature threshold agreed upon by the world in the 2015 Paris climate agreement because of warming from the burning of coal, oil,...
-------------------------------------------------
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 #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #1point5Degrees #UNReport #ParisAgreement #ClimateCrisis #GlobalHeating #SustainableFuture #CarbonEmissions #EnvironmentNews
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 10:36AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Gloria Steinem, Trailblazing Figure in Women's Movement, Dies at 92
Source: CBS News - U.S. News
Gloria Steinem, a co-founder of Ms. Magazine and a trailblazing figure of the women's movement in the latter half of the 20th century, died yesterday at the age of 92. Steinem "was one of the architects of the entire structure of women's equality," former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday. In 2013, Steinem received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, and in 2019, the Freedom Award from the National Civil...
-------------------------------------------------
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 #GloriaSteinem #WomensMovement #Feminism #MsMagazine #Equality #Trailblazer #WomenEmpowerment #CivilRights #PresidentialMedalOfFreedom #HerStory
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 11:18AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Global Warming Will Top 1.5-Degree Limit, U.N. Reports
Source: PBS News Hour
In a first-of-its-kind report issued Wednesday, the United Nations has said that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming's harms. Now, the world must figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety, officials warn. Earth is soon going to exceed the safe temperature threshold agreed upon by the world in the 2015 Paris climate agreement because of warming from the burning of coal, oil,...
-------------------------------------------------
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 #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #1point5Degrees #UNReport #ParisAgreement #ClimateCrisis #GlobalHeating #SustainableFuture #CarbonEmissions #EnvironmentNews
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 10:36AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Gloria Steinem, Trailblazing Figure in Women's Movement, Dies at 92
Source: CBS News - U.S. News
Gloria Steinem, a co-founder of Ms. Magazine and a trailblazing figure of the women's movement in the latter half of the 20th century, died yesterday at the age of 92. Steinem "was one of the architects of the entire structure of women's equality," former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday. In 2013, Steinem received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, and in 2019, the Freedom Award from the National Civil...
-------------------------------------------------
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 #GloriaSteinem #WomensMovement #Feminism #MsMagazine #Equality #Trailblazer #WomenEmpowerment #CivilRights #PresidentialMedalOfFreedom #HerStory
-
DATE: September 4, 2026 at 10:36AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Gloria Steinem, Trailblazing Figure in Women's Movement, Dies at 92
Source: CBS News - U.S. News
Gloria Steinem, a co-founder of Ms. Magazine and a trailblazing figure of the women's movement in the latter half of the 20th century, died yesterday at the age of 92. Steinem "was one of the architects of the entire structure of women's equality," former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday. In 2013, Steinem received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, and in 2019, the Freedom Award from the National Civil...
-------------------------------------------------
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 #GloriaSteinem #WomensMovement #Feminism #MsMagazine #Equality #Trailblazer #WomenEmpowerment #CivilRights #PresidentialMedalOfFreedom #HerStory
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Gentle rocking beds could offer a new way to treat insomnia
URL: https://www.psypost.org/gentle-rocking-beds-could-offer-a-new-way-to-treat-insomnia/
For adults who struggle to stay asleep, a bed that sways back and forth gently throughout the night might offer a path to a better night of rest. A small study reveals that continuous, slow rocking reduces nighttime awakenings and improves overall sleep quality in people with insomnia symptoms. The research was published in the Journal of Sleep Research.
Insomnia is a common sleep disorder defined by a persistent difficulty falling asleep or returning to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night. These disruptions lead to daytime fatigue, mood changes, and trouble concentrating. The standard clinical treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy, a psychological intervention that targets anxiety around sleep and helps correct unhelpful bedtime habits. While this therapy helps many people feel better about their sleep, it does not always resolve the physiological disruptions that show up on brain monitors.
Normal sleep progresses through a highly structured series of stages, moving from light sleep to deep sleep, and finally to rapid eye movement sleep. Deep sleep is characterized by specific patterns of electrical activity in the brain, notably slow oscillations and sleep spindles. Slow oscillations are large, rolling brain waves, while sleep spindles are brief, rapid bursts of electrical activity. These distinct rhythms help the brain block out environmental noise and process the events of the previous day.
Researchers Aurore A. Perrault, Sophie Schwartz, and Laurence Bayer from the University of Geneva and their colleagues wanted to see if physical motion could directly influence these brain rhythms in a clinical population. Prior experiments by the team showed that healthy sleepers spent more time in deep sleep and had enhanced memory recall after sleeping on a gently rocking bed. Studies in mice indicate that this effect is driven by the vestibular system, a sensory network in the inner ear that detects movement and balance. When a person rocks, the vestibular system sends a rhythmic physical signal to the thalamus, a brain region central to generating sleep spindles and slow waves.
Because the rocking motion directly stimulates the neural circuits involved in stabilizing sleep, the researchers hypothesized that it might provide a unique benefit to individuals who suffer from chronic sleep disruptions. The team suspected that a moving bed could act as a physiological complement to traditional psychological therapies. To test this idea, they recruited 16 young adults who reported mild to moderate difficulties falling or staying asleep.
The team first verified the participants’ sleep troubles to ensure they exhibited objectively poor sleep. For three weeks, the participants wore movement-tracking wristbands at home to log their natural rest patterns. They then spent a baseline habituation night in a sleep laboratory wired to diagnostic equipment to rule out other medical issues, such as sleep apnea or cardiac arrhythmias.
Following the screening period, each participant spent two separate experimental nights in the sleep laboratory. During one visit, the participants slept on a completely stationary bed. During the other visit, they slept on a bed that moved laterally from side to side in a slow, continuous rocking motion. The bed shifted a few inches in each direction, completing a full sweep every four seconds for the entire night.
Throughout both nights, the researchers recorded the participants’ brain waves, muscle activity, and eye movements to precisely track their progression through the various stages of sleep. The participants also completed questionnaires about their subjective sleep experience upon waking. Additionally, the researchers administered a memory test involving pairs of unrelated words before bed and again the next morning to assess whether the rocking motion affected memory retention.
The continuous rocking motion produced measurable improvements in how well the participants maintained their sleep. Compared to the stationary night, the participants spent 34 percent less time awake in the middle of the night. They also spent about 15 percent less time in the lightest and most easily interrupted stage of sleep.
This reduction in wakefulness led to an overall increase in sleep efficiency, a metric that calculates the percentage of time in bed that a person is actually asleep. The monitoring equipment also recorded a lower rate of sleep fragmentation during the rocking night. This indicates that the sleepers transitioned much less frequently from deeper sleep states back into light sleep or full wakefulness.
These physiological improvements aligned with the participants’ own perceptions of their rest. On mornings following the rocking night, participants rated their sleep quality about 25 percent higher on average than they did after the stationary night. They generally found the rocking motion pleasant and relaxing, and the participants who experienced the largest drop in sleep fragmentation reported the highest subjective improvements in their rest.
The team also looked closely at the electrical activity in the brain to understand how the physical movement altered the sleep cycle. They observed that the side-to-side motion actively synchronized with the brain’s natural rhythms. Bursts of sleep spindles and the lowest points of slow wave activity clustered at specific moments that matched the physical turning points of the moving bed.
During the deepest stages of rest, this synchronization appeared to boost brain activity. The rocking motion generated a higher density of fast sleep spindles compared to the stationary night. This suggests that the continuous stimulation of the inner ear effectively prompted the brain’s thalamus to generate the electrical rhythms necessary to keep the brain asleep.
However, the rocking bed did not improve every aspect of the participants’ insomnia symptoms. The gentle motion did not reduce the amount of time it took the participants to initially fall asleep. While some individuals drifted off much faster on the moving bed, others took longer, resulting in wide variations across the test group.
Despite the changes in brain wave activity, the enhanced rest also did not translate into better cognitive performance. The participants performed equally well on the morning word-pair memory test regardless of which bed they slept in. The researchers suspect this might be due to the fact that the rocking bed had a variable effect on the exact amount of deep sleep each person received, unlike healthy sleepers who tend to experience a more uniform boost in deep sleep.
As a small study focused exclusively on young adults, the results do not necessarily reflect how older populations or individuals with more severe health conditions might respond to the motion. Insomnia encompasses a wide variety of symptoms and underlying causes, and people with high sensory sensitivity might find a moving bed distracting rather than relaxing. The experiment also evaluated only a single night of rocking per participant.
It remains unknown whether the observed sleep improvements would persist over several nights of use or if the benefits might fade as the nervous system becomes accustomed to the movement. Further testing over longer periods will be required to determine if rocking beds could become a practical, long-term intervention for chronic insomnia. If the results hold up in larger trials, rhythmic sensory stimulation could eventually be paired with behavioral therapies to help patients find more stable rest.
The study, “Whole-Night Gentle Rocking Improves Sleep in Poor Sleepers With Insomnia Complaints,” was authored by Aurore A. Perrault, Nathan E. Cross, Thien Thanh Dang Vu, Sophie Schwartz, and Laurence Bayer.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/gentle-rocking-beds-could-offer-a-new-way-to-treat-insomnia/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #GentleRockingBeds #InsomniaTreatment #SleepQuality #RockingSleep #VestibularStimulation #SleepResearch #BrainRhythms #SleepSpindles #SleepEfficiency #ChronicInsomniaTreatment
-
DATE: September 4, 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: Gentle rocking beds could offer a new way to treat insomnia
URL: https://www.psypost.org/gentle-rocking-beds-could-offer-a-new-way-to-treat-insomnia/
For adults who struggle to stay asleep, a bed that sways back and forth gently throughout the night might offer a path to a better night of rest. A small study reveals that continuous, slow rocking reduces nighttime awakenings and improves overall sleep quality in people with insomnia symptoms. The research was published in the Journal of Sleep Research.
Insomnia is a common sleep disorder defined by a persistent difficulty falling asleep or returning to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night. These disruptions lead to daytime fatigue, mood changes, and trouble concentrating. The standard clinical treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy, a psychological intervention that targets anxiety around sleep and helps correct unhelpful bedtime habits. While this therapy helps many people feel better about their sleep, it does not always resolve the physiological disruptions that show up on brain monitors.
Normal sleep progresses through a highly structured series of stages, moving from light sleep to deep sleep, and finally to rapid eye movement sleep. Deep sleep is characterized by specific patterns of electrical activity in the brain, notably slow oscillations and sleep spindles. Slow oscillations are large, rolling brain waves, while sleep spindles are brief, rapid bursts of electrical activity. These distinct rhythms help the brain block out environmental noise and process the events of the previous day.
Researchers Aurore A. Perrault, Sophie Schwartz, and Laurence Bayer from the University of Geneva and their colleagues wanted to see if physical motion could directly influence these brain rhythms in a clinical population. Prior experiments by the team showed that healthy sleepers spent more time in deep sleep and had enhanced memory recall after sleeping on a gently rocking bed. Studies in mice indicate that this effect is driven by the vestibular system, a sensory network in the inner ear that detects movement and balance. When a person rocks, the vestibular system sends a rhythmic physical signal to the thalamus, a brain region central to generating sleep spindles and slow waves.
Because the rocking motion directly stimulates the neural circuits involved in stabilizing sleep, the researchers hypothesized that it might provide a unique benefit to individuals who suffer from chronic sleep disruptions. The team suspected that a moving bed could act as a physiological complement to traditional psychological therapies. To test this idea, they recruited 16 young adults who reported mild to moderate difficulties falling or staying asleep.
The team first verified the participants’ sleep troubles to ensure they exhibited objectively poor sleep. For three weeks, the participants wore movement-tracking wristbands at home to log their natural rest patterns. They then spent a baseline habituation night in a sleep laboratory wired to diagnostic equipment to rule out other medical issues, such as sleep apnea or cardiac arrhythmias.
Following the screening period, each participant spent two separate experimental nights in the sleep laboratory. During one visit, the participants slept on a completely stationary bed. During the other visit, they slept on a bed that moved laterally from side to side in a slow, continuous rocking motion. The bed shifted a few inches in each direction, completing a full sweep every four seconds for the entire night.
Throughout both nights, the researchers recorded the participants’ brain waves, muscle activity, and eye movements to precisely track their progression through the various stages of sleep. The participants also completed questionnaires about their subjective sleep experience upon waking. Additionally, the researchers administered a memory test involving pairs of unrelated words before bed and again the next morning to assess whether the rocking motion affected memory retention.
The continuous rocking motion produced measurable improvements in how well the participants maintained their sleep. Compared to the stationary night, the participants spent 34 percent less time awake in the middle of the night. They also spent about 15 percent less time in the lightest and most easily interrupted stage of sleep.
This reduction in wakefulness led to an overall increase in sleep efficiency, a metric that calculates the percentage of time in bed that a person is actually asleep. The monitoring equipment also recorded a lower rate of sleep fragmentation during the rocking night. This indicates that the sleepers transitioned much less frequently from deeper sleep states back into light sleep or full wakefulness.
These physiological improvements aligned with the participants’ own perceptions of their rest. On mornings following the rocking night, participants rated their sleep quality about 25 percent higher on average than they did after the stationary night. They generally found the rocking motion pleasant and relaxing, and the participants who experienced the largest drop in sleep fragmentation reported the highest subjective improvements in their rest.
The team also looked closely at the electrical activity in the brain to understand how the physical movement altered the sleep cycle. They observed that the side-to-side motion actively synchronized with the brain’s natural rhythms. Bursts of sleep spindles and the lowest points of slow wave activity clustered at specific moments that matched the physical turning points of the moving bed.
During the deepest stages of rest, this synchronization appeared to boost brain activity. The rocking motion generated a higher density of fast sleep spindles compared to the stationary night. This suggests that the continuous stimulation of the inner ear effectively prompted the brain’s thalamus to generate the electrical rhythms necessary to keep the brain asleep.
However, the rocking bed did not improve every aspect of the participants’ insomnia symptoms. The gentle motion did not reduce the amount of time it took the participants to initially fall asleep. While some individuals drifted off much faster on the moving bed, others took longer, resulting in wide variations across the test group.
Despite the changes in brain wave activity, the enhanced rest also did not translate into better cognitive performance. The participants performed equally well on the morning word-pair memory test regardless of which bed they slept in. The researchers suspect this might be due to the fact that the rocking bed had a variable effect on the exact amount of deep sleep each person received, unlike healthy sleepers who tend to experience a more uniform boost in deep sleep.
As a small study focused exclusively on young adults, the results do not necessarily reflect how older populations or individuals with more severe health conditions might respond to the motion. Insomnia encompasses a wide variety of symptoms and underlying causes, and people with high sensory sensitivity might find a moving bed distracting rather than relaxing. The experiment also evaluated only a single night of rocking per participant.
It remains unknown whether the observed sleep improvements would persist over several nights of use or if the benefits might fade as the nervous system becomes accustomed to the movement. Further testing over longer periods will be required to determine if rocking beds could become a practical, long-term intervention for chronic insomnia. If the results hold up in larger trials, rhythmic sensory stimulation could eventually be paired with behavioral therapies to help patients find more stable rest.
The study, “Whole-Night Gentle Rocking Improves Sleep in Poor Sleepers With Insomnia Complaints,” was authored by Aurore A. Perrault, Nathan E. Cross, Thien Thanh Dang Vu, Sophie Schwartz, and Laurence Bayer.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/gentle-rocking-beds-could-offer-a-new-way-to-treat-insomnia/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #GentleRockingBeds #InsomniaTreatment #SleepQuality #RockingSleep #VestibularStimulation #SleepResearch #BrainRhythms #SleepSpindles #SleepEfficiency #ChronicInsomniaTreatment