#psychotherapy — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #psychotherapy, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: September 10, 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: Creatine improves muscle mass and cognitive function in older adults even without exercise
A study involving healthy adults between 45 and 65 years of age with a sedentary lifestyle found that 12 weeks of taking creatine monohydrate supplements increased their lean tissue mass, strength, and muscular endurance, while promoting favorable changes in markers of cognitive function and memory. The same supplementation combined with an exercise and weight-loss diet program additionally resulted in body fat percentage reduction. The paper was published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.
Creatine is a naturally occurring compound that helps cells rapidly produce energy, particularly during short periods of intense activity. The human body makes creatine mainly from the amino acids arginine, glycine, and methionine. It can also be obtained from foods such as meat and fish.
Most of the body’s creatine is stored in skeletal muscles, where it is converted into phosphocreatine. Phosphocreatine helps regenerate adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, the primary molecule cells use as an immediate source of energy. Because this energy system is especially important during brief, high-intensity efforts, creatine has long attracted interest in sport and exercise science.
Creatine can also be taken as a dietary supplement. Such intake allows the body to increase the amount of creatine stored in muscles. The most widely used supplemental form is creatine monohydrate, in which creatine is combined with a molecule of water. Creatine monohydrate is inexpensive, stable, and by far the most extensively studied form of creatine supplementation. Research has linked it to improvements in strength, power, training capacity, and gains in lean body mass. Interest is also growing in its possible effects on brain function and health.
Study author Jisun Chun and colleagues examined the effects of 12 weeks of creatine monohydrate supplementation on body composition and cognitive function in healthy, untrained middle-aged and older adults. The researchers compared participants who maintained their usual lifestyle with those who engaged in a structured diet and training program aimed at promoting weight loss.
They note that as people age, the fat tissue in their bodies progressively increases while the mass of their skeletal muscles decreases. This condition, known as sarcopenic obesity, is associated with heightened health risks and various functional impairments.
The authors hypothesized that creatine monohydrate supplementation would support improvements in the health-related outcomes of exercise and diet, and would enhance improvements in body composition induced by training. They also expected that this supplementation would favorably influence the cognitive performance of individuals taking it.
Study participants were 64 adults between 45 and 65 years of age. Their average age was 55 years, and 40 of them were women.
Participants were divided into four groups. Two groups received creatine monohydrate supplementation (two 5-gram foil sachets per day, to be dissolved in water or a flavored beverage, taken once in the morning and once in the evening), and two groups received a placebo (identical-looking sachets containing maltodextrin, taken in the same way). While participants were randomly assigned to receive either creatine monohydrate or the placebo without knowing which substance they were receiving, they decided for themselves whether they would participate in the training and diet program or not. This created four distinct groups: no exercise with placebo, no exercise with creatine, exercise and diet with placebo, and exercise and diet with creatine.
Participants in the exercise groups participated in a supervised resistance and aerobic training program three times per week. Additionally, they were instructed to follow a diet plan aligned with the American Heart Association’s macronutrient recommendations (55 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein, 30 percent fat) to induce a modest energy deficit of approximately 300 to 500 calories per day to promote weight loss. These participants recorded their dietary intake using a smartphone-based application called MyFitnessPal. The non-exercise groups did not follow this diet or exercise program.
Participants completed various measurements at the start of the study, six weeks after the start, and at the end of the 12-week study. These included basic body measurements, resting metabolic rate (how much energy the body uses at rest), body composition measurements derived from dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, or DXA, scans, blood biomarkers, physical activity, cognitive performance, reaction speed tests, muscular strength measurements, cardiopulmonary exercise capacity, and various psychological health measures.
Results showed that creatine monohydrate supplementation without the exercise and diet intervention increased lean tissue mass, strength, and muscular endurance. It also promoted favorable changes in blood concentrations of some lipids and in markers of cognitive function and memory. Creatine supplementation combined with the exercise and diet program additionally resulted in a greater reduction in body fat percentage.
“Creatine supplementation (10 g/d) without exercise training and diet intervention increased lean tissue mass, strength and muscular endurance, promoted favorable changes in selected blood-lipid measures, reduced HbA1c levels [a measure of average blood sugar over the past two to three months], and improved selected markers of cognitive function and memory in middle-aged and older adults,” the study authors concluded. “Creatine supplementation during an exercise and weight-loss diet intervention in middle-aged and older adults promoted a greater reduction in body fat percentage, gains in muscular strength and endurance, and improved selected markers of cognitive function and memory.”
The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about the effects of creatine supplementation. However, the researchers cautioned that the individual cognitive and biomarker findings are exploratory and require confirmation. Furthermore, while participants were randomly assigned to receive creatine or a placebo, they chose for themselves whether they would participate in the training and diet program. This could have introduced systematic differences between those who did and did not choose to participate in the lifestyle intervention, affecting the results.
The paper, “Effects of creatine supplementation with and without exercise and diet intervention on body composition, cognitive function, and markers of health in middle-aged and older adults,” was authored by Jisun Chun, Yuhang Liu, Giuliet L. Kibler, Hudson Lee, Khatereh Babakhani, Nathaniel Rhoades, Ian Bivins, Joungbo Ko, Broderick Dickerson, Drew E. Gonzalez, Ryan J. Sowinski, Chris J. Rasmussen, and Richard B. Kreider.
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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
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #CreatineCognitionAgeing #CreatineForMuscleAndMind #SarcopenicObesityPrevention #MiddleAgedFitness #CreatineMonohydrateBenefits #CognitiveFunctionBoost #LeanMassGain #HealthyAging #ExerciseAndDietImpact #StrengthAndEnduranceBoost
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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology
DATE: September 10, 2026 at 12:14PM
SOURCE: CONSORTIUM FOR DEFENSE PSYCHOLOGYDirect article link at end of text block below.
RT @CSTS_USU: Mental health problems are a leading cause of hospitalization and discharge among active-duty service members.
An upcoming vitamin B9 clinical trial will focus on reducing suicide risk and supporting service member health. https://t.co/LMxsoUfb93
Here are any URLs found in the article text:
Articles can be found at https://deploymentpsych.org/.
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Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #military #militarypsych #militarypsychology #militarycounseling #APA #Division19 #militaryhealth #DeploymentPsychology #DefensePsychology #ConsortiumForDefensePsychology #UniformServicesUniversity
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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology
DATE: September 10, 2026 at 12:14PM
SOURCE: CONSORTIUM FOR DEFENSE PSYCHOLOGYDirect article link at end of text block below.
RT @CSTS_USU: Mental health problems are a leading cause of hospitalization and discharge among active-duty service members.
An upcoming vitamin B9 clinical trial will focus on reducing suicide risk and supporting service member health. https://t.co/LMxsoUfb93
Here are any URLs found in the article text:
Articles can be found at https://deploymentpsych.org/.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #depression #psychotherapist #military #militarypsych #militarypsychology #militarycounseling #APA #Division19 #militaryhealth #DeploymentPsychology #DefensePsychology #ConsortiumForDefensePsychology #UniformServicesUniversity
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TRIGGER WARNING: Military Psychology
DATE: September 10, 2026 at 12:14PM
SOURCE: CONSORTIUM FOR DEFENSE PSYCHOLOGYDirect article link at end of text block below.
RT @CSTS_USU: Mental health problems are a leading cause of hospitalization and discharge among active-duty service members.
An upcoming vitamin B9 clinical trial will focus on reducing suicide risk and supporting service member health. https://t.co/LMxsoUfb93
Here are any URLs found in the article text:
Articles can be found at https://deploymentpsych.org/.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #depression #psychotherapist #military #militarypsych #militarypsychology #militarycounseling #APA #Division19 #militaryhealth #DeploymentPsychology #DefensePsychology #ConsortiumForDefensePsychology #UniformServicesUniversity
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DATE: September 10, 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: Getting a smartphone before age 13 linked to worse mental health in young adulthood
New research provides evidence that receiving a smartphone early in childhood is associated with poorer psychological well-being in young adulthood. The findings indicate that these negative outcomes are largely tied to early access to social media, which opens the door to cyberbullying, poor family relationships, and disrupted sleep. The study was published in Journal of Human Development and Capabilities.
Scientists and policymakers have expressed growing concern over the modern digital landscape. Smartphones operate as gateways into algorithmically curated digital environments. These algorithms are designed by artificial intelligence (AI) programs to maximize user engagement, often by presenting content that keeps users scrolling.
When young children navigate these spaces, they face unique challenges. According to a 2026 review, adolescent brains undergo biological changes that heighten their sensitivity to social feedback and variable rewards, like notifications and likes. This makes young minds particularly vulnerable to the design features of modern digital platforms.
Efforts to manage this issue have been mixed. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2026 evaluated the concurrent impact of restricting phone use during secondary school hours and noted little to no mental health improvement from daytime bans alone. With inconsistent findings across the scientific literature, questions remain regarding the long-term impact of digital exposure starting in early childhood.
The authors of the new study focused on the concept of mind health, which they distinguish from traditional clinical categories like depression and anxiety. Mind health encompasses the full complement of emotional, social, and cognitive capacities that allow a person to navigate life’s challenges and function productively.
The research, led by Tara C. Thiagarajan, founder and chief scientist of Sapien Labs, aimed to determine the population-level developmental consequences of owning a smartphone during childhood. They sought to understand how the age at which a child receives their first smartphone correlates with their mind health as a young adult.
“We are a nonprofit tracking mind health across the globe and exploring how different aspects of the environment contribute to the decline across each younger generation,” Thiagarajan told PsyPost. “One of the most significant environmental shifts that tracks with this trajectory is the advent of smartphones. We wanted to understand the cumulative effect of having a smartphone in childhood on development rather than just the immediate effect of using it.”
To explore this, the researchers analyzed data from the Global Mind Project, a large-scale data acquisition initiative. Their sample included over 100,000 young adults between the ages of 18 and 24, spanning 163 countries and various cultural backgrounds. Participants completed an online assessment tool called the Mind Health Quotient.
The Mind Health Quotient captures 47 different functions and symptoms, generating a score that reflects a person’s overall mental well-being on a spectrum from distressed to thriving. The survey also collected contextual information, including the age at which each participant received their first smartphone and when they first created social media accounts. The researchers used regression analysis to identify associations between early phone ownership, potential mediating factors, and current mind health.
The results showed a consistent pattern across different regions and languages. Receiving a smartphone before the age of 13 was associated with progressively lower mind health scores in early adulthood. For example, the average Mind Health Quotient score was 30 for individuals who acquired their first smartphone at age 13, but it dropped to just 1 for those who received one at age five.
“That the younger a child got a phone, the worse their mental health is likely to be in adulthood,” Thiagarajan explained. “This relationship is particularly steep before age 13. That means that every successive year before 13 makes it even worse.”
The percentage of young adults considered distressed or struggling was higher among those who acquired smartphones earlier. Compared to those who received a phone later in adolescence, females who obtained a smartphone at a very young age experienced a 9.5 percent higher rate of severe struggles, while males showed a 7.0 percent higher rate.
Specific symptoms also varied based on the age of first smartphone ownership. Among female participants who received a smartphone at age five or six, 48 percent reported severe suicidal thoughts as young adults, compared to 28 percent of those who received their first phone at age 13. Among males, the figures were 31 percent for early adopters and 20 percent for those who waited until age 13. Participants who owned phones earlier also reported higher rates of aggression, feelings of detachment from reality, and diminished emotional resilience.
“We were surprised that the specific aspects that early smartphone exposure effects after controlling for other factors are things like suicidal thoughts, aggression towards others and detachment from reality and not the typically discussed anxiety and depression,” the researcher noted.
To understand why this association exists, the researchers looked at several potential contributing factors. Globally, the age at which participants first accessed social media accounted for about 40 percent of the link between early smartphone ownership and poorer adult mind health.
Other factors played a role, but they were often tied to social media use. Cyberbullying and poor family relationships were linked to early smartphone ownership, and the researchers found that these issues were largely downstream effects of accessing social media at a young age. On the other hand, early smartphone use was also associated with disrupted sleep, but this sleep disruption appeared to happen independently of social media access, suggesting it might stem from other screen activities like gaming or watching videos.
The study highlighted regional differences, particularly in developed, English-speaking countries. Young adults in these countries reported receiving smartphones at an average age of 11, compared to ages 14 to 16 in parts of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.
In these English-speaking nations, the age of social media access explained up to 70 percent of the negative mind health associations linked to early smartphone ownership. In this region, experiences of cyberbullying and poor family relationships were almost entirely downstream of early social media access. For females in these countries, early social media access was also linked to an increased likelihood of experiencing sexual abuse, which in turn predicted poorer mental health outcomes.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2026, which found that youth social media engagement is consistently linked to poorer emotional well-being and diminished self-worth. It is worth noting, however, that the earlier study examined ongoing digital usage during childhood rather than the specific age of first smartphone ownership on young adult outcomes.
The findings are in tension with an earlier study regarding whether adolescent phone use impairs long-term psychological development. That previous study specifically tracked self-control over time in teenagers in South Korea, whereas the new study relied on retrospective reports of first smartphone ownership and broader adult mental health outcomes.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relies on observational data, meaning it can show links between early phone ownership and later mental health, but it cannot establish that one directly causes the other. Participants were also asked to recall events from their childhood, which can introduce memory errors.
“These results reflect the population level effects,” Thiagarajan said. “What that means is that they reflect having phones in a world where almost everyone else has one too. If you are the only one without a phone, it doesn’t mean you will easily have better outcomes. In fact it could even be more isolating.”
“On the other hand if an entire group doesn’t have phones it will change the social dynamic and behaviors in positive ways,” she added. “So the more impactful solutions are likely to be population level bans until 13 at the school or societal level.”
The researchers did not measure the total amount of time participants spent on screens during childhood. The study also lacked data on the specific types of online content the individuals interacted with as they grew up. The findings reflect broad patterns across large populations and do not predict the exact outcome for every child who receives a smartphone at a young age.
“We are working on understanding if these cumulative effects can be reversed and how,” Thiagarajan said. “One example is this recently published camp study.”
The study, “Protecting the Developing Mind in a Digital Age: A Global Policy Imperative,” was authored by Tara C. Thiagarajan, Jennifer Jane Newson, and Shailender Swaminathan.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #SmartphoneAge13 #MindHealthQuotient #DigitalAgeImpact #YouthMentalWellbeing #SocialMediaEffects #CyberbullyingRisk #EarlyPhoneOwnership #ScreenTimeEffects #MentalHealthResearch #GlobalMindProject
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DATE: September 10, 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: Getting a smartphone before age 13 linked to worse mental health in young adulthood
New research provides evidence that receiving a smartphone early in childhood is associated with poorer psychological well-being in young adulthood. The findings indicate that these negative outcomes are largely tied to early access to social media, which opens the door to cyberbullying, poor family relationships, and disrupted sleep. The study was published in Journal of Human Development and Capabilities.
Scientists and policymakers have expressed growing concern over the modern digital landscape. Smartphones operate as gateways into algorithmically curated digital environments. These algorithms are designed by artificial intelligence (AI) programs to maximize user engagement, often by presenting content that keeps users scrolling.
When young children navigate these spaces, they face unique challenges. According to a 2026 review, adolescent brains undergo biological changes that heighten their sensitivity to social feedback and variable rewards, like notifications and likes. This makes young minds particularly vulnerable to the design features of modern digital platforms.
Efforts to manage this issue have been mixed. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2026 evaluated the concurrent impact of restricting phone use during secondary school hours and noted little to no mental health improvement from daytime bans alone. With inconsistent findings across the scientific literature, questions remain regarding the long-term impact of digital exposure starting in early childhood.
The authors of the new study focused on the concept of mind health, which they distinguish from traditional clinical categories like depression and anxiety. Mind health encompasses the full complement of emotional, social, and cognitive capacities that allow a person to navigate life’s challenges and function productively.
The research, led by Tara C. Thiagarajan, founder and chief scientist of Sapien Labs, aimed to determine the population-level developmental consequences of owning a smartphone during childhood. They sought to understand how the age at which a child receives their first smartphone correlates with their mind health as a young adult.
“We are a nonprofit tracking mind health across the globe and exploring how different aspects of the environment contribute to the decline across each younger generation,” Thiagarajan told PsyPost. “One of the most significant environmental shifts that tracks with this trajectory is the advent of smartphones. We wanted to understand the cumulative effect of having a smartphone in childhood on development rather than just the immediate effect of using it.”
To explore this, the researchers analyzed data from the Global Mind Project, a large-scale data acquisition initiative. Their sample included over 100,000 young adults between the ages of 18 and 24, spanning 163 countries and various cultural backgrounds. Participants completed an online assessment tool called the Mind Health Quotient.
The Mind Health Quotient captures 47 different functions and symptoms, generating a score that reflects a person’s overall mental well-being on a spectrum from distressed to thriving. The survey also collected contextual information, including the age at which each participant received their first smartphone and when they first created social media accounts. The researchers used regression analysis to identify associations between early phone ownership, potential mediating factors, and current mind health.
The results showed a consistent pattern across different regions and languages. Receiving a smartphone before the age of 13 was associated with progressively lower mind health scores in early adulthood. For example, the average Mind Health Quotient score was 30 for individuals who acquired their first smartphone at age 13, but it dropped to just 1 for those who received one at age five.
“That the younger a child got a phone, the worse their mental health is likely to be in adulthood,” Thiagarajan explained. “This relationship is particularly steep before age 13. That means that every successive year before 13 makes it even worse.”
The percentage of young adults considered distressed or struggling was higher among those who acquired smartphones earlier. Compared to those who received a phone later in adolescence, females who obtained a smartphone at a very young age experienced a 9.5 percent higher rate of severe struggles, while males showed a 7.0 percent higher rate.
Specific symptoms also varied based on the age of first smartphone ownership. Among female participants who received a smartphone at age five or six, 48 percent reported severe suicidal thoughts as young adults, compared to 28 percent of those who received their first phone at age 13. Among males, the figures were 31 percent for early adopters and 20 percent for those who waited until age 13. Participants who owned phones earlier also reported higher rates of aggression, feelings of detachment from reality, and diminished emotional resilience.
“We were surprised that the specific aspects that early smartphone exposure effects after controlling for other factors are things like suicidal thoughts, aggression towards others and detachment from reality and not the typically discussed anxiety and depression,” the researcher noted.
To understand why this association exists, the researchers looked at several potential contributing factors. Globally, the age at which participants first accessed social media accounted for about 40 percent of the link between early smartphone ownership and poorer adult mind health.
Other factors played a role, but they were often tied to social media use. Cyberbullying and poor family relationships were linked to early smartphone ownership, and the researchers found that these issues were largely downstream effects of accessing social media at a young age. On the other hand, early smartphone use was also associated with disrupted sleep, but this sleep disruption appeared to happen independently of social media access, suggesting it might stem from other screen activities like gaming or watching videos.
The study highlighted regional differences, particularly in developed, English-speaking countries. Young adults in these countries reported receiving smartphones at an average age of 11, compared to ages 14 to 16 in parts of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.
In these English-speaking nations, the age of social media access explained up to 70 percent of the negative mind health associations linked to early smartphone ownership. In this region, experiences of cyberbullying and poor family relationships were almost entirely downstream of early social media access. For females in these countries, early social media access was also linked to an increased likelihood of experiencing sexual abuse, which in turn predicted poorer mental health outcomes.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2026, which found that youth social media engagement is consistently linked to poorer emotional well-being and diminished self-worth. It is worth noting, however, that the earlier study examined ongoing digital usage during childhood rather than the specific age of first smartphone ownership on young adult outcomes.
The findings are in tension with an earlier study regarding whether adolescent phone use impairs long-term psychological development. That previous study specifically tracked self-control over time in teenagers in South Korea, whereas the new study relied on retrospective reports of first smartphone ownership and broader adult mental health outcomes.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relies on observational data, meaning it can show links between early phone ownership and later mental health, but it cannot establish that one directly causes the other. Participants were also asked to recall events from their childhood, which can introduce memory errors.
“These results reflect the population level effects,” Thiagarajan said. “What that means is that they reflect having phones in a world where almost everyone else has one too. If you are the only one without a phone, it doesn’t mean you will easily have better outcomes. In fact it could even be more isolating.”
“On the other hand if an entire group doesn’t have phones it will change the social dynamic and behaviors in positive ways,” she added. “So the more impactful solutions are likely to be population level bans until 13 at the school or societal level.”
The researchers did not measure the total amount of time participants spent on screens during childhood. The study also lacked data on the specific types of online content the individuals interacted with as they grew up. The findings reflect broad patterns across large populations and do not predict the exact outcome for every child who receives a smartphone at a young age.
“We are working on understanding if these cumulative effects can be reversed and how,” Thiagarajan said. “One example is this recently published camp study.”
The study, “Protecting the Developing Mind in a Digital Age: A Global Policy Imperative,” was authored by Tara C. Thiagarajan, Jennifer Jane Newson, and Shailender Swaminathan.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #SmartphoneAge13 #MindHealthQuotient #DigitalAgeImpact #YouthMentalWellbeing #SocialMediaEffects #CyberbullyingRisk #EarlyPhoneOwnership #ScreenTimeEffects #MentalHealthResearch #GlobalMindProject
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DATE: September 10, 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: Getting a smartphone before age 13 linked to worse mental health in young adulthood
New research provides evidence that receiving a smartphone early in childhood is associated with poorer psychological well-being in young adulthood. The findings indicate that these negative outcomes are largely tied to early access to social media, which opens the door to cyberbullying, poor family relationships, and disrupted sleep. The study was published in Journal of Human Development and Capabilities.
Scientists and policymakers have expressed growing concern over the modern digital landscape. Smartphones operate as gateways into algorithmically curated digital environments. These algorithms are designed by artificial intelligence (AI) programs to maximize user engagement, often by presenting content that keeps users scrolling.
When young children navigate these spaces, they face unique challenges. According to a 2026 review, adolescent brains undergo biological changes that heighten their sensitivity to social feedback and variable rewards, like notifications and likes. This makes young minds particularly vulnerable to the design features of modern digital platforms.
Efforts to manage this issue have been mixed. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2026 evaluated the concurrent impact of restricting phone use during secondary school hours and noted little to no mental health improvement from daytime bans alone. With inconsistent findings across the scientific literature, questions remain regarding the long-term impact of digital exposure starting in early childhood.
The authors of the new study focused on the concept of mind health, which they distinguish from traditional clinical categories like depression and anxiety. Mind health encompasses the full complement of emotional, social, and cognitive capacities that allow a person to navigate life’s challenges and function productively.
The research, led by Tara C. Thiagarajan, founder and chief scientist of Sapien Labs, aimed to determine the population-level developmental consequences of owning a smartphone during childhood. They sought to understand how the age at which a child receives their first smartphone correlates with their mind health as a young adult.
“We are a nonprofit tracking mind health across the globe and exploring how different aspects of the environment contribute to the decline across each younger generation,” Thiagarajan told PsyPost. “One of the most significant environmental shifts that tracks with this trajectory is the advent of smartphones. We wanted to understand the cumulative effect of having a smartphone in childhood on development rather than just the immediate effect of using it.”
To explore this, the researchers analyzed data from the Global Mind Project, a large-scale data acquisition initiative. Their sample included over 100,000 young adults between the ages of 18 and 24, spanning 163 countries and various cultural backgrounds. Participants completed an online assessment tool called the Mind Health Quotient.
The Mind Health Quotient captures 47 different functions and symptoms, generating a score that reflects a person’s overall mental well-being on a spectrum from distressed to thriving. The survey also collected contextual information, including the age at which each participant received their first smartphone and when they first created social media accounts. The researchers used regression analysis to identify associations between early phone ownership, potential mediating factors, and current mind health.
The results showed a consistent pattern across different regions and languages. Receiving a smartphone before the age of 13 was associated with progressively lower mind health scores in early adulthood. For example, the average Mind Health Quotient score was 30 for individuals who acquired their first smartphone at age 13, but it dropped to just 1 for those who received one at age five.
“That the younger a child got a phone, the worse their mental health is likely to be in adulthood,” Thiagarajan explained. “This relationship is particularly steep before age 13. That means that every successive year before 13 makes it even worse.”
The percentage of young adults considered distressed or struggling was higher among those who acquired smartphones earlier. Compared to those who received a phone later in adolescence, females who obtained a smartphone at a very young age experienced a 9.5 percent higher rate of severe struggles, while males showed a 7.0 percent higher rate.
Specific symptoms also varied based on the age of first smartphone ownership. Among female participants who received a smartphone at age five or six, 48 percent reported severe suicidal thoughts as young adults, compared to 28 percent of those who received their first phone at age 13. Among males, the figures were 31 percent for early adopters and 20 percent for those who waited until age 13. Participants who owned phones earlier also reported higher rates of aggression, feelings of detachment from reality, and diminished emotional resilience.
“We were surprised that the specific aspects that early smartphone exposure effects after controlling for other factors are things like suicidal thoughts, aggression towards others and detachment from reality and not the typically discussed anxiety and depression,” the researcher noted.
To understand why this association exists, the researchers looked at several potential contributing factors. Globally, the age at which participants first accessed social media accounted for about 40 percent of the link between early smartphone ownership and poorer adult mind health.
Other factors played a role, but they were often tied to social media use. Cyberbullying and poor family relationships were linked to early smartphone ownership, and the researchers found that these issues were largely downstream effects of accessing social media at a young age. On the other hand, early smartphone use was also associated with disrupted sleep, but this sleep disruption appeared to happen independently of social media access, suggesting it might stem from other screen activities like gaming or watching videos.
The study highlighted regional differences, particularly in developed, English-speaking countries. Young adults in these countries reported receiving smartphones at an average age of 11, compared to ages 14 to 16 in parts of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.
In these English-speaking nations, the age of social media access explained up to 70 percent of the negative mind health associations linked to early smartphone ownership. In this region, experiences of cyberbullying and poor family relationships were almost entirely downstream of early social media access. For females in these countries, early social media access was also linked to an increased likelihood of experiencing sexual abuse, which in turn predicted poorer mental health outcomes.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2026, which found that youth social media engagement is consistently linked to poorer emotional well-being and diminished self-worth. It is worth noting, however, that the earlier study examined ongoing digital usage during childhood rather than the specific age of first smartphone ownership on young adult outcomes.
The findings are in tension with an earlier study regarding whether adolescent phone use impairs long-term psychological development. That previous study specifically tracked self-control over time in teenagers in South Korea, whereas the new study relied on retrospective reports of first smartphone ownership and broader adult mental health outcomes.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relies on observational data, meaning it can show links between early phone ownership and later mental health, but it cannot establish that one directly causes the other. Participants were also asked to recall events from their childhood, which can introduce memory errors.
“These results reflect the population level effects,” Thiagarajan said. “What that means is that they reflect having phones in a world where almost everyone else has one too. If you are the only one without a phone, it doesn’t mean you will easily have better outcomes. In fact it could even be more isolating.”
“On the other hand if an entire group doesn’t have phones it will change the social dynamic and behaviors in positive ways,” she added. “So the more impactful solutions are likely to be population level bans until 13 at the school or societal level.”
The researchers did not measure the total amount of time participants spent on screens during childhood. The study also lacked data on the specific types of online content the individuals interacted with as they grew up. The findings reflect broad patterns across large populations and do not predict the exact outcome for every child who receives a smartphone at a young age.
“We are working on understanding if these cumulative effects can be reversed and how,” Thiagarajan said. “One example is this recently published camp study.”
The study, “Protecting the Developing Mind in a Digital Age: A Global Policy Imperative,” was authored by Tara C. Thiagarajan, Jennifer Jane Newson, and Shailender Swaminathan.
-------------------------------------------------
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
-------------------------------------------------
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DATE: September 10, 2026 at 10:22AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMESDirect article link at end of text block below.
Check out the latest episode of "Psychopharm Today"! This month, host Michael E. Henry, MD, interviews Maurizio Fava, MD, about his decades-long work on treatment-resistant depression.
Watch it here: https://t.co/npZuVKt2uo
Listen here: https://t.co/vpKbbETa9U https://t.co/YWZMl0ZkfJ
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Articles can be found by scrolling down the page at Articles can be found at https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/news".
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DATE: September 10, 2026 at 10:22AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMESDirect article link at end of text block below.
Check out the latest episode of "Psychopharm Today"! This month, host Michael E. Henry, MD, interviews Maurizio Fava, MD, about his decades-long work on treatment-resistant depression.
Watch it here: https://t.co/npZuVKt2uo
Listen here: https://t.co/vpKbbETa9U https://t.co/YWZMl0ZkfJ
Here are any URLs found in the article text:
Listen
Articles can be found by scrolling down the page at Articles can be found at https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/news".
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #psychotherapist #Psychopharmacology #TreatmentResistantDepression #MentalHealth #MaurizioFava #DepressionResearch
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DATE: September 10, 2026 at 10:22AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMESDirect article link at end of text block below.
Check out the latest episode of "Psychopharm Today"! This month, host Michael E. Henry, MD, interviews Maurizio Fava, MD, about his decades-long work on treatment-resistant depression.
Watch it here: https://t.co/npZuVKt2uo
Listen here: https://t.co/vpKbbETa9U https://t.co/YWZMl0ZkfJ
Here are any URLs found in the article text:
Listen
Articles can be found by scrolling down the page at Articles can be found at https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/news".
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Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #psychotherapist #Psychopharmacology #TreatmentResistantDepression #MentalHealth #MaurizioFava #DepressionResearch
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DATE: September 10, 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: Shyness makes facial expressions seem more intense, but only in certain cultures
People with higher levels of shyness tend to perceive other people’s facial expressions as more intense, but this effect appears to depend heavily on their cultural background. A recent study found that shyness heightens the perceived intensity of emotions among young adults in Mainland China, but the same pattern does not appear in Canadian populations. The research, published in Psychological Reports, suggests that cultural rules about how we display our feelings play a major role in how personality shapes our perception of others.
Emotions are a universal human experience, but the way we display and interpret them depends on where we grow up. In Western societies, expressing emotions openly and directly is generally encouraged. In contrast, many East Asian societies place a higher value on social harmony, which often translates to more subdued emotional displays. This idea is supported by a variety of prior studies. For example, a 2016 review noted that people in Western cultures tend to experience and value high-energy emotions, while people in Eastern cultures tend to prefer and experience calmer, lower-energy emotional states.
Because emotional displays are more restrained in collectivist cultures, individuals in these environments might learn to pay closer attention to subtle changes in facial expressions. This cultural tuning can even be seen at the neural level. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that simply hearing an emotion word changed how the brains of Chinese immigrants processed facial expressions, while having no such effect on the brains of White American participants.
Beyond cultural background, individual personality traits also influence how we read faces. Shyness is a personality trait characterized by feeling nervous, timid, or self-conscious in social situations. People with high levels of shyness often experience a strong fear of being judged by others, which can cause them to become highly vigilant when navigating social interactions. Prior research hints that shy individuals might overestimate the intensity of negative emotions, seeing them as more threatening than they actually are.
Until now, it was unknown how a person’s shyness and their broader cultural environment might combine to shape how they judge emotional intensity. Emotional intensity refers to the physical strength or energy of a feeling displayed on someone’s face. A slight smile represents a low-intensity emotion, while a wide grin represents a high-intensity emotion. To address this gap, researchers led by Xiaoxue (Sonia) Kong, an assistant professor at the University of Northern British Columbia, and Gabriel (Naiqi) Xiao, an associate professor at McMaster University, set out to see if the link between shyness and emotion perception changes across different cultural contexts.
“Previous research has shown that both cultural background and individual personality traits can influence how people perceive facial emotions, but very few studies have examined these two factors together,” Kong and Xiao told PsyPost.
“We were particularly interested in shyness because shy individuals may be more sensitive to social and emotional cues and shyness is also a personality trait whose expression and implications can be shaped by culture. So we wanted to bring these two areas together.”
The researchers recruited 160 young adults for their experiment. This included 47 participants living in Mainland China, alongside 59 White participants and 54 East Asian participants living in Canada. The East Asian Canadian group primarily consisted of individuals originally from regions like Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan who had been living in Canada for four to ten years.
To measure shyness, the participants completed a widely used questionnaire that asked them to rate how strongly they agreed with statements about feeling nervous or tense in social settings. Next, the participants completed a computer-based emotion perception task.
During this task, participants looked at photographs of faces expressing happiness, sadness, anger, fear, or a neutral state. To prevent the participants from struggling to read the faces of people from unfamiliar backgrounds, the researchers only showed faces that matched the participant’s own racial group. The researchers used specialized software to blend emotional faces with neutral faces, creating five specific levels of emotional intensity: zero percent, 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent, and 100 percent. Each face appeared on the screen for a brief moment, and the participants then used a sliding scale from zero to 100 to rate how intense the emotion looked.
When analyzing the results, the researchers found that participants across all three groups were generally accurate at tracking emotional intensity. As the physical intensity of the facial expression increased in the photographs, the participants’ intensity ratings reliably increased as well.
However, the participants’ level of shyness had a distinct impact on these ratings depending on their cultural group. Among the participants living in Mainland China, shyness acted as a strong amplifier. The higher a Chinese participant scored on the shyness scale, the more intense they perceived all the facial expressions to be. This heightened sensitivity applied across the board, whether the face was showing a positive emotion like happiness or a negative one like fear.
“One finding that surprised us was that the effect of shyness was not limited to negative emotions,” the researchers explained.
“Previous research has often linked shyness to heightened sensitivity to socially threatening or negative emotional cues, but in our study, shyness was associated with greater perceived emotional intensity more broadly among the Mainland Chinese participants.”
This amplifying effect of shyness was completely absent in both the White Canadian and East Asian Canadian groups. For the participants living in Canada, being highly shy did not change how intensely they rated the facial expressions.
“We included both White Canadian and East Asian Canadian participants, in addition to participants living in Mainland China,” the researchers noted. “The fact that the two Canadian groups showed similar patterns, while the Mainland Chinese group differed, suggests that where people live and the cultural environment they experience may be important alongside ethnic background when we think about personality and emotion perception.”
“The way personality influences our perception of other people’s emotions may depend on the cultural context in which we live,” they added. “This suggests that shyness does not necessarily operate in the same way across cultures.”
The researchers suggest that in Chinese culture, where emotional restraint is the norm, shy individuals might develop an intense sensitivity to subtle facial changes to avoid social missteps. Because they are less exposed to loud or exaggerated emotional displays, they might react more strongly when reading expressions. Their heightened vigilance makes any emotional display register as stronger. In contrast, Western cultures encourage more direct emotional communication, which might reduce the need for shy individuals to be on such high alert. The social costs of misreading a facial expression might simply be lower in a Western environment.
The fact that East Asian Canadians did not show the same pattern as Mainland Chinese participants suggests that they may have adapted to Western communication styles. It is also possible that the varied backgrounds within this immigrant group diluted the cultural effect observed in the Mainland Chinese sample.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, the study relied on static photographs of facial expressions. In real-world social interactions, people express emotions dynamically through moving facial muscles, body language, and tone of voice. A photograph might not fully capture how a shy person reads a shifting emotional situation in everyday life.
The study also focused on three specific groups, which means the results cannot automatically be applied to people from other ethnic or cultural backgrounds. Different societies have their own unique rules about emotional expression, and incorporating a wider variety of global populations could provide a more complete picture of how personality and culture interact.
Additionally, while the study included East Asian Canadians, the researchers did not measure exactly how much these individuals had adopted Canadian cultural norms. Tracking how immigrant populations adapt their social perception over time could offer deeper insights into the way cultural shifts alter emotional processing.
“Our findings should not be interpreted as suggesting that all shy Chinese individuals perceive emotions in a particular way, or that culture alone causes these differences,” the researchers clarified. “Our sample consisted of young adults from three specific groups, and we used static facial expressions in a laboratory setting.”
“Future research with more culturally diverse samples and more naturalistic emotional interactions will be important for determining how broadly these findings generalize,” they concluded.
The study, “Shyness and Facial Emotion Perception: A Cross-Cultural Study,” was authored by Xiaoxue Kong, Wei Fang, Skade Fernando, Naiqi G. Xiao, and Louis A. Schmidt.
-------------------------------------------------
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Shyness #FacialEmotionPerception #CrossCulturalStudy # MainlandChina #Canada #EastAsianCanada #CulturalInfluence #EmotionalIntensities #SocialNorms #EmotionReading
-
DATE: September 10, 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: Shyness makes facial expressions seem more intense, but only in certain cultures
People with higher levels of shyness tend to perceive other people’s facial expressions as more intense, but this effect appears to depend heavily on their cultural background. A recent study found that shyness heightens the perceived intensity of emotions among young adults in Mainland China, but the same pattern does not appear in Canadian populations. The research, published in Psychological Reports, suggests that cultural rules about how we display our feelings play a major role in how personality shapes our perception of others.
Emotions are a universal human experience, but the way we display and interpret them depends on where we grow up. In Western societies, expressing emotions openly and directly is generally encouraged. In contrast, many East Asian societies place a higher value on social harmony, which often translates to more subdued emotional displays. This idea is supported by a variety of prior studies. For example, a 2016 review noted that people in Western cultures tend to experience and value high-energy emotions, while people in Eastern cultures tend to prefer and experience calmer, lower-energy emotional states.
Because emotional displays are more restrained in collectivist cultures, individuals in these environments might learn to pay closer attention to subtle changes in facial expressions. This cultural tuning can even be seen at the neural level. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that simply hearing an emotion word changed how the brains of Chinese immigrants processed facial expressions, while having no such effect on the brains of White American participants.
Beyond cultural background, individual personality traits also influence how we read faces. Shyness is a personality trait characterized by feeling nervous, timid, or self-conscious in social situations. People with high levels of shyness often experience a strong fear of being judged by others, which can cause them to become highly vigilant when navigating social interactions. Prior research hints that shy individuals might overestimate the intensity of negative emotions, seeing them as more threatening than they actually are.
Until now, it was unknown how a person’s shyness and their broader cultural environment might combine to shape how they judge emotional intensity. Emotional intensity refers to the physical strength or energy of a feeling displayed on someone’s face. A slight smile represents a low-intensity emotion, while a wide grin represents a high-intensity emotion. To address this gap, researchers led by Xiaoxue (Sonia) Kong, an assistant professor at the University of Northern British Columbia, and Gabriel (Naiqi) Xiao, an associate professor at McMaster University, set out to see if the link between shyness and emotion perception changes across different cultural contexts.
“Previous research has shown that both cultural background and individual personality traits can influence how people perceive facial emotions, but very few studies have examined these two factors together,” Kong and Xiao told PsyPost.
“We were particularly interested in shyness because shy individuals may be more sensitive to social and emotional cues and shyness is also a personality trait whose expression and implications can be shaped by culture. So we wanted to bring these two areas together.”
The researchers recruited 160 young adults for their experiment. This included 47 participants living in Mainland China, alongside 59 White participants and 54 East Asian participants living in Canada. The East Asian Canadian group primarily consisted of individuals originally from regions like Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan who had been living in Canada for four to ten years.
To measure shyness, the participants completed a widely used questionnaire that asked them to rate how strongly they agreed with statements about feeling nervous or tense in social settings. Next, the participants completed a computer-based emotion perception task.
During this task, participants looked at photographs of faces expressing happiness, sadness, anger, fear, or a neutral state. To prevent the participants from struggling to read the faces of people from unfamiliar backgrounds, the researchers only showed faces that matched the participant’s own racial group. The researchers used specialized software to blend emotional faces with neutral faces, creating five specific levels of emotional intensity: zero percent, 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent, and 100 percent. Each face appeared on the screen for a brief moment, and the participants then used a sliding scale from zero to 100 to rate how intense the emotion looked.
When analyzing the results, the researchers found that participants across all three groups were generally accurate at tracking emotional intensity. As the physical intensity of the facial expression increased in the photographs, the participants’ intensity ratings reliably increased as well.
However, the participants’ level of shyness had a distinct impact on these ratings depending on their cultural group. Among the participants living in Mainland China, shyness acted as a strong amplifier. The higher a Chinese participant scored on the shyness scale, the more intense they perceived all the facial expressions to be. This heightened sensitivity applied across the board, whether the face was showing a positive emotion like happiness or a negative one like fear.
“One finding that surprised us was that the effect of shyness was not limited to negative emotions,” the researchers explained.
“Previous research has often linked shyness to heightened sensitivity to socially threatening or negative emotional cues, but in our study, shyness was associated with greater perceived emotional intensity more broadly among the Mainland Chinese participants.”
This amplifying effect of shyness was completely absent in both the White Canadian and East Asian Canadian groups. For the participants living in Canada, being highly shy did not change how intensely they rated the facial expressions.
“We included both White Canadian and East Asian Canadian participants, in addition to participants living in Mainland China,” the researchers noted. “The fact that the two Canadian groups showed similar patterns, while the Mainland Chinese group differed, suggests that where people live and the cultural environment they experience may be important alongside ethnic background when we think about personality and emotion perception.”
“The way personality influences our perception of other people’s emotions may depend on the cultural context in which we live,” they added. “This suggests that shyness does not necessarily operate in the same way across cultures.”
The researchers suggest that in Chinese culture, where emotional restraint is the norm, shy individuals might develop an intense sensitivity to subtle facial changes to avoid social missteps. Because they are less exposed to loud or exaggerated emotional displays, they might react more strongly when reading expressions. Their heightened vigilance makes any emotional display register as stronger. In contrast, Western cultures encourage more direct emotional communication, which might reduce the need for shy individuals to be on such high alert. The social costs of misreading a facial expression might simply be lower in a Western environment.
The fact that East Asian Canadians did not show the same pattern as Mainland Chinese participants suggests that they may have adapted to Western communication styles. It is also possible that the varied backgrounds within this immigrant group diluted the cultural effect observed in the Mainland Chinese sample.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, the study relied on static photographs of facial expressions. In real-world social interactions, people express emotions dynamically through moving facial muscles, body language, and tone of voice. A photograph might not fully capture how a shy person reads a shifting emotional situation in everyday life.
The study also focused on three specific groups, which means the results cannot automatically be applied to people from other ethnic or cultural backgrounds. Different societies have their own unique rules about emotional expression, and incorporating a wider variety of global populations could provide a more complete picture of how personality and culture interact.
Additionally, while the study included East Asian Canadians, the researchers did not measure exactly how much these individuals had adopted Canadian cultural norms. Tracking how immigrant populations adapt their social perception over time could offer deeper insights into the way cultural shifts alter emotional processing.
“Our findings should not be interpreted as suggesting that all shy Chinese individuals perceive emotions in a particular way, or that culture alone causes these differences,” the researchers clarified. “Our sample consisted of young adults from three specific groups, and we used static facial expressions in a laboratory setting.”
“Future research with more culturally diverse samples and more naturalistic emotional interactions will be important for determining how broadly these findings generalize,” they concluded.
The study, “Shyness and Facial Emotion Perception: A Cross-Cultural Study,” was authored by Xiaoxue Kong, Wei Fang, Skade Fernando, Naiqi G. Xiao, and Louis A. Schmidt.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #Shyness #FacialEmotionPerception #CrossCulturalStudy # MainlandChina #Canada #EastAsianCanada #CulturalInfluence #EmotionalIntensities #SocialNorms #EmotionReading
-
DATE: September 10, 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: Shyness makes facial expressions seem more intense, but only in certain cultures
People with higher levels of shyness tend to perceive other people’s facial expressions as more intense, but this effect appears to depend heavily on their cultural background. A recent study found that shyness heightens the perceived intensity of emotions among young adults in Mainland China, but the same pattern does not appear in Canadian populations. The research, published in Psychological Reports, suggests that cultural rules about how we display our feelings play a major role in how personality shapes our perception of others.
Emotions are a universal human experience, but the way we display and interpret them depends on where we grow up. In Western societies, expressing emotions openly and directly is generally encouraged. In contrast, many East Asian societies place a higher value on social harmony, which often translates to more subdued emotional displays. This idea is supported by a variety of prior studies. For example, a 2016 review noted that people in Western cultures tend to experience and value high-energy emotions, while people in Eastern cultures tend to prefer and experience calmer, lower-energy emotional states.
Because emotional displays are more restrained in collectivist cultures, individuals in these environments might learn to pay closer attention to subtle changes in facial expressions. This cultural tuning can even be seen at the neural level. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that simply hearing an emotion word changed how the brains of Chinese immigrants processed facial expressions, while having no such effect on the brains of White American participants.
Beyond cultural background, individual personality traits also influence how we read faces. Shyness is a personality trait characterized by feeling nervous, timid, or self-conscious in social situations. People with high levels of shyness often experience a strong fear of being judged by others, which can cause them to become highly vigilant when navigating social interactions. Prior research hints that shy individuals might overestimate the intensity of negative emotions, seeing them as more threatening than they actually are.
Until now, it was unknown how a person’s shyness and their broader cultural environment might combine to shape how they judge emotional intensity. Emotional intensity refers to the physical strength or energy of a feeling displayed on someone’s face. A slight smile represents a low-intensity emotion, while a wide grin represents a high-intensity emotion. To address this gap, researchers led by Xiaoxue (Sonia) Kong, an assistant professor at the University of Northern British Columbia, and Gabriel (Naiqi) Xiao, an associate professor at McMaster University, set out to see if the link between shyness and emotion perception changes across different cultural contexts.
“Previous research has shown that both cultural background and individual personality traits can influence how people perceive facial emotions, but very few studies have examined these two factors together,” Kong and Xiao told PsyPost.
“We were particularly interested in shyness because shy individuals may be more sensitive to social and emotional cues and shyness is also a personality trait whose expression and implications can be shaped by culture. So we wanted to bring these two areas together.”
The researchers recruited 160 young adults for their experiment. This included 47 participants living in Mainland China, alongside 59 White participants and 54 East Asian participants living in Canada. The East Asian Canadian group primarily consisted of individuals originally from regions like Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan who had been living in Canada for four to ten years.
To measure shyness, the participants completed a widely used questionnaire that asked them to rate how strongly they agreed with statements about feeling nervous or tense in social settings. Next, the participants completed a computer-based emotion perception task.
During this task, participants looked at photographs of faces expressing happiness, sadness, anger, fear, or a neutral state. To prevent the participants from struggling to read the faces of people from unfamiliar backgrounds, the researchers only showed faces that matched the participant’s own racial group. The researchers used specialized software to blend emotional faces with neutral faces, creating five specific levels of emotional intensity: zero percent, 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent, and 100 percent. Each face appeared on the screen for a brief moment, and the participants then used a sliding scale from zero to 100 to rate how intense the emotion looked.
When analyzing the results, the researchers found that participants across all three groups were generally accurate at tracking emotional intensity. As the physical intensity of the facial expression increased in the photographs, the participants’ intensity ratings reliably increased as well.
However, the participants’ level of shyness had a distinct impact on these ratings depending on their cultural group. Among the participants living in Mainland China, shyness acted as a strong amplifier. The higher a Chinese participant scored on the shyness scale, the more intense they perceived all the facial expressions to be. This heightened sensitivity applied across the board, whether the face was showing a positive emotion like happiness or a negative one like fear.
“One finding that surprised us was that the effect of shyness was not limited to negative emotions,” the researchers explained.
“Previous research has often linked shyness to heightened sensitivity to socially threatening or negative emotional cues, but in our study, shyness was associated with greater perceived emotional intensity more broadly among the Mainland Chinese participants.”
This amplifying effect of shyness was completely absent in both the White Canadian and East Asian Canadian groups. For the participants living in Canada, being highly shy did not change how intensely they rated the facial expressions.
“We included both White Canadian and East Asian Canadian participants, in addition to participants living in Mainland China,” the researchers noted. “The fact that the two Canadian groups showed similar patterns, while the Mainland Chinese group differed, suggests that where people live and the cultural environment they experience may be important alongside ethnic background when we think about personality and emotion perception.”
“The way personality influences our perception of other people’s emotions may depend on the cultural context in which we live,” they added. “This suggests that shyness does not necessarily operate in the same way across cultures.”
The researchers suggest that in Chinese culture, where emotional restraint is the norm, shy individuals might develop an intense sensitivity to subtle facial changes to avoid social missteps. Because they are less exposed to loud or exaggerated emotional displays, they might react more strongly when reading expressions. Their heightened vigilance makes any emotional display register as stronger. In contrast, Western cultures encourage more direct emotional communication, which might reduce the need for shy individuals to be on such high alert. The social costs of misreading a facial expression might simply be lower in a Western environment.
The fact that East Asian Canadians did not show the same pattern as Mainland Chinese participants suggests that they may have adapted to Western communication styles. It is also possible that the varied backgrounds within this immigrant group diluted the cultural effect observed in the Mainland Chinese sample.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, the study relied on static photographs of facial expressions. In real-world social interactions, people express emotions dynamically through moving facial muscles, body language, and tone of voice. A photograph might not fully capture how a shy person reads a shifting emotional situation in everyday life.
The study also focused on three specific groups, which means the results cannot automatically be applied to people from other ethnic or cultural backgrounds. Different societies have their own unique rules about emotional expression, and incorporating a wider variety of global populations could provide a more complete picture of how personality and culture interact.
Additionally, while the study included East Asian Canadians, the researchers did not measure exactly how much these individuals had adopted Canadian cultural norms. Tracking how immigrant populations adapt their social perception over time could offer deeper insights into the way cultural shifts alter emotional processing.
“Our findings should not be interpreted as suggesting that all shy Chinese individuals perceive emotions in a particular way, or that culture alone causes these differences,” the researchers clarified. “Our sample consisted of young adults from three specific groups, and we used static facial expressions in a laboratory setting.”
“Future research with more culturally diverse samples and more naturalistic emotional interactions will be important for determining how broadly these findings generalize,” they concluded.
The study, “Shyness and Facial Emotion Perception: A Cross-Cultural Study,” was authored by Xiaoxue Kong, Wei Fang, Skade Fernando, Naiqi G. Xiao, and Louis A. Schmidt.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #Shyness #FacialEmotionPerception #CrossCulturalStudy # MainlandChina #Canada #EastAsianCanada #CulturalInfluence #EmotionalIntensities #SocialNorms #EmotionReading
-
DATE: September 10, 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: Daily stress predicts nighttime wakefulness through cognitive arousal
URL: https://www.psypost.org/racing-thoughts-not-racing-hearts-link-daily-stress-to-poor-sleep/
A new study reveals that daily stress is associated with racing thoughts at bedtime, which in turn predicts disrupted sleep for nearly everyone. However, people who are naturally prone to stress-induced sleep loss experience higher overall stress and prolonged nighttime wakefulness compared to more resilient sleepers. The findings were published in the Journal of Sleep Research.
Chronic stress is a well-documented risk factor for a host of physical and mental health issues. One common way stress harms the body is by disrupting rest. Many people experience heightened cognitive activity, like worry or rumination, right before bed. Others experience physical symptoms like an elevated heart rate or sweating. Both types of arousal can interfere with the body’s ability to transition into restful sleep.
Not everyone reacts to daily pressures the same way. Some individuals possess high sleep reactivity, meaning they are particularly vulnerable to losing sleep when faced with stressful situations. Sleep researchers often frame this using a three-part model. Sleep reactivity acts as a predisposing vulnerability. Daily stressors act as precipitating events. Finally, pre-sleep arousal acts as a perpetuating mechanism that keeps the cycle going.
Prior research into this vulnerability often relied on broad annual surveys or focused on major life events, like job loss or bereavement. While these major events are impactful, they are relatively infrequent. Everyday pressures, such as academic deadlines or interpersonal arguments, accumulate over time and affect health.
Researchers wanted to understand exactly how routine stress, pre-sleep arousal, and baseline sleep reactivity interact on a daily basis. The research team was led by Noof Abdullah Saad Shaif, Stijn A. A. Massar, and Ju Lynn Ong at the National University of Singapore. They designed a study to track both the mental and physical aspects of nighttime arousal simultaneously, filling a gap in a field that often studies these factors in isolation.
The researchers recruited full-time university students who did not have existing sleep disorders or psychiatric conditions. They administered a standard questionnaire to measure sleep reactivity in 264 eligible participants. From this pool, the researchers selected 30 students with the highest vulnerability to stress-induced sleep loss and 30 students with the lowest vulnerability.
This group of 60 students participated in a two-week monitoring period during their regular academic semester. The researchers instructed the participants to wear wrist actigraphy monitors. These devices use motion sensors to objectively record sleep patterns in a natural environment. The monitors logged when a person fell asleep, how much total sleep they achieved, and how many minutes they spent awake in the middle of the night.
Participants also wore a smart ring that recorded their heart rate in the 20 minutes before bedtime. This provided an objective measure of physical arousal that could be compared against self-reported physical symptoms. Each night before bed, the students completed a survey rating their perceived stress levels for that day. The following morning, they filled out another survey to report how much cognitive and physical arousal they remembered experiencing the night before.
The team collected 800 nights of matched survey and tracker data. They analyzed the results in two distinct ways to capture both short-term fluctuations and long-term group differences.
First, they looked at day-to-day fluctuations within each individual. They found that on days when a student reported higher stress than their own personal average, they experienced more racing thoughts at bedtime. This cognitive arousal predicted less total sleep time and a longer wait to fall asleep. This pattern occurred consistently across the board, regardless of whether the student had high or low baseline sleep reactivity.
Next, the researchers analyzed the differences between the two groups. In this comparison, baseline sleep reactivity played a substantial role. Students in the high sleep reactivity group reported greater average stress and higher cognitive arousal over the two weeks. They did not actually experience a higher number of stressors than the low-reactivity group. Instead, their perception of the stress was amplified.
This heightened mental arousal predicted longer periods of wakefulness in the middle of the night for the highly reactive group compared to the low-reactive group. The researchers suggest that racing thoughts at bedtime might carry over into the night. When highly reactive individuals experience normal nighttime awakenings, intrusive thoughts may resurface, making it harder to fall back asleep.
The physical measurements yielded an unexpected result. Neither self-reported physical symptoms nor the objective heart rate data mediated the relationship between daily stress and sleep disruption. The differences in objective heart rate between the high and low reactivity groups were not statistically significant.
In this sample, cognitive arousal was the primary mechanism connecting daytime stress to nighttime wakefulness. The researchers noted that minor daily stressors might not be severe enough to trigger pronounced physical responses, such as a spiking heart rate.
The study relies on a specific demographic, consisting mainly of young, female, Chinese university students in Singapore. These results might not apply to older adults, different cultural groups, or clinical populations with diagnosed sleep disorders. The types of stress experienced by university students may also differ from the chronic pressures faced by other groups.
The timing of the surveys presents another limitation. Participants reported their pre-sleep arousal the morning after it occurred, rather than in the moment. The researchers chose this design to avoid introducing artificial stress or screen light right at bedtime, which could contaminate the sleep tracking data. This means the self-reported mental arousal was retrospective. The responses could have been influenced by how well the participant felt they slept that night.
Future research could investigate whether interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia can help retrain the brain to handle stress better. By targeting racing thoughts and rumination, people with high sleep reactivity might learn to protect their rest against the wear and tear of daily life. Tracking these metrics in a wider variety of people could also reveal if physical arousal plays a larger role in groups facing more severe types of trauma.
The study, “Sleep Reactivity Amplifies the Impact of Pre-Sleep Cognitive Arousal on Sleep Disturbances,” was authored by Noof Abdullah Saad Shaif, Julian Lim, Anthony N. Reffi, Michael W. L. Chee, Stijn A. A. Massar, and Ju Lynn Ong.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/racing-thoughts-not-racing-hearts-link-daily-stress-to-poor-sleep/
-------------------------------------------------
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Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #SleepReactivity #CognitiveArousal #SleepDisturbance #NighttimeWakefulness #StressAndSleep #RacingThoughts #PreSleepArousal #SleepResearch #UniversitySleep #SleepQuality
-
DATE: September 10, 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: Daily stress predicts nighttime wakefulness through cognitive arousal
URL: https://www.psypost.org/racing-thoughts-not-racing-hearts-link-daily-stress-to-poor-sleep/
A new study reveals that daily stress is associated with racing thoughts at bedtime, which in turn predicts disrupted sleep for nearly everyone. However, people who are naturally prone to stress-induced sleep loss experience higher overall stress and prolonged nighttime wakefulness compared to more resilient sleepers. The findings were published in the Journal of Sleep Research.
Chronic stress is a well-documented risk factor for a host of physical and mental health issues. One common way stress harms the body is by disrupting rest. Many people experience heightened cognitive activity, like worry or rumination, right before bed. Others experience physical symptoms like an elevated heart rate or sweating. Both types of arousal can interfere with the body’s ability to transition into restful sleep.
Not everyone reacts to daily pressures the same way. Some individuals possess high sleep reactivity, meaning they are particularly vulnerable to losing sleep when faced with stressful situations. Sleep researchers often frame this using a three-part model. Sleep reactivity acts as a predisposing vulnerability. Daily stressors act as precipitating events. Finally, pre-sleep arousal acts as a perpetuating mechanism that keeps the cycle going.
Prior research into this vulnerability often relied on broad annual surveys or focused on major life events, like job loss or bereavement. While these major events are impactful, they are relatively infrequent. Everyday pressures, such as academic deadlines or interpersonal arguments, accumulate over time and affect health.
Researchers wanted to understand exactly how routine stress, pre-sleep arousal, and baseline sleep reactivity interact on a daily basis. The research team was led by Noof Abdullah Saad Shaif, Stijn A. A. Massar, and Ju Lynn Ong at the National University of Singapore. They designed a study to track both the mental and physical aspects of nighttime arousal simultaneously, filling a gap in a field that often studies these factors in isolation.
The researchers recruited full-time university students who did not have existing sleep disorders or psychiatric conditions. They administered a standard questionnaire to measure sleep reactivity in 264 eligible participants. From this pool, the researchers selected 30 students with the highest vulnerability to stress-induced sleep loss and 30 students with the lowest vulnerability.
This group of 60 students participated in a two-week monitoring period during their regular academic semester. The researchers instructed the participants to wear wrist actigraphy monitors. These devices use motion sensors to objectively record sleep patterns in a natural environment. The monitors logged when a person fell asleep, how much total sleep they achieved, and how many minutes they spent awake in the middle of the night.
Participants also wore a smart ring that recorded their heart rate in the 20 minutes before bedtime. This provided an objective measure of physical arousal that could be compared against self-reported physical symptoms. Each night before bed, the students completed a survey rating their perceived stress levels for that day. The following morning, they filled out another survey to report how much cognitive and physical arousal they remembered experiencing the night before.
The team collected 800 nights of matched survey and tracker data. They analyzed the results in two distinct ways to capture both short-term fluctuations and long-term group differences.
First, they looked at day-to-day fluctuations within each individual. They found that on days when a student reported higher stress than their own personal average, they experienced more racing thoughts at bedtime. This cognitive arousal predicted less total sleep time and a longer wait to fall asleep. This pattern occurred consistently across the board, regardless of whether the student had high or low baseline sleep reactivity.
Next, the researchers analyzed the differences between the two groups. In this comparison, baseline sleep reactivity played a substantial role. Students in the high sleep reactivity group reported greater average stress and higher cognitive arousal over the two weeks. They did not actually experience a higher number of stressors than the low-reactivity group. Instead, their perception of the stress was amplified.
This heightened mental arousal predicted longer periods of wakefulness in the middle of the night for the highly reactive group compared to the low-reactive group. The researchers suggest that racing thoughts at bedtime might carry over into the night. When highly reactive individuals experience normal nighttime awakenings, intrusive thoughts may resurface, making it harder to fall back asleep.
The physical measurements yielded an unexpected result. Neither self-reported physical symptoms nor the objective heart rate data mediated the relationship between daily stress and sleep disruption. The differences in objective heart rate between the high and low reactivity groups were not statistically significant.
In this sample, cognitive arousal was the primary mechanism connecting daytime stress to nighttime wakefulness. The researchers noted that minor daily stressors might not be severe enough to trigger pronounced physical responses, such as a spiking heart rate.
The study relies on a specific demographic, consisting mainly of young, female, Chinese university students in Singapore. These results might not apply to older adults, different cultural groups, or clinical populations with diagnosed sleep disorders. The types of stress experienced by university students may also differ from the chronic pressures faced by other groups.
The timing of the surveys presents another limitation. Participants reported their pre-sleep arousal the morning after it occurred, rather than in the moment. The researchers chose this design to avoid introducing artificial stress or screen light right at bedtime, which could contaminate the sleep tracking data. This means the self-reported mental arousal was retrospective. The responses could have been influenced by how well the participant felt they slept that night.
Future research could investigate whether interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia can help retrain the brain to handle stress better. By targeting racing thoughts and rumination, people with high sleep reactivity might learn to protect their rest against the wear and tear of daily life. Tracking these metrics in a wider variety of people could also reveal if physical arousal plays a larger role in groups facing more severe types of trauma.
The study, “Sleep Reactivity Amplifies the Impact of Pre-Sleep Cognitive Arousal on Sleep Disturbances,” was authored by Noof Abdullah Saad Shaif, Julian Lim, Anthony N. Reffi, Michael W. L. Chee, Stijn A. A. Massar, and Ju Lynn Ong.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/racing-thoughts-not-racing-hearts-link-daily-stress-to-poor-sleep/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #SleepReactivity #CognitiveArousal #SleepDisturbance #NighttimeWakefulness #StressAndSleep #RacingThoughts #PreSleepArousal #SleepResearch #UniversitySleep #SleepQuality
-
DATE: September 10, 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: Daily stress predicts nighttime wakefulness through cognitive arousal
URL: https://www.psypost.org/racing-thoughts-not-racing-hearts-link-daily-stress-to-poor-sleep/
A new study reveals that daily stress is associated with racing thoughts at bedtime, which in turn predicts disrupted sleep for nearly everyone. However, people who are naturally prone to stress-induced sleep loss experience higher overall stress and prolonged nighttime wakefulness compared to more resilient sleepers. The findings were published in the Journal of Sleep Research.
Chronic stress is a well-documented risk factor for a host of physical and mental health issues. One common way stress harms the body is by disrupting rest. Many people experience heightened cognitive activity, like worry or rumination, right before bed. Others experience physical symptoms like an elevated heart rate or sweating. Both types of arousal can interfere with the body’s ability to transition into restful sleep.
Not everyone reacts to daily pressures the same way. Some individuals possess high sleep reactivity, meaning they are particularly vulnerable to losing sleep when faced with stressful situations. Sleep researchers often frame this using a three-part model. Sleep reactivity acts as a predisposing vulnerability. Daily stressors act as precipitating events. Finally, pre-sleep arousal acts as a perpetuating mechanism that keeps the cycle going.
Prior research into this vulnerability often relied on broad annual surveys or focused on major life events, like job loss or bereavement. While these major events are impactful, they are relatively infrequent. Everyday pressures, such as academic deadlines or interpersonal arguments, accumulate over time and affect health.
Researchers wanted to understand exactly how routine stress, pre-sleep arousal, and baseline sleep reactivity interact on a daily basis. The research team was led by Noof Abdullah Saad Shaif, Stijn A. A. Massar, and Ju Lynn Ong at the National University of Singapore. They designed a study to track both the mental and physical aspects of nighttime arousal simultaneously, filling a gap in a field that often studies these factors in isolation.
The researchers recruited full-time university students who did not have existing sleep disorders or psychiatric conditions. They administered a standard questionnaire to measure sleep reactivity in 264 eligible participants. From this pool, the researchers selected 30 students with the highest vulnerability to stress-induced sleep loss and 30 students with the lowest vulnerability.
This group of 60 students participated in a two-week monitoring period during their regular academic semester. The researchers instructed the participants to wear wrist actigraphy monitors. These devices use motion sensors to objectively record sleep patterns in a natural environment. The monitors logged when a person fell asleep, how much total sleep they achieved, and how many minutes they spent awake in the middle of the night.
Participants also wore a smart ring that recorded their heart rate in the 20 minutes before bedtime. This provided an objective measure of physical arousal that could be compared against self-reported physical symptoms. Each night before bed, the students completed a survey rating their perceived stress levels for that day. The following morning, they filled out another survey to report how much cognitive and physical arousal they remembered experiencing the night before.
The team collected 800 nights of matched survey and tracker data. They analyzed the results in two distinct ways to capture both short-term fluctuations and long-term group differences.
First, they looked at day-to-day fluctuations within each individual. They found that on days when a student reported higher stress than their own personal average, they experienced more racing thoughts at bedtime. This cognitive arousal predicted less total sleep time and a longer wait to fall asleep. This pattern occurred consistently across the board, regardless of whether the student had high or low baseline sleep reactivity.
Next, the researchers analyzed the differences between the two groups. In this comparison, baseline sleep reactivity played a substantial role. Students in the high sleep reactivity group reported greater average stress and higher cognitive arousal over the two weeks. They did not actually experience a higher number of stressors than the low-reactivity group. Instead, their perception of the stress was amplified.
This heightened mental arousal predicted longer periods of wakefulness in the middle of the night for the highly reactive group compared to the low-reactive group. The researchers suggest that racing thoughts at bedtime might carry over into the night. When highly reactive individuals experience normal nighttime awakenings, intrusive thoughts may resurface, making it harder to fall back asleep.
The physical measurements yielded an unexpected result. Neither self-reported physical symptoms nor the objective heart rate data mediated the relationship between daily stress and sleep disruption. The differences in objective heart rate between the high and low reactivity groups were not statistically significant.
In this sample, cognitive arousal was the primary mechanism connecting daytime stress to nighttime wakefulness. The researchers noted that minor daily stressors might not be severe enough to trigger pronounced physical responses, such as a spiking heart rate.
The study relies on a specific demographic, consisting mainly of young, female, Chinese university students in Singapore. These results might not apply to older adults, different cultural groups, or clinical populations with diagnosed sleep disorders. The types of stress experienced by university students may also differ from the chronic pressures faced by other groups.
The timing of the surveys presents another limitation. Participants reported their pre-sleep arousal the morning after it occurred, rather than in the moment. The researchers chose this design to avoid introducing artificial stress or screen light right at bedtime, which could contaminate the sleep tracking data. This means the self-reported mental arousal was retrospective. The responses could have been influenced by how well the participant felt they slept that night.
Future research could investigate whether interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia can help retrain the brain to handle stress better. By targeting racing thoughts and rumination, people with high sleep reactivity might learn to protect their rest against the wear and tear of daily life. Tracking these metrics in a wider variety of people could also reveal if physical arousal plays a larger role in groups facing more severe types of trauma.
The study, “Sleep Reactivity Amplifies the Impact of Pre-Sleep Cognitive Arousal on Sleep Disturbances,” was authored by Noof Abdullah Saad Shaif, Julian Lim, Anthony N. Reffi, Michael W. L. Chee, Stijn A. A. Massar, and Ju Lynn Ong.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/racing-thoughts-not-racing-hearts-link-daily-stress-to-poor-sleep/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #SleepReactivity #CognitiveArousal #SleepDisturbance #NighttimeWakefulness #StressAndSleep #RacingThoughts #PreSleepArousal #SleepResearch #UniversitySleep #SleepQuality
-
DATE: September 10, 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: Psilocybin prevents chemotherapy-induced nerve damage in new preclinical study
Recent research suggests that giving mice a compound found in magic mushrooms before chemotherapy can prevent the debilitating nerve damage that often accompanies cancer treatment. The findings indicate that psilocybin protects nerve fibers by keeping their cellular powerhouses moving and functioning properly. The study was published in Science.
Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy is a condition where cancer drugs damage the long sensory nerves that extend from the spinal cord to the hands and feet. This damage leads to pain, numbness, and an extreme sensitivity to cold. Because the condition can be severe and long-lasting, doctors often have to reduce a patient’s chemotherapy dose or stop the treatment entirely.
“Almost everyone who gets any of the most common cancer chemotherapies for all the most common cancers will develop peripheral neuropathy that can be experienced as mild numbness, tingling, to pins and needles or to most severe as continuous burning sensations,” said study co-author Patrick M. Dougherty, a professor of pain medicine research at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
“This is in spite of the fact that none of these cancer drugs are given at the maximum dose to kill cancer cells, but at lesser doses to avoid neurotoxicity,” he told PsyPost. “While many patients will improve over time, others suffer this negative impact for years.”
Medical scientists have worked to understand exactly how these drugs harm the nerves. For example, a 2014 review established that chemotherapy agents tend to damage mitochondria, the small structures inside cells that generate energy. These energy factories are especially important for sensory nerves, which require a constant supply of power along their extensive, thread-like extensions, called axons.
Subsequent work, such as a 2024 study, demonstrated that keeping mitochondria moving along these nerve fibers helps shield them from the physical degeneration caused by chemotherapy. In a parallel area of study, a 2018 study provided evidence that psychedelic compounds can stimulate specific growth pathways to rebuild and protect nerve connections.
The authors of the new study connected these pieces of evidence. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in certain mushroom species, activates a specific receptor on the surface of cells known as the serotonin 2A receptor. Because this receptor is involved in both nerve adaptability and mitochondrial regulation, the scientists hypothesized that administering psilocybin before chemotherapy might trigger a protective rescue mechanism, preventing the nerve damage before it begins.
“Interventions for pre-established neuropathy have not worked out, so the goal here was to find a way to protect the nervous system to keep neuropathy from ever developing,” Dougherty explained.
“There is an urgent need for treatments that prevent nerve injury without interfering with lifesaving chemotherapy,” added study co-leader Moran Amit, an assistant professor of head and neck surgery at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “These findings offer important insights into how psilocybin may protect nerves before damage occurs, rather than treating symptoms after they become persistent.”
The research, co-led by Dougherty and Amit, utilized a combination of mouse behavioral models and human tissue analysis. To test their hypothesis, the scientists gave mice two doses of psilocybin before administering common chemotherapy drugs, such as cisplatin and paclitaxel. They then subjected the mice to up to six cycles of chemotherapy, mimicking a clinical treatment schedule.
To measure nerve damage, the researchers tested the animals’ responses to physical pressure and cold temperatures over the course of eight months. The team also used mice with oral tumors to check if psilocybin interfered with the chemotherapy’s ability to shrink the cancer.
In addition to the animal models, the researchers examined human sensory neurons grown in the lab. They also looked at fresh peripheral nerve tissue taken from 29 human surgical patients. Using advanced live-cell imaging, they watched how mitochondria moved inside these human nerve fibers when exposed to chemotherapy with and without psilocybin.
The scientists found that just two preventive doses of psilocybin kept the mice from developing the physical hypersensitivity and cold sensitivity typically caused by the chemotherapy drugs. The mice maintained normal baseline sensitivity scores, and this protective effect lasted across all six cycles of treatment and throughout the eight-month follow-up period.
Notably, psilocybin did not reduce the cancer-killing effectiveness of the chemotherapy. The tumor-bearing mice that received psilocybin showed the same reduction in tumor size as those that only received chemotherapy. Systemic immune markers also remained unchanged, suggesting the treatment targets the nerves without altering the body’s general response to cancer.
The team discovered that psilocybin operates through two distinct pathways to achieve this protection. In the brain, it helped normalize electrical activity that is typically disrupted by chronic pain. In the peripheral body, it directly protected the structure and function of the sensory nerve endings in the skin.
When looking closely at the nerve cells, the researchers noticed that chemotherapy ordinarily causes mitochondria to stall, halting their journey down the long nerve axons. This starvation of energy at the distant nerve endings leads to their structural decay. Psilocybin prevented this traffic jam.
By activating the serotonin 2A receptor, psilocybin engaged a specific signaling chain that controls the molecular motors responsible for transporting mitochondria. By keeping the mitochondria moving, psilocybin ensured the nerve endings received the energy they needed to survive the toxic stress of the chemotherapy.
“Psilocybin does more than reduce pain signals by protecting the nerves themselves through energy delivery,” Dougherty noted. “This neuroprotective effect could help patients withstand the stress of chemotherapy, maintaining sensation, mobility and quality of life during treatment and long into survivorship.”
The researchers also found that the hallucinogenic effects of psilocybin were not strictly necessary for this nerve protection. When they treated mice with a nonhallucinogenic compound that targets the exact same serotonin 2A receptors, the animals received an equivalent level of protection against the nerve damage.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2026, which found that a single dose of psilocybin reduced neuropathic pain sensitivity in mice. It is worth noting that the older study evaluated treating established pain via central brain remodeling, whereas the new study evaluated preventing the pain prophylactically by preserving peripheral nerve function. Another study covered by PsyPost later in 2026 similarly demonstrated psilocybin’s ability to calm pain networks in rodents, again focusing on existing central pain rather than preventing peripheral damage.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The study relies heavily on mouse models and isolated human tissues. Laboratory tests on human nerve cells provided promising outcomes, but clinical trials involving human patients are needed to see if the preventive treatment works safely and effectively in a real-world medical setting.
“The study offers an interesting mechanistic and preclinical rationale for investigating psilocybin in chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, particularly through its potential effects on mitochondrial trafficking and neuronal resilience,” said Andres Ort, a physician and member of the Neurophenomenology of Consciousness Lab at the University of Zurich who was not involved in the research.
“However, the findings should not be interpreted as evidence that psilocybin prevents or treats chemotherapy-induced neuropathy in patients,” Ort told PsyPost. “The translational gap between experimental models and clinical oncology remains substantial, and questions around dosing, timing, safety, drug interactions, psychiatric screening, blinding, and meaningful patient-centered outcomes will need careful evaluation.”
“The prospect of self-medication would be best avoided,” Dougherty cautioned. “If the work is validated, access to psilocybin would come to be available through your oncologist.”
It is also important to note that the timing of the treatment appears strict. The study indicates that psilocybin only works as a preventive measure in this context. When the researchers tried administering chemotherapy first and waiting for the nerve damage to set in, the psilocybin did not reverse the injury. Patients would likely need to receive the compound before every cycle of chemotherapy to maintain the protective effect.
Despite these constraints, the researchers are optimistic about the drug’s clinical potential. “The results of this study are very promising and have opened a new angle for potential therapeutic intervention in chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy,” Dougherty said.
The team is already moving forward with an upcoming Phase 2 clinical trial, called NeuroGuard, to evaluate psilocybin during chemotherapy in patients with multiple cancer types. “A clinical trial will be opening soon for patients receiving cisplatin, but other chemotherapies will now also need to be tested to determine whether psilocybin may protect from their neurotoxicities,” Dougherty added.
“The most important next step is a well-designed, adequately powered clinical trial assessing not only neuropathy symptoms, but also function, quality of life, cancer-treatment adherence, and safety in the relevant oncology population,” Ort noted.
“If this work holds up, it may be a therapy integrated to all cancers,” Dougherty explained. “This would impact the approximately 2,000,000 new cancer cases expected in 2026, based on 2025 numbers in just the US.”
This work is part of UT MD Anderson’s Cancer Neuroscience Program, which examines the interactions between cancer and the nervous system. “At UT MD Anderson, we are actively exploring the multiple facets of psychedelics to pursue interventions that improve the lives of our patients,” Amit concluded.
The study, “Psilocybin prevents chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy through mitochondrial trafficking preservation,” was authored by Mario Heles, Lilach Pasvolsky, Hinduja Sathishkumar, Shorook Naara, Yen Vu, Caitlyn L. Stewart, Tongxin Xie, Frederico O. Gleber-Netto, William McCarthy, Dan Yaniv, Shashank S. Kamal, Hajira Elahi, Pengyu Zhu, Megan L. Uhelski, Jordan Chatwin, Andrew Lara, Danielle L. Stolley, Michael R. Migden, Z-Hye Lee, Shiyanth Thevasagayampillai, Preethi H. Gunaratne, Kaoutar Ait-Ahmad, M. J. Kuykendall, Sebnem Ece Eksi, Lorenzo Cohen, Jeremy C. Borniger, Eyal Gottlieb, Gregory H. Jones, Patrick M. Dougherty, and Moran Amit.
-------------------------------------------------
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Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PsilocybinTherapy #ChemotherapyNeuropathy #MitochondrialTrafficking #NerveProtection #PeripheralNeuropathyPrevention #Serotonin2A #PsychedelicsInMedicine #CancerTreatmentSupport #NeuroGuardTrial #ScienceNews
-
DATE: September 10, 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: Psilocybin prevents chemotherapy-induced nerve damage in new preclinical study
Recent research suggests that giving mice a compound found in magic mushrooms before chemotherapy can prevent the debilitating nerve damage that often accompanies cancer treatment. The findings indicate that psilocybin protects nerve fibers by keeping their cellular powerhouses moving and functioning properly. The study was published in Science.
Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy is a condition where cancer drugs damage the long sensory nerves that extend from the spinal cord to the hands and feet. This damage leads to pain, numbness, and an extreme sensitivity to cold. Because the condition can be severe and long-lasting, doctors often have to reduce a patient’s chemotherapy dose or stop the treatment entirely.
“Almost everyone who gets any of the most common cancer chemotherapies for all the most common cancers will develop peripheral neuropathy that can be experienced as mild numbness, tingling, to pins and needles or to most severe as continuous burning sensations,” said study co-author Patrick M. Dougherty, a professor of pain medicine research at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
“This is in spite of the fact that none of these cancer drugs are given at the maximum dose to kill cancer cells, but at lesser doses to avoid neurotoxicity,” he told PsyPost. “While many patients will improve over time, others suffer this negative impact for years.”
Medical scientists have worked to understand exactly how these drugs harm the nerves. For example, a 2014 review established that chemotherapy agents tend to damage mitochondria, the small structures inside cells that generate energy. These energy factories are especially important for sensory nerves, which require a constant supply of power along their extensive, thread-like extensions, called axons.
Subsequent work, such as a 2024 study, demonstrated that keeping mitochondria moving along these nerve fibers helps shield them from the physical degeneration caused by chemotherapy. In a parallel area of study, a 2018 study provided evidence that psychedelic compounds can stimulate specific growth pathways to rebuild and protect nerve connections.
The authors of the new study connected these pieces of evidence. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in certain mushroom species, activates a specific receptor on the surface of cells known as the serotonin 2A receptor. Because this receptor is involved in both nerve adaptability and mitochondrial regulation, the scientists hypothesized that administering psilocybin before chemotherapy might trigger a protective rescue mechanism, preventing the nerve damage before it begins.
“Interventions for pre-established neuropathy have not worked out, so the goal here was to find a way to protect the nervous system to keep neuropathy from ever developing,” Dougherty explained.
“There is an urgent need for treatments that prevent nerve injury without interfering with lifesaving chemotherapy,” added study co-leader Moran Amit, an assistant professor of head and neck surgery at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “These findings offer important insights into how psilocybin may protect nerves before damage occurs, rather than treating symptoms after they become persistent.”
The research, co-led by Dougherty and Amit, utilized a combination of mouse behavioral models and human tissue analysis. To test their hypothesis, the scientists gave mice two doses of psilocybin before administering common chemotherapy drugs, such as cisplatin and paclitaxel. They then subjected the mice to up to six cycles of chemotherapy, mimicking a clinical treatment schedule.
To measure nerve damage, the researchers tested the animals’ responses to physical pressure and cold temperatures over the course of eight months. The team also used mice with oral tumors to check if psilocybin interfered with the chemotherapy’s ability to shrink the cancer.
In addition to the animal models, the researchers examined human sensory neurons grown in the lab. They also looked at fresh peripheral nerve tissue taken from 29 human surgical patients. Using advanced live-cell imaging, they watched how mitochondria moved inside these human nerve fibers when exposed to chemotherapy with and without psilocybin.
The scientists found that just two preventive doses of psilocybin kept the mice from developing the physical hypersensitivity and cold sensitivity typically caused by the chemotherapy drugs. The mice maintained normal baseline sensitivity scores, and this protective effect lasted across all six cycles of treatment and throughout the eight-month follow-up period.
Notably, psilocybin did not reduce the cancer-killing effectiveness of the chemotherapy. The tumor-bearing mice that received psilocybin showed the same reduction in tumor size as those that only received chemotherapy. Systemic immune markers also remained unchanged, suggesting the treatment targets the nerves without altering the body’s general response to cancer.
The team discovered that psilocybin operates through two distinct pathways to achieve this protection. In the brain, it helped normalize electrical activity that is typically disrupted by chronic pain. In the peripheral body, it directly protected the structure and function of the sensory nerve endings in the skin.
When looking closely at the nerve cells, the researchers noticed that chemotherapy ordinarily causes mitochondria to stall, halting their journey down the long nerve axons. This starvation of energy at the distant nerve endings leads to their structural decay. Psilocybin prevented this traffic jam.
By activating the serotonin 2A receptor, psilocybin engaged a specific signaling chain that controls the molecular motors responsible for transporting mitochondria. By keeping the mitochondria moving, psilocybin ensured the nerve endings received the energy they needed to survive the toxic stress of the chemotherapy.
“Psilocybin does more than reduce pain signals by protecting the nerves themselves through energy delivery,” Dougherty noted. “This neuroprotective effect could help patients withstand the stress of chemotherapy, maintaining sensation, mobility and quality of life during treatment and long into survivorship.”
The researchers also found that the hallucinogenic effects of psilocybin were not strictly necessary for this nerve protection. When they treated mice with a nonhallucinogenic compound that targets the exact same serotonin 2A receptors, the animals received an equivalent level of protection against the nerve damage.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2026, which found that a single dose of psilocybin reduced neuropathic pain sensitivity in mice. It is worth noting that the older study evaluated treating established pain via central brain remodeling, whereas the new study evaluated preventing the pain prophylactically by preserving peripheral nerve function. Another study covered by PsyPost later in 2026 similarly demonstrated psilocybin’s ability to calm pain networks in rodents, again focusing on existing central pain rather than preventing peripheral damage.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The study relies heavily on mouse models and isolated human tissues. Laboratory tests on human nerve cells provided promising outcomes, but clinical trials involving human patients are needed to see if the preventive treatment works safely and effectively in a real-world medical setting.
“The study offers an interesting mechanistic and preclinical rationale for investigating psilocybin in chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, particularly through its potential effects on mitochondrial trafficking and neuronal resilience,” said Andres Ort, a physician and member of the Neurophenomenology of Consciousness Lab at the University of Zurich who was not involved in the research.
“However, the findings should not be interpreted as evidence that psilocybin prevents or treats chemotherapy-induced neuropathy in patients,” Ort told PsyPost. “The translational gap between experimental models and clinical oncology remains substantial, and questions around dosing, timing, safety, drug interactions, psychiatric screening, blinding, and meaningful patient-centered outcomes will need careful evaluation.”
“The prospect of self-medication would be best avoided,” Dougherty cautioned. “If the work is validated, access to psilocybin would come to be available through your oncologist.”
It is also important to note that the timing of the treatment appears strict. The study indicates that psilocybin only works as a preventive measure in this context. When the researchers tried administering chemotherapy first and waiting for the nerve damage to set in, the psilocybin did not reverse the injury. Patients would likely need to receive the compound before every cycle of chemotherapy to maintain the protective effect.
Despite these constraints, the researchers are optimistic about the drug’s clinical potential. “The results of this study are very promising and have opened a new angle for potential therapeutic intervention in chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy,” Dougherty said.
The team is already moving forward with an upcoming Phase 2 clinical trial, called NeuroGuard, to evaluate psilocybin during chemotherapy in patients with multiple cancer types. “A clinical trial will be opening soon for patients receiving cisplatin, but other chemotherapies will now also need to be tested to determine whether psilocybin may protect from their neurotoxicities,” Dougherty added.
“The most important next step is a well-designed, adequately powered clinical trial assessing not only neuropathy symptoms, but also function, quality of life, cancer-treatment adherence, and safety in the relevant oncology population,” Ort noted.
“If this work holds up, it may be a therapy integrated to all cancers,” Dougherty explained. “This would impact the approximately 2,000,000 new cancer cases expected in 2026, based on 2025 numbers in just the US.”
This work is part of UT MD Anderson’s Cancer Neuroscience Program, which examines the interactions between cancer and the nervous system. “At UT MD Anderson, we are actively exploring the multiple facets of psychedelics to pursue interventions that improve the lives of our patients,” Amit concluded.
The study, “Psilocybin prevents chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy through mitochondrial trafficking preservation,” was authored by Mario Heles, Lilach Pasvolsky, Hinduja Sathishkumar, Shorook Naara, Yen Vu, Caitlyn L. Stewart, Tongxin Xie, Frederico O. Gleber-Netto, William McCarthy, Dan Yaniv, Shashank S. Kamal, Hajira Elahi, Pengyu Zhu, Megan L. Uhelski, Jordan Chatwin, Andrew Lara, Danielle L. Stolley, Michael R. Migden, Z-Hye Lee, Shiyanth Thevasagayampillai, Preethi H. Gunaratne, Kaoutar Ait-Ahmad, M. J. Kuykendall, Sebnem Ece Eksi, Lorenzo Cohen, Jeremy C. Borniger, Eyal Gottlieb, Gregory H. Jones, Patrick M. Dougherty, and Moran Amit.
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-
DATE: September 10, 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: Psilocybin prevents chemotherapy-induced nerve damage in new preclinical study
Recent research suggests that giving mice a compound found in magic mushrooms before chemotherapy can prevent the debilitating nerve damage that often accompanies cancer treatment. The findings indicate that psilocybin protects nerve fibers by keeping their cellular powerhouses moving and functioning properly. The study was published in Science.
Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy is a condition where cancer drugs damage the long sensory nerves that extend from the spinal cord to the hands and feet. This damage leads to pain, numbness, and an extreme sensitivity to cold. Because the condition can be severe and long-lasting, doctors often have to reduce a patient’s chemotherapy dose or stop the treatment entirely.
“Almost everyone who gets any of the most common cancer chemotherapies for all the most common cancers will develop peripheral neuropathy that can be experienced as mild numbness, tingling, to pins and needles or to most severe as continuous burning sensations,” said study co-author Patrick M. Dougherty, a professor of pain medicine research at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
“This is in spite of the fact that none of these cancer drugs are given at the maximum dose to kill cancer cells, but at lesser doses to avoid neurotoxicity,” he told PsyPost. “While many patients will improve over time, others suffer this negative impact for years.”
Medical scientists have worked to understand exactly how these drugs harm the nerves. For example, a 2014 review established that chemotherapy agents tend to damage mitochondria, the small structures inside cells that generate energy. These energy factories are especially important for sensory nerves, which require a constant supply of power along their extensive, thread-like extensions, called axons.
Subsequent work, such as a 2024 study, demonstrated that keeping mitochondria moving along these nerve fibers helps shield them from the physical degeneration caused by chemotherapy. In a parallel area of study, a 2018 study provided evidence that psychedelic compounds can stimulate specific growth pathways to rebuild and protect nerve connections.
The authors of the new study connected these pieces of evidence. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in certain mushroom species, activates a specific receptor on the surface of cells known as the serotonin 2A receptor. Because this receptor is involved in both nerve adaptability and mitochondrial regulation, the scientists hypothesized that administering psilocybin before chemotherapy might trigger a protective rescue mechanism, preventing the nerve damage before it begins.
“Interventions for pre-established neuropathy have not worked out, so the goal here was to find a way to protect the nervous system to keep neuropathy from ever developing,” Dougherty explained.
“There is an urgent need for treatments that prevent nerve injury without interfering with lifesaving chemotherapy,” added study co-leader Moran Amit, an assistant professor of head and neck surgery at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “These findings offer important insights into how psilocybin may protect nerves before damage occurs, rather than treating symptoms after they become persistent.”
The research, co-led by Dougherty and Amit, utilized a combination of mouse behavioral models and human tissue analysis. To test their hypothesis, the scientists gave mice two doses of psilocybin before administering common chemotherapy drugs, such as cisplatin and paclitaxel. They then subjected the mice to up to six cycles of chemotherapy, mimicking a clinical treatment schedule.
To measure nerve damage, the researchers tested the animals’ responses to physical pressure and cold temperatures over the course of eight months. The team also used mice with oral tumors to check if psilocybin interfered with the chemotherapy’s ability to shrink the cancer.
In addition to the animal models, the researchers examined human sensory neurons grown in the lab. They also looked at fresh peripheral nerve tissue taken from 29 human surgical patients. Using advanced live-cell imaging, they watched how mitochondria moved inside these human nerve fibers when exposed to chemotherapy with and without psilocybin.
The scientists found that just two preventive doses of psilocybin kept the mice from developing the physical hypersensitivity and cold sensitivity typically caused by the chemotherapy drugs. The mice maintained normal baseline sensitivity scores, and this protective effect lasted across all six cycles of treatment and throughout the eight-month follow-up period.
Notably, psilocybin did not reduce the cancer-killing effectiveness of the chemotherapy. The tumor-bearing mice that received psilocybin showed the same reduction in tumor size as those that only received chemotherapy. Systemic immune markers also remained unchanged, suggesting the treatment targets the nerves without altering the body’s general response to cancer.
The team discovered that psilocybin operates through two distinct pathways to achieve this protection. In the brain, it helped normalize electrical activity that is typically disrupted by chronic pain. In the peripheral body, it directly protected the structure and function of the sensory nerve endings in the skin.
When looking closely at the nerve cells, the researchers noticed that chemotherapy ordinarily causes mitochondria to stall, halting their journey down the long nerve axons. This starvation of energy at the distant nerve endings leads to their structural decay. Psilocybin prevented this traffic jam.
By activating the serotonin 2A receptor, psilocybin engaged a specific signaling chain that controls the molecular motors responsible for transporting mitochondria. By keeping the mitochondria moving, psilocybin ensured the nerve endings received the energy they needed to survive the toxic stress of the chemotherapy.
“Psilocybin does more than reduce pain signals by protecting the nerves themselves through energy delivery,” Dougherty noted. “This neuroprotective effect could help patients withstand the stress of chemotherapy, maintaining sensation, mobility and quality of life during treatment and long into survivorship.”
The researchers also found that the hallucinogenic effects of psilocybin were not strictly necessary for this nerve protection. When they treated mice with a nonhallucinogenic compound that targets the exact same serotonin 2A receptors, the animals received an equivalent level of protection against the nerve damage.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2026, which found that a single dose of psilocybin reduced neuropathic pain sensitivity in mice. It is worth noting that the older study evaluated treating established pain via central brain remodeling, whereas the new study evaluated preventing the pain prophylactically by preserving peripheral nerve function. Another study covered by PsyPost later in 2026 similarly demonstrated psilocybin’s ability to calm pain networks in rodents, again focusing on existing central pain rather than preventing peripheral damage.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The study relies heavily on mouse models and isolated human tissues. Laboratory tests on human nerve cells provided promising outcomes, but clinical trials involving human patients are needed to see if the preventive treatment works safely and effectively in a real-world medical setting.
“The study offers an interesting mechanistic and preclinical rationale for investigating psilocybin in chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, particularly through its potential effects on mitochondrial trafficking and neuronal resilience,” said Andres Ort, a physician and member of the Neurophenomenology of Consciousness Lab at the University of Zurich who was not involved in the research.
“However, the findings should not be interpreted as evidence that psilocybin prevents or treats chemotherapy-induced neuropathy in patients,” Ort told PsyPost. “The translational gap between experimental models and clinical oncology remains substantial, and questions around dosing, timing, safety, drug interactions, psychiatric screening, blinding, and meaningful patient-centered outcomes will need careful evaluation.”
“The prospect of self-medication would be best avoided,” Dougherty cautioned. “If the work is validated, access to psilocybin would come to be available through your oncologist.”
It is also important to note that the timing of the treatment appears strict. The study indicates that psilocybin only works as a preventive measure in this context. When the researchers tried administering chemotherapy first and waiting for the nerve damage to set in, the psilocybin did not reverse the injury. Patients would likely need to receive the compound before every cycle of chemotherapy to maintain the protective effect.
Despite these constraints, the researchers are optimistic about the drug’s clinical potential. “The results of this study are very promising and have opened a new angle for potential therapeutic intervention in chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy,” Dougherty said.
The team is already moving forward with an upcoming Phase 2 clinical trial, called NeuroGuard, to evaluate psilocybin during chemotherapy in patients with multiple cancer types. “A clinical trial will be opening soon for patients receiving cisplatin, but other chemotherapies will now also need to be tested to determine whether psilocybin may protect from their neurotoxicities,” Dougherty added.
“The most important next step is a well-designed, adequately powered clinical trial assessing not only neuropathy symptoms, but also function, quality of life, cancer-treatment adherence, and safety in the relevant oncology population,” Ort noted.
“If this work holds up, it may be a therapy integrated to all cancers,” Dougherty explained. “This would impact the approximately 2,000,000 new cancer cases expected in 2026, based on 2025 numbers in just the US.”
This work is part of UT MD Anderson’s Cancer Neuroscience Program, which examines the interactions between cancer and the nervous system. “At UT MD Anderson, we are actively exploring the multiple facets of psychedelics to pursue interventions that improve the lives of our patients,” Amit concluded.
The study, “Psilocybin prevents chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy through mitochondrial trafficking preservation,” was authored by Mario Heles, Lilach Pasvolsky, Hinduja Sathishkumar, Shorook Naara, Yen Vu, Caitlyn L. Stewart, Tongxin Xie, Frederico O. Gleber-Netto, William McCarthy, Dan Yaniv, Shashank S. Kamal, Hajira Elahi, Pengyu Zhu, Megan L. Uhelski, Jordan Chatwin, Andrew Lara, Danielle L. Stolley, Michael R. Migden, Z-Hye Lee, Shiyanth Thevasagayampillai, Preethi H. Gunaratne, Kaoutar Ait-Ahmad, M. J. Kuykendall, Sebnem Ece Eksi, Lorenzo Cohen, Jeremy C. Borniger, Eyal Gottlieb, Gregory H. Jones, Patrick M. Dougherty, and Moran Amit.
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-
DATE: September 10, 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: Family environments shape authoritarian traits differently than dominance preferences
Genetic predispositions and family environments both shape extreme political views, but they do so in entirely different ways depending on the specific type of attitude. A new study reveals that a desire for social conformity is heavily influenced by household upbringing, while a preference for group dominance stems more from outside personal experiences. The research was published in Behavior Genetics.
Political scientists and psychologists often examine two distinct personality traits to understand polarized socio-political attitudes. The first is Right-Wing Authoritarianism. This concept describes a person’s preference for strict adherence to social conventions, collective security, and obedience to authority.
The second concept is Social Dominance Orientation. This captures a person’s desire for group-based hierarchies and the belief that their own social group is inherently superior to others. Both traits reliably predict prejudice, support for extreme political movements, and a tolerance for discrimination.
Researchers want to know why people develop these distinct views in the first place. Past research has shown that both biological genetics and life experiences play a role in shaping them. It has remained largely unknown whether the specific environmental and genetic sources differ between the two traits.
Psychologists Christian Kandler and Jana Instinske of Bielefeld University in Germany, along with sociologist Edward Bell of the University of Western Ontario, wanted to map exactly how these influences combine. They also aimed to see if the roots of these political attitudes shift as people grow from adolescence into young adulthood.
The researchers analyzed data from a large study of 1,440 German families. This group included identical and fraternal twins, their parents, and their non-twin siblings, encompassing more than 5,000 individuals. The twins belonged to three distinct age cohorts averaging 15, 21, and 27 years old.
Participants answered survey questions designed to measure their levels of both authoritarianism and social dominance. By comparing the attitude similarities between identical twins, who share all their genes, and fraternal twins, who share about half, the team could estimate the mathematical contribution of genetics.
Adding parents and non-twin siblings to the analysis allowed the researchers to account for the specific environments families create. It also let them measure assortative mating. This is the well-documented tendency of people to marry partners who share similar political and social views.
The results showed that genetics shape about the same total amount of variance for both personality traits. The genetic components themselves differed slightly in their structure. Authoritarianism was influenced by both additive genetics, which are straightforward traits passed directly from parents, and nonadditive genetics, which involve complex interactions between different genes.
Social dominance was driven entirely by additive genetic factors. Beyond that basic genetic contribution, the two political orientations diverged completely in their environmental origins. Authoritarianism showed a strong connection to family inheritance and upbringing.
The data indicated that parents who favor social conformity tend to choose partners who feel the same way. These parents then pass down both genetic predispositions and a home environment that reinforces those exact traditionalist views. Researchers refer to this combined biological and environmental inheritance as a passive genotype-environment correlation.
In this scenario, children receive genes that might make them lean toward conformity, and they are simultaneously raised in a household that actively promotes obedience and tradition. Social dominance showed almost no link to this kind of passive family inheritance.
The tendency for parents to match with partners based on dominance preferences was lower, and the home environment played a negligible role in shaping the trait in their children. Instead, a person’s preference for group hierarchy was heavily shaped by their own unique, individual experiences outside the family home.
The researchers suggest this divergence makes sense based on what the traits represent. Authoritarianism involves moral regulation and conformity, which are central to keeping a family unit cohesive. Because these values dictate household rules and religious traditions, they heavily influence mate selection and parenting.
By contrast, a preference for social dominance usually applies to intergroup competition in the broader outside world. A belief in societal hierarchy is less relevant to daily household dynamics, making it less likely to be directly programmed by the family environment.
The team also looked at how these influences changed as the twins aged. They initially suspected that the impact of the family environment would fade as adolescents grew into adults and selected their own surroundings. They hypothesized that genetics would play a larger role as adults sought out social circles and news sources that matched their natural predispositions.
Instead, the data pointed in the opposite direction. For both traits, the total genetic influence remained relatively stable across the age groups. The influence of environments shared specifically by the twins actually increased from adolescence to adulthood.
This twin-specific shared environment was essentially nonexistent for 15-year-olds but became highly relevant for 21-year-olds and 27-year-olds. The researchers suspect that as young adults become eligible to vote, they might engage in more political discussions with their peers and twin siblings. This co-development process could amplify shared social influences during the exact years when political identities solidify.
A few limitations shape how these findings should be interpreted. The study compared different age groups at a single point in time, rather than tracking the same individuals across their entire lives. This makes it difficult to separate genuine developmental changes from generational effects related to the specific time period in which a given cohort was born.
The statistical tests did not yield statistically significant differences between the age cohorts for many of the mathematical model parameters. The researchers note that an even larger sample might be needed to confirm other age-related trends. The study also relied on relatively short survey measures, which can sometimes limit the precision of personality evaluations.
Additionally, the mathematical models required the researchers to assume that genetic and environmental variances remain identical across different generations, which may not perfectly reflect reality given shifting cultural norms. Understanding these origins provides a foundation for making sense of political polarization.
The study, “Sources of Differences in Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation from Adolescence to Adulthood: A Multi-Cohort Twin Family Study,” was authored by Christian Kandler, Jana Instinske, and Edward Bell.
-------------------------------------------------
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-
DATE: September 10, 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: Family environments shape authoritarian traits differently than dominance preferences
Genetic predispositions and family environments both shape extreme political views, but they do so in entirely different ways depending on the specific type of attitude. A new study reveals that a desire for social conformity is heavily influenced by household upbringing, while a preference for group dominance stems more from outside personal experiences. The research was published in Behavior Genetics.
Political scientists and psychologists often examine two distinct personality traits to understand polarized socio-political attitudes. The first is Right-Wing Authoritarianism. This concept describes a person’s preference for strict adherence to social conventions, collective security, and obedience to authority.
The second concept is Social Dominance Orientation. This captures a person’s desire for group-based hierarchies and the belief that their own social group is inherently superior to others. Both traits reliably predict prejudice, support for extreme political movements, and a tolerance for discrimination.
Researchers want to know why people develop these distinct views in the first place. Past research has shown that both biological genetics and life experiences play a role in shaping them. It has remained largely unknown whether the specific environmental and genetic sources differ between the two traits.
Psychologists Christian Kandler and Jana Instinske of Bielefeld University in Germany, along with sociologist Edward Bell of the University of Western Ontario, wanted to map exactly how these influences combine. They also aimed to see if the roots of these political attitudes shift as people grow from adolescence into young adulthood.
The researchers analyzed data from a large study of 1,440 German families. This group included identical and fraternal twins, their parents, and their non-twin siblings, encompassing more than 5,000 individuals. The twins belonged to three distinct age cohorts averaging 15, 21, and 27 years old.
Participants answered survey questions designed to measure their levels of both authoritarianism and social dominance. By comparing the attitude similarities between identical twins, who share all their genes, and fraternal twins, who share about half, the team could estimate the mathematical contribution of genetics.
Adding parents and non-twin siblings to the analysis allowed the researchers to account for the specific environments families create. It also let them measure assortative mating. This is the well-documented tendency of people to marry partners who share similar political and social views.
The results showed that genetics shape about the same total amount of variance for both personality traits. The genetic components themselves differed slightly in their structure. Authoritarianism was influenced by both additive genetics, which are straightforward traits passed directly from parents, and nonadditive genetics, which involve complex interactions between different genes.
Social dominance was driven entirely by additive genetic factors. Beyond that basic genetic contribution, the two political orientations diverged completely in their environmental origins. Authoritarianism showed a strong connection to family inheritance and upbringing.
The data indicated that parents who favor social conformity tend to choose partners who feel the same way. These parents then pass down both genetic predispositions and a home environment that reinforces those exact traditionalist views. Researchers refer to this combined biological and environmental inheritance as a passive genotype-environment correlation.
In this scenario, children receive genes that might make them lean toward conformity, and they are simultaneously raised in a household that actively promotes obedience and tradition. Social dominance showed almost no link to this kind of passive family inheritance.
The tendency for parents to match with partners based on dominance preferences was lower, and the home environment played a negligible role in shaping the trait in their children. Instead, a person’s preference for group hierarchy was heavily shaped by their own unique, individual experiences outside the family home.
The researchers suggest this divergence makes sense based on what the traits represent. Authoritarianism involves moral regulation and conformity, which are central to keeping a family unit cohesive. Because these values dictate household rules and religious traditions, they heavily influence mate selection and parenting.
By contrast, a preference for social dominance usually applies to intergroup competition in the broader outside world. A belief in societal hierarchy is less relevant to daily household dynamics, making it less likely to be directly programmed by the family environment.
The team also looked at how these influences changed as the twins aged. They initially suspected that the impact of the family environment would fade as adolescents grew into adults and selected their own surroundings. They hypothesized that genetics would play a larger role as adults sought out social circles and news sources that matched their natural predispositions.
Instead, the data pointed in the opposite direction. For both traits, the total genetic influence remained relatively stable across the age groups. The influence of environments shared specifically by the twins actually increased from adolescence to adulthood.
This twin-specific shared environment was essentially nonexistent for 15-year-olds but became highly relevant for 21-year-olds and 27-year-olds. The researchers suspect that as young adults become eligible to vote, they might engage in more political discussions with their peers and twin siblings. This co-development process could amplify shared social influences during the exact years when political identities solidify.
A few limitations shape how these findings should be interpreted. The study compared different age groups at a single point in time, rather than tracking the same individuals across their entire lives. This makes it difficult to separate genuine developmental changes from generational effects related to the specific time period in which a given cohort was born.
The statistical tests did not yield statistically significant differences between the age cohorts for many of the mathematical model parameters. The researchers note that an even larger sample might be needed to confirm other age-related trends. The study also relied on relatively short survey measures, which can sometimes limit the precision of personality evaluations.
Additionally, the mathematical models required the researchers to assume that genetic and environmental variances remain identical across different generations, which may not perfectly reflect reality given shifting cultural norms. Understanding these origins provides a foundation for making sense of political polarization.
The study, “Sources of Differences in Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation from Adolescence to Adulthood: A Multi-Cohort Twin Family Study,” was authored by Christian Kandler, Jana Instinske, and Edward Bell.
-------------------------------------------------
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Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #RightWingAuthoritarianism #SocialDominanceOrientation #PoliticalAttitudes #TwinStudy #FamilyEnvironment #GeneticsAndPolitics #PassiveGenotypeEnvironmentCorrelation #AssortativeMating #PoliticalPolarization #BehaviorGenetics
-
DATE: September 10, 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: Family environments shape authoritarian traits differently than dominance preferences
Genetic predispositions and family environments both shape extreme political views, but they do so in entirely different ways depending on the specific type of attitude. A new study reveals that a desire for social conformity is heavily influenced by household upbringing, while a preference for group dominance stems more from outside personal experiences. The research was published in Behavior Genetics.
Political scientists and psychologists often examine two distinct personality traits to understand polarized socio-political attitudes. The first is Right-Wing Authoritarianism. This concept describes a person’s preference for strict adherence to social conventions, collective security, and obedience to authority.
The second concept is Social Dominance Orientation. This captures a person’s desire for group-based hierarchies and the belief that their own social group is inherently superior to others. Both traits reliably predict prejudice, support for extreme political movements, and a tolerance for discrimination.
Researchers want to know why people develop these distinct views in the first place. Past research has shown that both biological genetics and life experiences play a role in shaping them. It has remained largely unknown whether the specific environmental and genetic sources differ between the two traits.
Psychologists Christian Kandler and Jana Instinske of Bielefeld University in Germany, along with sociologist Edward Bell of the University of Western Ontario, wanted to map exactly how these influences combine. They also aimed to see if the roots of these political attitudes shift as people grow from adolescence into young adulthood.
The researchers analyzed data from a large study of 1,440 German families. This group included identical and fraternal twins, their parents, and their non-twin siblings, encompassing more than 5,000 individuals. The twins belonged to three distinct age cohorts averaging 15, 21, and 27 years old.
Participants answered survey questions designed to measure their levels of both authoritarianism and social dominance. By comparing the attitude similarities between identical twins, who share all their genes, and fraternal twins, who share about half, the team could estimate the mathematical contribution of genetics.
Adding parents and non-twin siblings to the analysis allowed the researchers to account for the specific environments families create. It also let them measure assortative mating. This is the well-documented tendency of people to marry partners who share similar political and social views.
The results showed that genetics shape about the same total amount of variance for both personality traits. The genetic components themselves differed slightly in their structure. Authoritarianism was influenced by both additive genetics, which are straightforward traits passed directly from parents, and nonadditive genetics, which involve complex interactions between different genes.
Social dominance was driven entirely by additive genetic factors. Beyond that basic genetic contribution, the two political orientations diverged completely in their environmental origins. Authoritarianism showed a strong connection to family inheritance and upbringing.
The data indicated that parents who favor social conformity tend to choose partners who feel the same way. These parents then pass down both genetic predispositions and a home environment that reinforces those exact traditionalist views. Researchers refer to this combined biological and environmental inheritance as a passive genotype-environment correlation.
In this scenario, children receive genes that might make them lean toward conformity, and they are simultaneously raised in a household that actively promotes obedience and tradition. Social dominance showed almost no link to this kind of passive family inheritance.
The tendency for parents to match with partners based on dominance preferences was lower, and the home environment played a negligible role in shaping the trait in their children. Instead, a person’s preference for group hierarchy was heavily shaped by their own unique, individual experiences outside the family home.
The researchers suggest this divergence makes sense based on what the traits represent. Authoritarianism involves moral regulation and conformity, which are central to keeping a family unit cohesive. Because these values dictate household rules and religious traditions, they heavily influence mate selection and parenting.
By contrast, a preference for social dominance usually applies to intergroup competition in the broader outside world. A belief in societal hierarchy is less relevant to daily household dynamics, making it less likely to be directly programmed by the family environment.
The team also looked at how these influences changed as the twins aged. They initially suspected that the impact of the family environment would fade as adolescents grew into adults and selected their own surroundings. They hypothesized that genetics would play a larger role as adults sought out social circles and news sources that matched their natural predispositions.
Instead, the data pointed in the opposite direction. For both traits, the total genetic influence remained relatively stable across the age groups. The influence of environments shared specifically by the twins actually increased from adolescence to adulthood.
This twin-specific shared environment was essentially nonexistent for 15-year-olds but became highly relevant for 21-year-olds and 27-year-olds. The researchers suspect that as young adults become eligible to vote, they might engage in more political discussions with their peers and twin siblings. This co-development process could amplify shared social influences during the exact years when political identities solidify.
A few limitations shape how these findings should be interpreted. The study compared different age groups at a single point in time, rather than tracking the same individuals across their entire lives. This makes it difficult to separate genuine developmental changes from generational effects related to the specific time period in which a given cohort was born.
The statistical tests did not yield statistically significant differences between the age cohorts for many of the mathematical model parameters. The researchers note that an even larger sample might be needed to confirm other age-related trends. The study also relied on relatively short survey measures, which can sometimes limit the precision of personality evaluations.
Additionally, the mathematical models required the researchers to assume that genetic and environmental variances remain identical across different generations, which may not perfectly reflect reality given shifting cultural norms. Understanding these origins provides a foundation for making sense of political polarization.
The study, “Sources of Differences in Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation from Adolescence to Adulthood: A Multi-Cohort Twin Family Study,” was authored by Christian Kandler, Jana Instinske, and Edward Bell.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #RightWingAuthoritarianism #SocialDominanceOrientation #PoliticalAttitudes #TwinStudy #FamilyEnvironment #GeneticsAndPolitics #PassiveGenotypeEnvironmentCorrelation #AssortativeMating #PoliticalPolarization #BehaviorGenetics
-
DATE: September 10, 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: New psychology research reveals why people tend to hide their successes and share their failures
People often adjust what they share about their own achievements or setbacks based on what their conversation partner has just revealed. New research suggests that these communication choices are driven less by a desire to manage one’s own image and more by an intention to protect the other person’s feelings. This tendency leads people to share mutual failures far more often than mutual successes, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
When people spontaneously share their successes or failures, they often do so to shape how others perceive them, such as appearing competent or seeking sympathy. But conversations are usually interactive. Responsive outcome disclosure occurs when an individual learns about a counterpart’s personal outcome and then must decide whether to share their own experience.
“A lot of existing research on disclosure has focused on why people initially choose to share good news or hide bad news, largely through the lens of self-presentation,” Irene Scopelliti, a professor of marketing and behavioral science at Bayes Business School, told PsyPost. “But conversations do not always work that way, because often we are responding after someone else has already told us their news.”
Traditional theories of communication suggest that people tend to match the tone of their conversation partners. According to this idea of reciprocity, a person should be equally likely to reply to a success with their own success as they are to reply to a failure with their own failure. But sharing personal outcomes is a highly emotional process. For instance, a 2019 study found that sharing one’s failures can reduce feelings of malicious envy in observers.
In addition, people often try to protect the feelings of those around them. Research covered by PsyPost in 2021 indicated that people frequently conceal personal information to avoid causing distress to a close conversation partner. Building on this idea, the current research proposes an other-focused framework for responsive disclosure. If a person cares about the feelings of their counterpart, they might actively shape their own disclosures to provide comfort or avoid causing harm.
To investigate this, the research team, led by Emily Prinsloo of Rice University and Scopelliti, tested this concept through nine separate studies. “So we wanted to understand how people navigate these interactions and what we are more likely to disclose when responding to others’ disclosures,” Scopelliti said.
Across the nine experiments, the researchers evaluated the responses of 8,229 participants in various scenarios and live interactions. They tracked whether people chose to reveal their own successes and failures after a counterpart shared theirs.
“These are not tiny statistical effects,” Scopelliti explained. “Across nine studies and more than 8,000 participants, in contexts ranging from job interviews to health outcomes to financial setbacks, we saw large, consistent shifts in disclosure behavior.”
In the first study, 900 online participants imagined receiving the results of a biological age test. Half were told their biological age was seven years younger than their actual age, indicating a positive health outcome, while the other half were told it was seven years older, indicating a negative outcome. They then read a scenario in which a colleague disclosed either a positive health result, a negative health result, or no result. The participants then allocated points to indicate how likely they were to reply by sharing their own outcome.
The results showed a general preference for matching. Participants were generally more likely to share a success if the colleague also had a success, and a failure if the colleague had a failure. But two interesting asymmetries emerged. First, participants were much more likely to disclose matching failures (87 percent) than matching successes (70 percent). Second, when outcomes did not match, participants were more willing to reveal a failure to a successful colleague (54 percent) than a success to a failing colleague (16 percent).
“For example, participants disclosed a failure of their own much more often after hearing about someone else’s failure compared to someone else’s success,” Scopelliti noted. “Across our studies, this was one of the largest and most consistent effects we observed.”
In fact, she pointed out, “In one study, people who had failed were more than twice as inclined to share their failure when the other person had disclosed a failure compared to when the other person had disclosed a success, and even in our most conservative, real-conversation studies, disclosure rates still rose by a third or more.”
To understand the motives behind these choices, the researchers conducted a second study with 812 participants who imagined receiving either a job offer or a rejection. The participants interacted with an acquaintance who also shared a job outcome. The researchers manipulated how much the participant liked the acquaintance.
When participants liked the acquaintance, the asymmetrical disclosure patterns were especially strong. Open-ended responses showed that participants who shared matching failures often did so to help the other person feel better. Those who withheld their successes from a rejected acquaintance often explicitly stated a desire to avoid causing harm. When participants were told they disliked the acquaintance, they cared less about protecting the other person’s feelings, and the asymmetries were noticeably reduced.
A third study involving 801 participants tested whether the topic of the disclosure mattered. Participants were placed in situations where their outcome either matched the topic of their colleague’s disclosure or involved a completely different topic. The tendency to share mutual failures was highest when the topics were exactly the same. When the topics differed, participants were less likely to share a failure in response to a failure. This indicates that people recognize that a completely unrelated negative outcome might feel dismissive or unhelpful to a struggling friend.
“When a friend shares a failure, many of us choose to mention a related failure of our own, not to compete but to offer solidarity,” Scopelliti said.
The researchers also investigated how people adjust the wording of their messages. In two studies, participants wrote open-ended replies after learning about a friend’s successful or unsuccessful financial investments and job applications.
When participants had a success to share but the friend had failed, they wrote longer messages and frequently used apologies to soften the blow. Sometimes they delayed sharing their own positive news until later in the conversation, or they offered words of consolation and help before mentioning their own outcome. A small percentage of participants even engaged in deception, misrepresenting their own success to protect the friend’s feelings.
“When we have succeeded when someone else has not, many of us hold back or soften the news, weighing how it will land rather than worrying about self-interest,” Scopelliti explained. “When we decide what to share about our own lives in these moments, we are often responding more to the other person’s emotional needs than to our own image.”
To test these patterns in real time, the final study paired 946 participants in live, online chat rooms. Participants completed a puzzle task that was secretly manipulated to be either very easy or very difficult, resulting in genuine feelings of success or failure. They were then paired up, and one participant was given a small financial bonus to spontaneously share their outcome in the chat.
The live interactions closely mirrored the hypothetical scenarios. When both individuals failed, 96 percent of the participants chose to share their failure. When both succeeded, only 73 percent shared their success. In mismatched pairs, participants shared failures in response to successes 81 percent of the time, but they only shared successes in response to failures 40 percent of the time. The chat logs also showed frequent use of compensatory apologies and delayed disclosures when participants were better off than their partners.
“Our data suggests that people calibrate what they share to protect the other person’s feelings,” Scopelliti summarized. “So this effect consistently shows up whether people are choosing between pre-written responses, writing their own replies, or having real, live conversations.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The study mostly involved participants from Western countries, and cultural backgrounds could influence how people handle personal news. In cultures that heavily emphasize social hierarchies or individualism, people might be more willing to share successes or less focused on protecting others from upward comparisons.
There are a few other things to keep in mind regarding the types of outcomes evaluated. The scenarios focused on definitive successes and failures, but everyday life often involves events with varying degrees of intensity. A massive career breakthrough might prompt different disclosure behaviors than a minor daily win.
Additionally, the researchers did not measure whether these well-intentioned communication strategies actually succeed in making the other person feel better. Withholding a success to protect a friend might backfire if the friend later discovers the truth and feels patronized.
“One thing we are eager to look at next is whether these disclosure strategies actually work the way responders intend them to,” Scopelliti told PsyPost. “Our studies show what people choose to share and why, but not how those choices land on the other end.”
Future research could explore how different types of relationships, such as romantic partnerships or rivalries, alter these communication habits. Evaluating how the original discloser reacts to these intentionally crafted responses could also shed light on the long-term relational impacts of hiding positive news. “So the next step is studying both sides of the conversation at once, to examine whether and when these well-intentioned strategies actually achieve their goal, and why,” Scopelliti added.
The study, “Responses to Outcome Disclosure: People Asymmetrically Disclose or Hide Their Outcomes to Protect Others’ Emotions”, was authored by Emily Prinsloo, Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein, and Joachim Vosgerau.
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Disclosures #OutcomeDisclosure #SocialPsychology #CommunicationStudies #MutualFailures #SupportiveCommunication #EmotionalSensitivity #InterpersonalRelationships #HealthyConversations #ResearchersShare
-
DATE: September 10, 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: New psychology research reveals why people tend to hide their successes and share their failures
People often adjust what they share about their own achievements or setbacks based on what their conversation partner has just revealed. New research suggests that these communication choices are driven less by a desire to manage one’s own image and more by an intention to protect the other person’s feelings. This tendency leads people to share mutual failures far more often than mutual successes, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
When people spontaneously share their successes or failures, they often do so to shape how others perceive them, such as appearing competent or seeking sympathy. But conversations are usually interactive. Responsive outcome disclosure occurs when an individual learns about a counterpart’s personal outcome and then must decide whether to share their own experience.
“A lot of existing research on disclosure has focused on why people initially choose to share good news or hide bad news, largely through the lens of self-presentation,” Irene Scopelliti, a professor of marketing and behavioral science at Bayes Business School, told PsyPost. “But conversations do not always work that way, because often we are responding after someone else has already told us their news.”
Traditional theories of communication suggest that people tend to match the tone of their conversation partners. According to this idea of reciprocity, a person should be equally likely to reply to a success with their own success as they are to reply to a failure with their own failure. But sharing personal outcomes is a highly emotional process. For instance, a 2019 study found that sharing one’s failures can reduce feelings of malicious envy in observers.
In addition, people often try to protect the feelings of those around them. Research covered by PsyPost in 2021 indicated that people frequently conceal personal information to avoid causing distress to a close conversation partner. Building on this idea, the current research proposes an other-focused framework for responsive disclosure. If a person cares about the feelings of their counterpart, they might actively shape their own disclosures to provide comfort or avoid causing harm.
To investigate this, the research team, led by Emily Prinsloo of Rice University and Scopelliti, tested this concept through nine separate studies. “So we wanted to understand how people navigate these interactions and what we are more likely to disclose when responding to others’ disclosures,” Scopelliti said.
Across the nine experiments, the researchers evaluated the responses of 8,229 participants in various scenarios and live interactions. They tracked whether people chose to reveal their own successes and failures after a counterpart shared theirs.
“These are not tiny statistical effects,” Scopelliti explained. “Across nine studies and more than 8,000 participants, in contexts ranging from job interviews to health outcomes to financial setbacks, we saw large, consistent shifts in disclosure behavior.”
In the first study, 900 online participants imagined receiving the results of a biological age test. Half were told their biological age was seven years younger than their actual age, indicating a positive health outcome, while the other half were told it was seven years older, indicating a negative outcome. They then read a scenario in which a colleague disclosed either a positive health result, a negative health result, or no result. The participants then allocated points to indicate how likely they were to reply by sharing their own outcome.
The results showed a general preference for matching. Participants were generally more likely to share a success if the colleague also had a success, and a failure if the colleague had a failure. But two interesting asymmetries emerged. First, participants were much more likely to disclose matching failures (87 percent) than matching successes (70 percent). Second, when outcomes did not match, participants were more willing to reveal a failure to a successful colleague (54 percent) than a success to a failing colleague (16 percent).
“For example, participants disclosed a failure of their own much more often after hearing about someone else’s failure compared to someone else’s success,” Scopelliti noted. “Across our studies, this was one of the largest and most consistent effects we observed.”
In fact, she pointed out, “In one study, people who had failed were more than twice as inclined to share their failure when the other person had disclosed a failure compared to when the other person had disclosed a success, and even in our most conservative, real-conversation studies, disclosure rates still rose by a third or more.”
To understand the motives behind these choices, the researchers conducted a second study with 812 participants who imagined receiving either a job offer or a rejection. The participants interacted with an acquaintance who also shared a job outcome. The researchers manipulated how much the participant liked the acquaintance.
When participants liked the acquaintance, the asymmetrical disclosure patterns were especially strong. Open-ended responses showed that participants who shared matching failures often did so to help the other person feel better. Those who withheld their successes from a rejected acquaintance often explicitly stated a desire to avoid causing harm. When participants were told they disliked the acquaintance, they cared less about protecting the other person’s feelings, and the asymmetries were noticeably reduced.
A third study involving 801 participants tested whether the topic of the disclosure mattered. Participants were placed in situations where their outcome either matched the topic of their colleague’s disclosure or involved a completely different topic. The tendency to share mutual failures was highest when the topics were exactly the same. When the topics differed, participants were less likely to share a failure in response to a failure. This indicates that people recognize that a completely unrelated negative outcome might feel dismissive or unhelpful to a struggling friend.
“When a friend shares a failure, many of us choose to mention a related failure of our own, not to compete but to offer solidarity,” Scopelliti said.
The researchers also investigated how people adjust the wording of their messages. In two studies, participants wrote open-ended replies after learning about a friend’s successful or unsuccessful financial investments and job applications.
When participants had a success to share but the friend had failed, they wrote longer messages and frequently used apologies to soften the blow. Sometimes they delayed sharing their own positive news until later in the conversation, or they offered words of consolation and help before mentioning their own outcome. A small percentage of participants even engaged in deception, misrepresenting their own success to protect the friend’s feelings.
“When we have succeeded when someone else has not, many of us hold back or soften the news, weighing how it will land rather than worrying about self-interest,” Scopelliti explained. “When we decide what to share about our own lives in these moments, we are often responding more to the other person’s emotional needs than to our own image.”
To test these patterns in real time, the final study paired 946 participants in live, online chat rooms. Participants completed a puzzle task that was secretly manipulated to be either very easy or very difficult, resulting in genuine feelings of success or failure. They were then paired up, and one participant was given a small financial bonus to spontaneously share their outcome in the chat.
The live interactions closely mirrored the hypothetical scenarios. When both individuals failed, 96 percent of the participants chose to share their failure. When both succeeded, only 73 percent shared their success. In mismatched pairs, participants shared failures in response to successes 81 percent of the time, but they only shared successes in response to failures 40 percent of the time. The chat logs also showed frequent use of compensatory apologies and delayed disclosures when participants were better off than their partners.
“Our data suggests that people calibrate what they share to protect the other person’s feelings,” Scopelliti summarized. “So this effect consistently shows up whether people are choosing between pre-written responses, writing their own replies, or having real, live conversations.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The study mostly involved participants from Western countries, and cultural backgrounds could influence how people handle personal news. In cultures that heavily emphasize social hierarchies or individualism, people might be more willing to share successes or less focused on protecting others from upward comparisons.
There are a few other things to keep in mind regarding the types of outcomes evaluated. The scenarios focused on definitive successes and failures, but everyday life often involves events with varying degrees of intensity. A massive career breakthrough might prompt different disclosure behaviors than a minor daily win.
Additionally, the researchers did not measure whether these well-intentioned communication strategies actually succeed in making the other person feel better. Withholding a success to protect a friend might backfire if the friend later discovers the truth and feels patronized.
“One thing we are eager to look at next is whether these disclosure strategies actually work the way responders intend them to,” Scopelliti told PsyPost. “Our studies show what people choose to share and why, but not how those choices land on the other end.”
Future research could explore how different types of relationships, such as romantic partnerships or rivalries, alter these communication habits. Evaluating how the original discloser reacts to these intentionally crafted responses could also shed light on the long-term relational impacts of hiding positive news. “So the next step is studying both sides of the conversation at once, to examine whether and when these well-intentioned strategies actually achieve their goal, and why,” Scopelliti added.
The study, “Responses to Outcome Disclosure: People Asymmetrically Disclose or Hide Their Outcomes to Protect Others’ Emotions”, was authored by Emily Prinsloo, Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein, and Joachim Vosgerau.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #Disclosures #OutcomeDisclosure #SocialPsychology #CommunicationStudies #MutualFailures #SupportiveCommunication #EmotionalSensitivity #InterpersonalRelationships #HealthyConversations #ResearchersShare
-
DATE: September 10, 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: New psychology research reveals why people tend to hide their successes and share their failures
People often adjust what they share about their own achievements or setbacks based on what their conversation partner has just revealed. New research suggests that these communication choices are driven less by a desire to manage one’s own image and more by an intention to protect the other person’s feelings. This tendency leads people to share mutual failures far more often than mutual successes, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
When people spontaneously share their successes or failures, they often do so to shape how others perceive them, such as appearing competent or seeking sympathy. But conversations are usually interactive. Responsive outcome disclosure occurs when an individual learns about a counterpart’s personal outcome and then must decide whether to share their own experience.
“A lot of existing research on disclosure has focused on why people initially choose to share good news or hide bad news, largely through the lens of self-presentation,” Irene Scopelliti, a professor of marketing and behavioral science at Bayes Business School, told PsyPost. “But conversations do not always work that way, because often we are responding after someone else has already told us their news.”
Traditional theories of communication suggest that people tend to match the tone of their conversation partners. According to this idea of reciprocity, a person should be equally likely to reply to a success with their own success as they are to reply to a failure with their own failure. But sharing personal outcomes is a highly emotional process. For instance, a 2019 study found that sharing one’s failures can reduce feelings of malicious envy in observers.
In addition, people often try to protect the feelings of those around them. Research covered by PsyPost in 2021 indicated that people frequently conceal personal information to avoid causing distress to a close conversation partner. Building on this idea, the current research proposes an other-focused framework for responsive disclosure. If a person cares about the feelings of their counterpart, they might actively shape their own disclosures to provide comfort or avoid causing harm.
To investigate this, the research team, led by Emily Prinsloo of Rice University and Scopelliti, tested this concept through nine separate studies. “So we wanted to understand how people navigate these interactions and what we are more likely to disclose when responding to others’ disclosures,” Scopelliti said.
Across the nine experiments, the researchers evaluated the responses of 8,229 participants in various scenarios and live interactions. They tracked whether people chose to reveal their own successes and failures after a counterpart shared theirs.
“These are not tiny statistical effects,” Scopelliti explained. “Across nine studies and more than 8,000 participants, in contexts ranging from job interviews to health outcomes to financial setbacks, we saw large, consistent shifts in disclosure behavior.”
In the first study, 900 online participants imagined receiving the results of a biological age test. Half were told their biological age was seven years younger than their actual age, indicating a positive health outcome, while the other half were told it was seven years older, indicating a negative outcome. They then read a scenario in which a colleague disclosed either a positive health result, a negative health result, or no result. The participants then allocated points to indicate how likely they were to reply by sharing their own outcome.
The results showed a general preference for matching. Participants were generally more likely to share a success if the colleague also had a success, and a failure if the colleague had a failure. But two interesting asymmetries emerged. First, participants were much more likely to disclose matching failures (87 percent) than matching successes (70 percent). Second, when outcomes did not match, participants were more willing to reveal a failure to a successful colleague (54 percent) than a success to a failing colleague (16 percent).
“For example, participants disclosed a failure of their own much more often after hearing about someone else’s failure compared to someone else’s success,” Scopelliti noted. “Across our studies, this was one of the largest and most consistent effects we observed.”
In fact, she pointed out, “In one study, people who had failed were more than twice as inclined to share their failure when the other person had disclosed a failure compared to when the other person had disclosed a success, and even in our most conservative, real-conversation studies, disclosure rates still rose by a third or more.”
To understand the motives behind these choices, the researchers conducted a second study with 812 participants who imagined receiving either a job offer or a rejection. The participants interacted with an acquaintance who also shared a job outcome. The researchers manipulated how much the participant liked the acquaintance.
When participants liked the acquaintance, the asymmetrical disclosure patterns were especially strong. Open-ended responses showed that participants who shared matching failures often did so to help the other person feel better. Those who withheld their successes from a rejected acquaintance often explicitly stated a desire to avoid causing harm. When participants were told they disliked the acquaintance, they cared less about protecting the other person’s feelings, and the asymmetries were noticeably reduced.
A third study involving 801 participants tested whether the topic of the disclosure mattered. Participants were placed in situations where their outcome either matched the topic of their colleague’s disclosure or involved a completely different topic. The tendency to share mutual failures was highest when the topics were exactly the same. When the topics differed, participants were less likely to share a failure in response to a failure. This indicates that people recognize that a completely unrelated negative outcome might feel dismissive or unhelpful to a struggling friend.
“When a friend shares a failure, many of us choose to mention a related failure of our own, not to compete but to offer solidarity,” Scopelliti said.
The researchers also investigated how people adjust the wording of their messages. In two studies, participants wrote open-ended replies after learning about a friend’s successful or unsuccessful financial investments and job applications.
When participants had a success to share but the friend had failed, they wrote longer messages and frequently used apologies to soften the blow. Sometimes they delayed sharing their own positive news until later in the conversation, or they offered words of consolation and help before mentioning their own outcome. A small percentage of participants even engaged in deception, misrepresenting their own success to protect the friend’s feelings.
“When we have succeeded when someone else has not, many of us hold back or soften the news, weighing how it will land rather than worrying about self-interest,” Scopelliti explained. “When we decide what to share about our own lives in these moments, we are often responding more to the other person’s emotional needs than to our own image.”
To test these patterns in real time, the final study paired 946 participants in live, online chat rooms. Participants completed a puzzle task that was secretly manipulated to be either very easy or very difficult, resulting in genuine feelings of success or failure. They were then paired up, and one participant was given a small financial bonus to spontaneously share their outcome in the chat.
The live interactions closely mirrored the hypothetical scenarios. When both individuals failed, 96 percent of the participants chose to share their failure. When both succeeded, only 73 percent shared their success. In mismatched pairs, participants shared failures in response to successes 81 percent of the time, but they only shared successes in response to failures 40 percent of the time. The chat logs also showed frequent use of compensatory apologies and delayed disclosures when participants were better off than their partners.
“Our data suggests that people calibrate what they share to protect the other person’s feelings,” Scopelliti summarized. “So this effect consistently shows up whether people are choosing between pre-written responses, writing their own replies, or having real, live conversations.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The study mostly involved participants from Western countries, and cultural backgrounds could influence how people handle personal news. In cultures that heavily emphasize social hierarchies or individualism, people might be more willing to share successes or less focused on protecting others from upward comparisons.
There are a few other things to keep in mind regarding the types of outcomes evaluated. The scenarios focused on definitive successes and failures, but everyday life often involves events with varying degrees of intensity. A massive career breakthrough might prompt different disclosure behaviors than a minor daily win.
Additionally, the researchers did not measure whether these well-intentioned communication strategies actually succeed in making the other person feel better. Withholding a success to protect a friend might backfire if the friend later discovers the truth and feels patronized.
“One thing we are eager to look at next is whether these disclosure strategies actually work the way responders intend them to,” Scopelliti told PsyPost. “Our studies show what people choose to share and why, but not how those choices land on the other end.”
Future research could explore how different types of relationships, such as romantic partnerships or rivalries, alter these communication habits. Evaluating how the original discloser reacts to these intentionally crafted responses could also shed light on the long-term relational impacts of hiding positive news. “So the next step is studying both sides of the conversation at once, to examine whether and when these well-intentioned strategies actually achieve their goal, and why,” Scopelliti added.
The study, “Responses to Outcome Disclosure: People Asymmetrically Disclose or Hide Their Outcomes to Protect Others’ Emotions”, was authored by Emily Prinsloo, Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein, and Joachim Vosgerau.
-------------------------------------------------
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Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Disclosures #OutcomeDisclosure #SocialPsychology #CommunicationStudies #MutualFailures #SupportiveCommunication #EmotionalSensitivity #InterpersonalRelationships #HealthyConversations #ResearchersShare
-
DATE: September 9, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORGTITLE: Why Nepal Is Demanding Climate Justice After Deadly Floods
Source: Al Jazeera
Nepal is demanding "climate justice" and $20 million in compensation after floods recently devastated a region of the country, leading to the deaths and disappearances of more than 6,000 people. The catastrophe, which scientists say was caused by the effects of climate change, was triggered when part of a mountain glacier collapsed on August 26 and a torrent of water and mud flooded Nepal's Rasuwa and Nuwakot regions.
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DATE: September 9, 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: Analyzing infant cries to detect autism shows potential, but definitive evidence is still lacking
A systematic review integrating the findings of studies looking to identify autistic infants by analyzing the way they cry found several consistent acoustic patterns, but a pooled meta-analysis did not find statistically significant evidence for differences in pitch. There were indications from individual studies that the fundamental frequency (the basic pitch of the voice) of autistic infants’ cries might be higher, but this finding was not supported when all studies were combined in the meta-analysis. The paper was published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects how people communicate, interact with others, behave, and process sensory information. Its signs can sometimes appear very early in infancy, yet many children are only diagnosed in later preschool years (or even later). This delay matters because earlier identification can give children and families faster access to support during periods of rapid brain development.
Current diagnosis relies largely on developmental observation, clinical assessment, and standardized diagnostic tools, all of which require trained professionals and can be difficult to access in some communities. Researchers are therefore exploring new ways to detect autism-related differences earlier and more objectively. Promising approaches include eye tracking, brain imaging, electroencephalography, video analysis, and other physiological or behavioral signals.
One particularly intriguing possibility is the analysis of infant crying. This approach looks into acoustic characteristics of an infant’s cry. Studies have reported that infants later diagnosed as autistic may differ in features of their cries, including pitch, duration, and variability. Because crying is universal, non-invasive, and easy to record, it could become a useful source of early biomarkers that complement existing autism screening methods.
Study author Sandra Pusil and her colleagues analyzed the results of studies that tried to use the analysis of infant crying to detect autistic infants. They note that these studies generally follow one of two approaches. One approach is to retrospectively compare acoustic features of cries of infants known to be autistic and those that are known to not be autistic. Studies following the other, prospective, approach follow infants who are considered to have an elevated likelihood of being autistic and compare them to infants with a decreased likelihood of being autistic. They then analyze their cries and follow them longitudinally examining which of them actually get diagnosed with autism later.
These authors conducted a systematic review and a meta-analysis of existing evidence. They conducted a comprehensive search of scientific publication databases that cover key biomedical, psychological, and multidisciplinary research areas, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and PsycINFO. They used keywords and subject headings related to cry analysis and autism in their search.
To be included in this review, studies had to focus on cry analyses, be conducted on children under 60 months of age, and either follow a uniform diagnostic protocol (for diagnosing autism), have diagnosis made by a specialist in neurology, psychiatry, or pediatrics, or be based on extensive, rigorous and detailed neuropsychological evaluation. The studies also needed to be reported in full text and available in English.
After searching the databases and removing duplicates, the records were screened. After excluding studies that did not contain what the authors were looking for, or that lacked the required data, they ended up with a total of 11 studies that were included in the systematic review.
Study authors rated 4 of these studies as being of good quality, while 7 were rated as fair. They included a total of 736 participants. The studies analyzed cry features of children ranging from neonates to 4 years of age. 5 of these studies followed the retrospective approach, while 6 followed the prospective approach. 6 of these studies were included in the meta-analysis, while the other 5 were excluded because they did not report the required data.
Multiple studies employed machine learning models to distinguish between the cries of autistic and non-autistic infants, consistently outperforming traditional statistical methods and often reporting accuracies exceeding 90%. Overall, some of the individual studies reported differences between autistic and non-autistic infants in the fundamental frequency of their cries, in the frequency of unusually high-pitched and intense cries (hyperphonation), voice quality irregularities, and other differences.
The most often reported difference was in the fundamental frequency of cries with multiple studies reporting higher pitched cries in autistic infants. However, when all studies were considered together, the difference between autistic and non-autistic infants in cry pitch (i.e., the fundamental frequency of cries) was not statistically significant (not sufficiently large to allow researchers to be sufficiently certain that it is not just caused by random variations).
“Cry analysis offers an objective, accessible, and non-invasive screening tool with the potential to support health assessments and developmental outcome prediction in early infancy. To realize this potential, future research must focus on large-scale, multicentric, longitudinal studies encompassing diverse populations. These efforts should aim to refine ML [machine learning] models, establish standardized datasets, and delineate developmental trajectories of acoustic markers,” study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the development of screening techniques for the early diagnosis of autism. However, it should be noted that most of the studies included in this review had very small sample sizes, requiring any effects to be quite substantial to be detected through statistical procedures used. Additionally, the studies differed very much in the age of participants, autism characteristics, and ways infants’ crying was elicited, further complicating the comparison of their results.
The paper, “Early Identification of Autism Using Cry Analysis: A Systematic Review and Meta‑analysis of Retrospective and Prospective Studies,” was authored by Sandra Pusil, Ana Laguna, Brenda Chino, Jonathan Adrián Zegarra, and Silvia Orlandi.
-------------------------------------------------
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AutismEarlyDetection #CryAnalysis #InfantCryStudy #AutismBiomarkers #PediatricScreening #MachineLearningInHealthcare #EarlyIntervention #SpeechSignalProcessing #Neurodevelopment #AutismResearch
-
DATE: September 9, 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: Analyzing infant cries to detect autism shows potential, but definitive evidence is still lacking
A systematic review integrating the findings of studies looking to identify autistic infants by analyzing the way they cry found several consistent acoustic patterns, but a pooled meta-analysis did not find statistically significant evidence for differences in pitch. There were indications from individual studies that the fundamental frequency (the basic pitch of the voice) of autistic infants’ cries might be higher, but this finding was not supported when all studies were combined in the meta-analysis. The paper was published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects how people communicate, interact with others, behave, and process sensory information. Its signs can sometimes appear very early in infancy, yet many children are only diagnosed in later preschool years (or even later). This delay matters because earlier identification can give children and families faster access to support during periods of rapid brain development.
Current diagnosis relies largely on developmental observation, clinical assessment, and standardized diagnostic tools, all of which require trained professionals and can be difficult to access in some communities. Researchers are therefore exploring new ways to detect autism-related differences earlier and more objectively. Promising approaches include eye tracking, brain imaging, electroencephalography, video analysis, and other physiological or behavioral signals.
One particularly intriguing possibility is the analysis of infant crying. This approach looks into acoustic characteristics of an infant’s cry. Studies have reported that infants later diagnosed as autistic may differ in features of their cries, including pitch, duration, and variability. Because crying is universal, non-invasive, and easy to record, it could become a useful source of early biomarkers that complement existing autism screening methods.
Study author Sandra Pusil and her colleagues analyzed the results of studies that tried to use the analysis of infant crying to detect autistic infants. They note that these studies generally follow one of two approaches. One approach is to retrospectively compare acoustic features of cries of infants known to be autistic and those that are known to not be autistic. Studies following the other, prospective, approach follow infants who are considered to have an elevated likelihood of being autistic and compare them to infants with a decreased likelihood of being autistic. They then analyze their cries and follow them longitudinally examining which of them actually get diagnosed with autism later.
These authors conducted a systematic review and a meta-analysis of existing evidence. They conducted a comprehensive search of scientific publication databases that cover key biomedical, psychological, and multidisciplinary research areas, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and PsycINFO. They used keywords and subject headings related to cry analysis and autism in their search.
To be included in this review, studies had to focus on cry analyses, be conducted on children under 60 months of age, and either follow a uniform diagnostic protocol (for diagnosing autism), have diagnosis made by a specialist in neurology, psychiatry, or pediatrics, or be based on extensive, rigorous and detailed neuropsychological evaluation. The studies also needed to be reported in full text and available in English.
After searching the databases and removing duplicates, the records were screened. After excluding studies that did not contain what the authors were looking for, or that lacked the required data, they ended up with a total of 11 studies that were included in the systematic review.
Study authors rated 4 of these studies as being of good quality, while 7 were rated as fair. They included a total of 736 participants. The studies analyzed cry features of children ranging from neonates to 4 years of age. 5 of these studies followed the retrospective approach, while 6 followed the prospective approach. 6 of these studies were included in the meta-analysis, while the other 5 were excluded because they did not report the required data.
Multiple studies employed machine learning models to distinguish between the cries of autistic and non-autistic infants, consistently outperforming traditional statistical methods and often reporting accuracies exceeding 90%. Overall, some of the individual studies reported differences between autistic and non-autistic infants in the fundamental frequency of their cries, in the frequency of unusually high-pitched and intense cries (hyperphonation), voice quality irregularities, and other differences.
The most often reported difference was in the fundamental frequency of cries with multiple studies reporting higher pitched cries in autistic infants. However, when all studies were considered together, the difference between autistic and non-autistic infants in cry pitch (i.e., the fundamental frequency of cries) was not statistically significant (not sufficiently large to allow researchers to be sufficiently certain that it is not just caused by random variations).
“Cry analysis offers an objective, accessible, and non-invasive screening tool with the potential to support health assessments and developmental outcome prediction in early infancy. To realize this potential, future research must focus on large-scale, multicentric, longitudinal studies encompassing diverse populations. These efforts should aim to refine ML [machine learning] models, establish standardized datasets, and delineate developmental trajectories of acoustic markers,” study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the development of screening techniques for the early diagnosis of autism. However, it should be noted that most of the studies included in this review had very small sample sizes, requiring any effects to be quite substantial to be detected through statistical procedures used. Additionally, the studies differed very much in the age of participants, autism characteristics, and ways infants’ crying was elicited, further complicating the comparison of their results.
The paper, “Early Identification of Autism Using Cry Analysis: A Systematic Review and Meta‑analysis of Retrospective and Prospective Studies,” was authored by Sandra Pusil, Ana Laguna, Brenda Chino, Jonathan Adrián Zegarra, and Silvia Orlandi.
-------------------------------------------------
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AutismEarlyDetection #CryAnalysis #InfantCryStudy #AutismBiomarkers #PediatricScreening #MachineLearningInHealthcare #EarlyIntervention #SpeechSignalProcessing #Neurodevelopment #AutismResearch
-
DATE: September 9, 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: Analyzing infant cries to detect autism shows potential, but definitive evidence is still lacking
A systematic review integrating the findings of studies looking to identify autistic infants by analyzing the way they cry found several consistent acoustic patterns, but a pooled meta-analysis did not find statistically significant evidence for differences in pitch. There were indications from individual studies that the fundamental frequency (the basic pitch of the voice) of autistic infants’ cries might be higher, but this finding was not supported when all studies were combined in the meta-analysis. The paper was published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects how people communicate, interact with others, behave, and process sensory information. Its signs can sometimes appear very early in infancy, yet many children are only diagnosed in later preschool years (or even later). This delay matters because earlier identification can give children and families faster access to support during periods of rapid brain development.
Current diagnosis relies largely on developmental observation, clinical assessment, and standardized diagnostic tools, all of which require trained professionals and can be difficult to access in some communities. Researchers are therefore exploring new ways to detect autism-related differences earlier and more objectively. Promising approaches include eye tracking, brain imaging, electroencephalography, video analysis, and other physiological or behavioral signals.
One particularly intriguing possibility is the analysis of infant crying. This approach looks into acoustic characteristics of an infant’s cry. Studies have reported that infants later diagnosed as autistic may differ in features of their cries, including pitch, duration, and variability. Because crying is universal, non-invasive, and easy to record, it could become a useful source of early biomarkers that complement existing autism screening methods.
Study author Sandra Pusil and her colleagues analyzed the results of studies that tried to use the analysis of infant crying to detect autistic infants. They note that these studies generally follow one of two approaches. One approach is to retrospectively compare acoustic features of cries of infants known to be autistic and those that are known to not be autistic. Studies following the other, prospective, approach follow infants who are considered to have an elevated likelihood of being autistic and compare them to infants with a decreased likelihood of being autistic. They then analyze their cries and follow them longitudinally examining which of them actually get diagnosed with autism later.
These authors conducted a systematic review and a meta-analysis of existing evidence. They conducted a comprehensive search of scientific publication databases that cover key biomedical, psychological, and multidisciplinary research areas, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and PsycINFO. They used keywords and subject headings related to cry analysis and autism in their search.
To be included in this review, studies had to focus on cry analyses, be conducted on children under 60 months of age, and either follow a uniform diagnostic protocol (for diagnosing autism), have diagnosis made by a specialist in neurology, psychiatry, or pediatrics, or be based on extensive, rigorous and detailed neuropsychological evaluation. The studies also needed to be reported in full text and available in English.
After searching the databases and removing duplicates, the records were screened. After excluding studies that did not contain what the authors were looking for, or that lacked the required data, they ended up with a total of 11 studies that were included in the systematic review.
Study authors rated 4 of these studies as being of good quality, while 7 were rated as fair. They included a total of 736 participants. The studies analyzed cry features of children ranging from neonates to 4 years of age. 5 of these studies followed the retrospective approach, while 6 followed the prospective approach. 6 of these studies were included in the meta-analysis, while the other 5 were excluded because they did not report the required data.
Multiple studies employed machine learning models to distinguish between the cries of autistic and non-autistic infants, consistently outperforming traditional statistical methods and often reporting accuracies exceeding 90%. Overall, some of the individual studies reported differences between autistic and non-autistic infants in the fundamental frequency of their cries, in the frequency of unusually high-pitched and intense cries (hyperphonation), voice quality irregularities, and other differences.
The most often reported difference was in the fundamental frequency of cries with multiple studies reporting higher pitched cries in autistic infants. However, when all studies were considered together, the difference between autistic and non-autistic infants in cry pitch (i.e., the fundamental frequency of cries) was not statistically significant (not sufficiently large to allow researchers to be sufficiently certain that it is not just caused by random variations).
“Cry analysis offers an objective, accessible, and non-invasive screening tool with the potential to support health assessments and developmental outcome prediction in early infancy. To realize this potential, future research must focus on large-scale, multicentric, longitudinal studies encompassing diverse populations. These efforts should aim to refine ML [machine learning] models, establish standardized datasets, and delineate developmental trajectories of acoustic markers,” study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the development of screening techniques for the early diagnosis of autism. However, it should be noted that most of the studies included in this review had very small sample sizes, requiring any effects to be quite substantial to be detected through statistical procedures used. Additionally, the studies differed very much in the age of participants, autism characteristics, and ways infants’ crying was elicited, further complicating the comparison of their results.
The paper, “Early Identification of Autism Using Cry Analysis: A Systematic Review and Meta‑analysis of Retrospective and Prospective Studies,” was authored by Sandra Pusil, Ana Laguna, Brenda Chino, Jonathan Adrián Zegarra, and Silvia Orlandi.
-------------------------------------------------
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Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AutismEarlyDetection #CryAnalysis #InfantCryStudy #AutismBiomarkers #PediatricScreening #MachineLearningInHealthcare #EarlyIntervention #SpeechSignalProcessing #Neurodevelopment #AutismResearch
-
DATE: September 9, 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: A six-decade study links teenage school anxiety to late-life memory complaints
Feeling anxious or struggling to keep pace in school during early adolescence is linked to how people view their own memory abilities more than fifty years later. The findings suggest that early-life psychological health can have a lasting association with how individuals perceive their cognitive decline in older age. The research was published in Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.
Subjective memory refers to a person’s own perception of their everyday memory functioning. This includes noticing how often they forget where they placed an item, lose track of a conversation, or fail to recall something they were just told. As people age, it is incredibly common to experience and report these types of memory difficulties. Some older adults report no changes, whereas others feel their memory is steadily declining.
Scientists are interested in these self-reported memory complaints because they can sometimes serve as an early warning sign for dementia. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that greater declines in self-reported memory over time were associated with higher levels of Alzheimer’s-related proteins in the brain. At the same time, a 2014 meta-analysis found that people’s self-rated memory issues only weakly match their actual memory test scores. Because subjective memory and objective memory often differ, researchers have begun exploring how emotional and psychological traits influence self-reported cognitive decline.
Historically, much of the research on cognitive aging has focused on risk factors present in middle or late adulthood. However, scientists are increasingly looking to the very beginning of life to understand how early experiences shape the aging process. For example, a 2004 study demonstrated that cognitive abilities measured in childhood continue to predict mental performance and health many decades later in old age. Conditions such as a family’s socioeconomic status can dictate a child’s early opportunities, setting them on a path that affects their long-term brain health.
The research, led by Gideon Neidenmark, a doctoral student at Örebro University in Sweden, aimed to understand how an array of childhood factors might forecast memory complaints in old age. The authors noted that existing research rarely tracks individuals from early childhood all the way into their late sixties. By bridging this gap, they hoped to see whether childhood intelligence, social well-being, or school anxiety could predict how people evaluate their own memories nearly six decades later.
“I am fortunate enough to be involved in a longitudinal study called the IDA-project with data spanning six decades,” Neidenmark told PsyPost. “This has enabled questions regarding how our childhood and adolescence are related to our abilities when we get older.”
“I became especially interested in subjective memory because previous research has demonstrated that our own experience of our memory abilities usually does not overlap substantially with our actual memory performance and wanted to understand why that is,” he added.
To investigate this, the researchers used data from the IDA-project, a massive Swedish longitudinal study that began in 1965. They tracked a cohort of participants who were around 10 years old at the start of the study, assessing them again in 1968 at age 13. During these childhood visits, participants completed standardized tests measuring their verbal, spatial, and reasoning abilities. The researchers also gathered official school grades, collected information on the families’ socioeconomic status, and asked the children to fill out questionnaires about their social well-being and any anxiety they experienced in the school context.
In 2022, the researchers sent follow-up questionnaires to the surviving participants, who were now about 67 years old. A total of 625 people completed this phase of the study. The participants filled out a standardized survey detailing their current subjective memory, answering questions about how often they forget things in their daily lives. They also completed a widely used assessment to measure their current levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms.
When analyzing the data, the researchers found that participants who reported higher levels of school anxiety at age 13 tended to report worse subjective memory at age 67. This association was specific to psychological health during early adolescence. Interestingly, the researchers did not find evidence that school anxiety at age 10 predicted memory complaints later in life.
This link between early adolescent anxiety and late-life memory complaints remained steady even after the researchers accounted for the participants’ current anxiety and depressive symptoms.
“I think the most important take-home message is that our childhood and adolescence are related to our abilities in later life, particularly that our psychological health in our youth is related to how we perceive and rate our own memory abilities,” Neidenmark said. “This also persists even when we account for current psychological health.”
In contrast, several other childhood factors did not predict subjective memory in older age. The researchers found no evidence that cognitive ability, school grades, social well-being, or family socioeconomic status at ages 10 or 13 had any bearing on how participants viewed their memory at age 67.
“I think what surprised me the most was that social well-being, socioeconomic status, cognitive ability and school performance during childhood and adolescence were not related to subjective memory in later life,” Neidenmark explained. “It really emphasized what previous literature has found, i.e., that subjective memory may better reflect psychological factors than actual memory performance.”
The findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that depression during adolescence was associated with lower cognitive performance over the next six years. The new study extends this timeline considerably, tracking participants over nearly six decades. It is worth noting, however, that the new study focused exclusively on self-reported memory complaints in older age rather than objective cognitive test performance.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The childhood questionnaires used to measure school anxiety and social well-being relied on only a few items, which resulted in relatively low statistical reliability for those specific measures. This lack of precision might explain why factors like early social well-being did not show a relationship with late-life memory complaints. Better measurement tools might yield different results in future studies.
“Like with any articles, we should be cautious about considering these findings as fact or infer causality,” Neidenmark pointed out. “As mentioned, we should be cautious about considering lower psychological health as causing lower subjective memory. Rather, they are related to each other even over such a large time span.”
Additionally, the recent follow-up phase of the study did not include objective memory tests or medical screenings for dementia. Because of this, the researchers could not determine if the participants’ memory complaints reflected actual cognitive decline or merely a pessimistic view of their abilities. The study also experienced attrition over its 57-year span, and the individuals who remained in the project at age 67 generally had better childhood grades and better psychological health than those who dropped out.
Future research could explore whether there is a direct chain of events linking early-life psychological health to late-life memory. Scientists might also look at mid-life factors that could bridge the gap between teenage anxiety and aging. Understanding these pathways could help health professionals design interventions that support both emotional well-being and lifelong cognitive health.
“However, this study and findings could indicate the importance of considering early-life for prevention,” Neidenmark noted. “This study in particular may point to psychological health (in particular school anxiety) as an important factor to consider in this work.”
“My next step is to investigate how these factors in childhood and adolescence are related to actual memory performance and brain structure in later life,” he said. “I hope to understand how this differs to my results from this study, and how they are related.”
The study, “Early life predictors of subjective cognitive function in older age: Emerging longitudinal associations over six decades,” was authored by Gideon Neidenmark, Catherine Tuvblad, and Jonas Persson.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #EarlyLifeCognition #SchoolAnxiety #SubjectiveMemory #CognitiveAging #LongevityResearch #AdolescentHealth #MemoryDeclinePerception #LongitudinalStudy #DementiaPrevention #PsychologicalHealthMatters
-
DATE: September 9, 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: A six-decade study links teenage school anxiety to late-life memory complaints
Feeling anxious or struggling to keep pace in school during early adolescence is linked to how people view their own memory abilities more than fifty years later. The findings suggest that early-life psychological health can have a lasting association with how individuals perceive their cognitive decline in older age. The research was published in Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.
Subjective memory refers to a person’s own perception of their everyday memory functioning. This includes noticing how often they forget where they placed an item, lose track of a conversation, or fail to recall something they were just told. As people age, it is incredibly common to experience and report these types of memory difficulties. Some older adults report no changes, whereas others feel their memory is steadily declining.
Scientists are interested in these self-reported memory complaints because they can sometimes serve as an early warning sign for dementia. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that greater declines in self-reported memory over time were associated with higher levels of Alzheimer’s-related proteins in the brain. At the same time, a 2014 meta-analysis found that people’s self-rated memory issues only weakly match their actual memory test scores. Because subjective memory and objective memory often differ, researchers have begun exploring how emotional and psychological traits influence self-reported cognitive decline.
Historically, much of the research on cognitive aging has focused on risk factors present in middle or late adulthood. However, scientists are increasingly looking to the very beginning of life to understand how early experiences shape the aging process. For example, a 2004 study demonstrated that cognitive abilities measured in childhood continue to predict mental performance and health many decades later in old age. Conditions such as a family’s socioeconomic status can dictate a child’s early opportunities, setting them on a path that affects their long-term brain health.
The research, led by Gideon Neidenmark, a doctoral student at Örebro University in Sweden, aimed to understand how an array of childhood factors might forecast memory complaints in old age. The authors noted that existing research rarely tracks individuals from early childhood all the way into their late sixties. By bridging this gap, they hoped to see whether childhood intelligence, social well-being, or school anxiety could predict how people evaluate their own memories nearly six decades later.
“I am fortunate enough to be involved in a longitudinal study called the IDA-project with data spanning six decades,” Neidenmark told PsyPost. “This has enabled questions regarding how our childhood and adolescence are related to our abilities when we get older.”
“I became especially interested in subjective memory because previous research has demonstrated that our own experience of our memory abilities usually does not overlap substantially with our actual memory performance and wanted to understand why that is,” he added.
To investigate this, the researchers used data from the IDA-project, a massive Swedish longitudinal study that began in 1965. They tracked a cohort of participants who were around 10 years old at the start of the study, assessing them again in 1968 at age 13. During these childhood visits, participants completed standardized tests measuring their verbal, spatial, and reasoning abilities. The researchers also gathered official school grades, collected information on the families’ socioeconomic status, and asked the children to fill out questionnaires about their social well-being and any anxiety they experienced in the school context.
In 2022, the researchers sent follow-up questionnaires to the surviving participants, who were now about 67 years old. A total of 625 people completed this phase of the study. The participants filled out a standardized survey detailing their current subjective memory, answering questions about how often they forget things in their daily lives. They also completed a widely used assessment to measure their current levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms.
When analyzing the data, the researchers found that participants who reported higher levels of school anxiety at age 13 tended to report worse subjective memory at age 67. This association was specific to psychological health during early adolescence. Interestingly, the researchers did not find evidence that school anxiety at age 10 predicted memory complaints later in life.
This link between early adolescent anxiety and late-life memory complaints remained steady even after the researchers accounted for the participants’ current anxiety and depressive symptoms.
“I think the most important take-home message is that our childhood and adolescence are related to our abilities in later life, particularly that our psychological health in our youth is related to how we perceive and rate our own memory abilities,” Neidenmark said. “This also persists even when we account for current psychological health.”
In contrast, several other childhood factors did not predict subjective memory in older age. The researchers found no evidence that cognitive ability, school grades, social well-being, or family socioeconomic status at ages 10 or 13 had any bearing on how participants viewed their memory at age 67.
“I think what surprised me the most was that social well-being, socioeconomic status, cognitive ability and school performance during childhood and adolescence were not related to subjective memory in later life,” Neidenmark explained. “It really emphasized what previous literature has found, i.e., that subjective memory may better reflect psychological factors than actual memory performance.”
The findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that depression during adolescence was associated with lower cognitive performance over the next six years. The new study extends this timeline considerably, tracking participants over nearly six decades. It is worth noting, however, that the new study focused exclusively on self-reported memory complaints in older age rather than objective cognitive test performance.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The childhood questionnaires used to measure school anxiety and social well-being relied on only a few items, which resulted in relatively low statistical reliability for those specific measures. This lack of precision might explain why factors like early social well-being did not show a relationship with late-life memory complaints. Better measurement tools might yield different results in future studies.
“Like with any articles, we should be cautious about considering these findings as fact or infer causality,” Neidenmark pointed out. “As mentioned, we should be cautious about considering lower psychological health as causing lower subjective memory. Rather, they are related to each other even over such a large time span.”
Additionally, the recent follow-up phase of the study did not include objective memory tests or medical screenings for dementia. Because of this, the researchers could not determine if the participants’ memory complaints reflected actual cognitive decline or merely a pessimistic view of their abilities. The study also experienced attrition over its 57-year span, and the individuals who remained in the project at age 67 generally had better childhood grades and better psychological health than those who dropped out.
Future research could explore whether there is a direct chain of events linking early-life psychological health to late-life memory. Scientists might also look at mid-life factors that could bridge the gap between teenage anxiety and aging. Understanding these pathways could help health professionals design interventions that support both emotional well-being and lifelong cognitive health.
“However, this study and findings could indicate the importance of considering early-life for prevention,” Neidenmark noted. “This study in particular may point to psychological health (in particular school anxiety) as an important factor to consider in this work.”
“My next step is to investigate how these factors in childhood and adolescence are related to actual memory performance and brain structure in later life,” he said. “I hope to understand how this differs to my results from this study, and how they are related.”
The study, “Early life predictors of subjective cognitive function in older age: Emerging longitudinal associations over six decades,” was authored by Gideon Neidenmark, Catherine Tuvblad, and Jonas Persson.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #EarlyLifeCognition #SchoolAnxiety #SubjectiveMemory #CognitiveAging #LongevityResearch #AdolescentHealth #MemoryDeclinePerception #LongitudinalStudy #DementiaPrevention #PsychologicalHealthMatters
-
DATE: September 9, 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: A six-decade study links teenage school anxiety to late-life memory complaints
Feeling anxious or struggling to keep pace in school during early adolescence is linked to how people view their own memory abilities more than fifty years later. The findings suggest that early-life psychological health can have a lasting association with how individuals perceive their cognitive decline in older age. The research was published in Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.
Subjective memory refers to a person’s own perception of their everyday memory functioning. This includes noticing how often they forget where they placed an item, lose track of a conversation, or fail to recall something they were just told. As people age, it is incredibly common to experience and report these types of memory difficulties. Some older adults report no changes, whereas others feel their memory is steadily declining.
Scientists are interested in these self-reported memory complaints because they can sometimes serve as an early warning sign for dementia. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that greater declines in self-reported memory over time were associated with higher levels of Alzheimer’s-related proteins in the brain. At the same time, a 2014 meta-analysis found that people’s self-rated memory issues only weakly match their actual memory test scores. Because subjective memory and objective memory often differ, researchers have begun exploring how emotional and psychological traits influence self-reported cognitive decline.
Historically, much of the research on cognitive aging has focused on risk factors present in middle or late adulthood. However, scientists are increasingly looking to the very beginning of life to understand how early experiences shape the aging process. For example, a 2004 study demonstrated that cognitive abilities measured in childhood continue to predict mental performance and health many decades later in old age. Conditions such as a family’s socioeconomic status can dictate a child’s early opportunities, setting them on a path that affects their long-term brain health.
The research, led by Gideon Neidenmark, a doctoral student at Örebro University in Sweden, aimed to understand how an array of childhood factors might forecast memory complaints in old age. The authors noted that existing research rarely tracks individuals from early childhood all the way into their late sixties. By bridging this gap, they hoped to see whether childhood intelligence, social well-being, or school anxiety could predict how people evaluate their own memories nearly six decades later.
“I am fortunate enough to be involved in a longitudinal study called the IDA-project with data spanning six decades,” Neidenmark told PsyPost. “This has enabled questions regarding how our childhood and adolescence are related to our abilities when we get older.”
“I became especially interested in subjective memory because previous research has demonstrated that our own experience of our memory abilities usually does not overlap substantially with our actual memory performance and wanted to understand why that is,” he added.
To investigate this, the researchers used data from the IDA-project, a massive Swedish longitudinal study that began in 1965. They tracked a cohort of participants who were around 10 years old at the start of the study, assessing them again in 1968 at age 13. During these childhood visits, participants completed standardized tests measuring their verbal, spatial, and reasoning abilities. The researchers also gathered official school grades, collected information on the families’ socioeconomic status, and asked the children to fill out questionnaires about their social well-being and any anxiety they experienced in the school context.
In 2022, the researchers sent follow-up questionnaires to the surviving participants, who were now about 67 years old. A total of 625 people completed this phase of the study. The participants filled out a standardized survey detailing their current subjective memory, answering questions about how often they forget things in their daily lives. They also completed a widely used assessment to measure their current levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms.
When analyzing the data, the researchers found that participants who reported higher levels of school anxiety at age 13 tended to report worse subjective memory at age 67. This association was specific to psychological health during early adolescence. Interestingly, the researchers did not find evidence that school anxiety at age 10 predicted memory complaints later in life.
This link between early adolescent anxiety and late-life memory complaints remained steady even after the researchers accounted for the participants’ current anxiety and depressive symptoms.
“I think the most important take-home message is that our childhood and adolescence are related to our abilities in later life, particularly that our psychological health in our youth is related to how we perceive and rate our own memory abilities,” Neidenmark said. “This also persists even when we account for current psychological health.”
In contrast, several other childhood factors did not predict subjective memory in older age. The researchers found no evidence that cognitive ability, school grades, social well-being, or family socioeconomic status at ages 10 or 13 had any bearing on how participants viewed their memory at age 67.
“I think what surprised me the most was that social well-being, socioeconomic status, cognitive ability and school performance during childhood and adolescence were not related to subjective memory in later life,” Neidenmark explained. “It really emphasized what previous literature has found, i.e., that subjective memory may better reflect psychological factors than actual memory performance.”
The findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that depression during adolescence was associated with lower cognitive performance over the next six years. The new study extends this timeline considerably, tracking participants over nearly six decades. It is worth noting, however, that the new study focused exclusively on self-reported memory complaints in older age rather than objective cognitive test performance.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The childhood questionnaires used to measure school anxiety and social well-being relied on only a few items, which resulted in relatively low statistical reliability for those specific measures. This lack of precision might explain why factors like early social well-being did not show a relationship with late-life memory complaints. Better measurement tools might yield different results in future studies.
“Like with any articles, we should be cautious about considering these findings as fact or infer causality,” Neidenmark pointed out. “As mentioned, we should be cautious about considering lower psychological health as causing lower subjective memory. Rather, they are related to each other even over such a large time span.”
Additionally, the recent follow-up phase of the study did not include objective memory tests or medical screenings for dementia. Because of this, the researchers could not determine if the participants’ memory complaints reflected actual cognitive decline or merely a pessimistic view of their abilities. The study also experienced attrition over its 57-year span, and the individuals who remained in the project at age 67 generally had better childhood grades and better psychological health than those who dropped out.
Future research could explore whether there is a direct chain of events linking early-life psychological health to late-life memory. Scientists might also look at mid-life factors that could bridge the gap between teenage anxiety and aging. Understanding these pathways could help health professionals design interventions that support both emotional well-being and lifelong cognitive health.
“However, this study and findings could indicate the importance of considering early-life for prevention,” Neidenmark noted. “This study in particular may point to psychological health (in particular school anxiety) as an important factor to consider in this work.”
“My next step is to investigate how these factors in childhood and adolescence are related to actual memory performance and brain structure in later life,” he said. “I hope to understand how this differs to my results from this study, and how they are related.”
The study, “Early life predictors of subjective cognitive function in older age: Emerging longitudinal associations over six decades,” was authored by Gideon Neidenmark, Catherine Tuvblad, and Jonas Persson.
-------------------------------------------------
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 #EarlyLifeCognition #SchoolAnxiety #SubjectiveMemory #CognitiveAging #LongevityResearch #AdolescentHealth #MemoryDeclinePerception #LongitudinalStudy #DementiaPrevention #PsychologicalHealthMatters
-
Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
https://jeffs.blog/p/defining-ai-psychosis-part-2-prolific
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628880
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Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
https://jeffs.blog/p/defining-ai-psychosis-part-2-prolific
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Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
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Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
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Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
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DATE: September 9, 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: Self-perceived romantic desirability is strongly linked to overall self-esteem
URL: https://www.psypost.org/feeling-like-a-good-catch-is-strongly-linked-to-higher-overall-self-esteem/
People who consider themselves highly desirable romantic partners also tend to report higher overall self-worth. A recent meta-analysis of data from nearly 12,000 individuals confirmed a strong positive association between self-perceived mate value and global self-esteem. The research was published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.
Psychologists use the term “mate value” to describe how desirable a person is within the dating market. Historically, researchers tied this concept to evolutionary traits like physical health, financial resources, and social status. More recent approaches emphasize that mate value also depends on specific relationship contexts and personal preferences.
Self-perceived mate value refers to an individual’s own assessment of their romantic desirability compared to potential competitors. It acts as a form of internal bargaining power. This self-assessment guides people toward partners who match their own perceived level of desirability, helping them minimize the risk of romantic rejection.
Self-esteem represents a person’s broad emotional evaluation of their own worth. One prominent psychological framework, known as sociometer theory, suggests that self-esteem functions as an internal gauge of social acceptance. According to this model, people experience high self-esteem when they feel included and valued by others. They experience low self-esteem when they feel rejected.
Evaluating oneself as a good romantic prospect is a highly specific form of social inclusion. Theoretical models suggest that self-perceived mate value and self-esteem operate in a continuous feedback loop. Feeling like a desirable partner might elevate self-esteem, which then breeds the social confidence needed to attract potential mates.
Evolutionary psychology provides additional context for this relationship. From an evolutionary standpoint, human beings possess deep-seated motivations to survive and reproduce. Individuals who believe they possess highly prized mating traits often feel a sense of biological and social fitness, which bolsters their overall self-worth.
Relationships can also be viewed through the lens of social exchange theory. This framework assumes people seek to maximize rewards, like companionship and support, while minimizing emotional costs. People with high self-perceived mate value often feel they bring substantial resources to a relationship, so they expect an equitable exchange and are less likely to settle for imbalanced partnerships.
Early childhood experiences shape how adults navigate these romantic domains. Securely attached individuals generally develop stable self-esteem and hold positive, accurate views of their mate value. Those with anxious or avoidant attachment histories often struggle with fluctuating self-worth and may undervalue what they offer to a romantic partner.
Finally, self-verification theory suggests that people have a strong psychological drive to maintain consistency between their self-concept and the way others treat them. Individuals who view themselves as highly desirable will seek out partners who validate that belief. Conversely, those with low self-perceived mate value might gravitate toward relationships that confirm their negative self-evaluations.
To better understand the strength and consistency of the relationship between self-esteem and romantic desirability, a team of researchers conducted a comprehensive review of existing literature. The team included Sreedevi J. and Saurabh Maheshwari of the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, along with Jeshmeen Deb Barman of the Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology. They wanted to see if the link between these two psychological concepts held true across different demographics and survey methods.
The investigators performed a meta-analysis, a statistical technique that combines the results of multiple independent studies to identify overarching trends. They searched academic databases for papers containing keywords related to self-esteem and mate selection. They also contacted the authors of previous studies to obtain unpublished correlation data.
The team ultimately gathered 23 research records containing 26 distinct datasets published through the end of 2025. This yielded a large sample of 11,837 participants. The vast majority of these participants were young adults living in Western countries.
The pooled data revealed a strong, positive mathematical correlation between self-perceived mate value and self-esteem. Individuals who rated themselves highly on traits related to romantic desirability consistently reported higher overall self-worth.
Next, the researchers tested whether other variables influenced the strength of this connection. They categorized the data by participant age and gender to see if demographic differences changed the statistical relationship. They also looked at whether the original studies used specific types of survey tools.
Some of the original studies measured mate value by asking participants to rate their own specific traits, such as physical attractiveness or wealth. Other studies used non-trait methods, simply asking participants how desirable they believed they were to the opposite sex. The researchers compared these different survey styles to see if the measurement method altered the results.
The results of these secondary analyses were not statistically significant. The type of survey used to measure self-esteem or mate value did not change the core relationship between the two variables. The researchers noted that both survey styles likely capture the same internalized beliefs about personal desirability.
Gender and age also failed to alter the connection. The link between romantic desirability and self-esteem remained consistent across the board. Men and women of various age groups all demonstrated a strong association between their perceived mate value and their global self-esteem.
This research relies entirely on correlational data. The mathematical association does not prove that feeling like a good catch directly boosts a person’s self-esteem. It is equally possible that possessing high baseline self-esteem makes people view their romantic prospects more optimistically.
The original study authors suggest that the relationship is likely bidirectional. Self-perceived mate value and self-esteem probably feed into one another over time. A positive self-evaluation in the dating market enhances overall confidence, which then makes a person feel even more desirable.
The underlying studies predominantly featured young adults from Western populations. This heavy reliance on specific demographics limits the ability to generalize the findings to older individuals or non-Western cultures. Cultural norms surrounding dating and self-worth can vary widely around the world.
The current data only addresses how people view their own desirability. Future investigations could incorporate external evaluations from peers or independent interviewers. Comparing a person’s internal self-assessment with how others actually perceive them might provide a more complete picture of how dating market dynamics relate to personal self-worth.
The study, “Association Between Self-Perceived Mate Value and Self-Esteem: A Meta-Analysis,” was authored by Sreedevi J., Jeshmeen Deb Barman, and Saurabh Maheshwari.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/feeling-like-a-good-catch-is-strongly-linked-to-higher-overall-self-esteem/
-------------------------------------------------
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DATE: September 9, 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: Self-perceived romantic desirability is strongly linked to overall self-esteem
URL: https://www.psypost.org/feeling-like-a-good-catch-is-strongly-linked-to-higher-overall-self-esteem/
People who consider themselves highly desirable romantic partners also tend to report higher overall self-worth. A recent meta-analysis of data from nearly 12,000 individuals confirmed a strong positive association between self-perceived mate value and global self-esteem. The research was published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.
Psychologists use the term “mate value” to describe how desirable a person is within the dating market. Historically, researchers tied this concept to evolutionary traits like physical health, financial resources, and social status. More recent approaches emphasize that mate value also depends on specific relationship contexts and personal preferences.
Self-perceived mate value refers to an individual’s own assessment of their romantic desirability compared to potential competitors. It acts as a form of internal bargaining power. This self-assessment guides people toward partners who match their own perceived level of desirability, helping them minimize the risk of romantic rejection.
Self-esteem represents a person’s broad emotional evaluation of their own worth. One prominent psychological framework, known as sociometer theory, suggests that self-esteem functions as an internal gauge of social acceptance. According to this model, people experience high self-esteem when they feel included and valued by others. They experience low self-esteem when they feel rejected.
Evaluating oneself as a good romantic prospect is a highly specific form of social inclusion. Theoretical models suggest that self-perceived mate value and self-esteem operate in a continuous feedback loop. Feeling like a desirable partner might elevate self-esteem, which then breeds the social confidence needed to attract potential mates.
Evolutionary psychology provides additional context for this relationship. From an evolutionary standpoint, human beings possess deep-seated motivations to survive and reproduce. Individuals who believe they possess highly prized mating traits often feel a sense of biological and social fitness, which bolsters their overall self-worth.
Relationships can also be viewed through the lens of social exchange theory. This framework assumes people seek to maximize rewards, like companionship and support, while minimizing emotional costs. People with high self-perceived mate value often feel they bring substantial resources to a relationship, so they expect an equitable exchange and are less likely to settle for imbalanced partnerships.
Early childhood experiences shape how adults navigate these romantic domains. Securely attached individuals generally develop stable self-esteem and hold positive, accurate views of their mate value. Those with anxious or avoidant attachment histories often struggle with fluctuating self-worth and may undervalue what they offer to a romantic partner.
Finally, self-verification theory suggests that people have a strong psychological drive to maintain consistency between their self-concept and the way others treat them. Individuals who view themselves as highly desirable will seek out partners who validate that belief. Conversely, those with low self-perceived mate value might gravitate toward relationships that confirm their negative self-evaluations.
To better understand the strength and consistency of the relationship between self-esteem and romantic desirability, a team of researchers conducted a comprehensive review of existing literature. The team included Sreedevi J. and Saurabh Maheshwari of the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, along with Jeshmeen Deb Barman of the Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology. They wanted to see if the link between these two psychological concepts held true across different demographics and survey methods.
The investigators performed a meta-analysis, a statistical technique that combines the results of multiple independent studies to identify overarching trends. They searched academic databases for papers containing keywords related to self-esteem and mate selection. They also contacted the authors of previous studies to obtain unpublished correlation data.
The team ultimately gathered 23 research records containing 26 distinct datasets published through the end of 2025. This yielded a large sample of 11,837 participants. The vast majority of these participants were young adults living in Western countries.
The pooled data revealed a strong, positive mathematical correlation between self-perceived mate value and self-esteem. Individuals who rated themselves highly on traits related to romantic desirability consistently reported higher overall self-worth.
Next, the researchers tested whether other variables influenced the strength of this connection. They categorized the data by participant age and gender to see if demographic differences changed the statistical relationship. They also looked at whether the original studies used specific types of survey tools.
Some of the original studies measured mate value by asking participants to rate their own specific traits, such as physical attractiveness or wealth. Other studies used non-trait methods, simply asking participants how desirable they believed they were to the opposite sex. The researchers compared these different survey styles to see if the measurement method altered the results.
The results of these secondary analyses were not statistically significant. The type of survey used to measure self-esteem or mate value did not change the core relationship between the two variables. The researchers noted that both survey styles likely capture the same internalized beliefs about personal desirability.
Gender and age also failed to alter the connection. The link between romantic desirability and self-esteem remained consistent across the board. Men and women of various age groups all demonstrated a strong association between their perceived mate value and their global self-esteem.
This research relies entirely on correlational data. The mathematical association does not prove that feeling like a good catch directly boosts a person’s self-esteem. It is equally possible that possessing high baseline self-esteem makes people view their romantic prospects more optimistically.
The original study authors suggest that the relationship is likely bidirectional. Self-perceived mate value and self-esteem probably feed into one another over time. A positive self-evaluation in the dating market enhances overall confidence, which then makes a person feel even more desirable.
The underlying studies predominantly featured young adults from Western populations. This heavy reliance on specific demographics limits the ability to generalize the findings to older individuals or non-Western cultures. Cultural norms surrounding dating and self-worth can vary widely around the world.
The current data only addresses how people view their own desirability. Future investigations could incorporate external evaluations from peers or independent interviewers. Comparing a person’s internal self-assessment with how others actually perceive them might provide a more complete picture of how dating market dynamics relate to personal self-worth.
The study, “Association Between Self-Perceived Mate Value and Self-Esteem: A Meta-Analysis,” was authored by Sreedevi J., Jeshmeen Deb Barman, and Saurabh Maheshwari.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/feeling-like-a-good-catch-is-strongly-linked-to-higher-overall-self-esteem/
-------------------------------------------------
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #SelfEsteem #MateValue #RomanticDesirability #SelfWorth #DatingMarket #SelfPerception #PsychologyResearch #MetaAnalysis #RelationshipScience #SocialExchangeTheory
-
DATE: September 9, 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: Self-perceived romantic desirability is strongly linked to overall self-esteem
URL: https://www.psypost.org/feeling-like-a-good-catch-is-strongly-linked-to-higher-overall-self-esteem/
People who consider themselves highly desirable romantic partners also tend to report higher overall self-worth. A recent meta-analysis of data from nearly 12,000 individuals confirmed a strong positive association between self-perceived mate value and global self-esteem. The research was published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.
Psychologists use the term “mate value” to describe how desirable a person is within the dating market. Historically, researchers tied this concept to evolutionary traits like physical health, financial resources, and social status. More recent approaches emphasize that mate value also depends on specific relationship contexts and personal preferences.
Self-perceived mate value refers to an individual’s own assessment of their romantic desirability compared to potential competitors. It acts as a form of internal bargaining power. This self-assessment guides people toward partners who match their own perceived level of desirability, helping them minimize the risk of romantic rejection.
Self-esteem represents a person’s broad emotional evaluation of their own worth. One prominent psychological framework, known as sociometer theory, suggests that self-esteem functions as an internal gauge of social acceptance. According to this model, people experience high self-esteem when they feel included and valued by others. They experience low self-esteem when they feel rejected.
Evaluating oneself as a good romantic prospect is a highly specific form of social inclusion. Theoretical models suggest that self-perceived mate value and self-esteem operate in a continuous feedback loop. Feeling like a desirable partner might elevate self-esteem, which then breeds the social confidence needed to attract potential mates.
Evolutionary psychology provides additional context for this relationship. From an evolutionary standpoint, human beings possess deep-seated motivations to survive and reproduce. Individuals who believe they possess highly prized mating traits often feel a sense of biological and social fitness, which bolsters their overall self-worth.
Relationships can also be viewed through the lens of social exchange theory. This framework assumes people seek to maximize rewards, like companionship and support, while minimizing emotional costs. People with high self-perceived mate value often feel they bring substantial resources to a relationship, so they expect an equitable exchange and are less likely to settle for imbalanced partnerships.
Early childhood experiences shape how adults navigate these romantic domains. Securely attached individuals generally develop stable self-esteem and hold positive, accurate views of their mate value. Those with anxious or avoidant attachment histories often struggle with fluctuating self-worth and may undervalue what they offer to a romantic partner.
Finally, self-verification theory suggests that people have a strong psychological drive to maintain consistency between their self-concept and the way others treat them. Individuals who view themselves as highly desirable will seek out partners who validate that belief. Conversely, those with low self-perceived mate value might gravitate toward relationships that confirm their negative self-evaluations.
To better understand the strength and consistency of the relationship between self-esteem and romantic desirability, a team of researchers conducted a comprehensive review of existing literature. The team included Sreedevi J. and Saurabh Maheshwari of the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, along with Jeshmeen Deb Barman of the Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology. They wanted to see if the link between these two psychological concepts held true across different demographics and survey methods.
The investigators performed a meta-analysis, a statistical technique that combines the results of multiple independent studies to identify overarching trends. They searched academic databases for papers containing keywords related to self-esteem and mate selection. They also contacted the authors of previous studies to obtain unpublished correlation data.
The team ultimately gathered 23 research records containing 26 distinct datasets published through the end of 2025. This yielded a large sample of 11,837 participants. The vast majority of these participants were young adults living in Western countries.
The pooled data revealed a strong, positive mathematical correlation between self-perceived mate value and self-esteem. Individuals who rated themselves highly on traits related to romantic desirability consistently reported higher overall self-worth.
Next, the researchers tested whether other variables influenced the strength of this connection. They categorized the data by participant age and gender to see if demographic differences changed the statistical relationship. They also looked at whether the original studies used specific types of survey tools.
Some of the original studies measured mate value by asking participants to rate their own specific traits, such as physical attractiveness or wealth. Other studies used non-trait methods, simply asking participants how desirable they believed they were to the opposite sex. The researchers compared these different survey styles to see if the measurement method altered the results.
The results of these secondary analyses were not statistically significant. The type of survey used to measure self-esteem or mate value did not change the core relationship between the two variables. The researchers noted that both survey styles likely capture the same internalized beliefs about personal desirability.
Gender and age also failed to alter the connection. The link between romantic desirability and self-esteem remained consistent across the board. Men and women of various age groups all demonstrated a strong association between their perceived mate value and their global self-esteem.
This research relies entirely on correlational data. The mathematical association does not prove that feeling like a good catch directly boosts a person’s self-esteem. It is equally possible that possessing high baseline self-esteem makes people view their romantic prospects more optimistically.
The original study authors suggest that the relationship is likely bidirectional. Self-perceived mate value and self-esteem probably feed into one another over time. A positive self-evaluation in the dating market enhances overall confidence, which then makes a person feel even more desirable.
The underlying studies predominantly featured young adults from Western populations. This heavy reliance on specific demographics limits the ability to generalize the findings to older individuals or non-Western cultures. Cultural norms surrounding dating and self-worth can vary widely around the world.
The current data only addresses how people view their own desirability. Future investigations could incorporate external evaluations from peers or independent interviewers. Comparing a person’s internal self-assessment with how others actually perceive them might provide a more complete picture of how dating market dynamics relate to personal self-worth.
The study, “Association Between Self-Perceived Mate Value and Self-Esteem: A Meta-Analysis,” was authored by Sreedevi J., Jeshmeen Deb Barman, and Saurabh Maheshwari.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/feeling-like-a-good-catch-is-strongly-linked-to-higher-overall-self-esteem/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #SelfEsteem #MateValue #RomanticDesirability #SelfWorth #DatingMarket #SelfPerception #PsychologyResearch #MetaAnalysis #RelationshipScience #SocialExchangeTheory
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DATE: September 9, 2026 at 11:20AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMESDirect article link at end of text block below.
Newly published results from 2 phase 3 studies evaluating oveporexton in individuals with narcolepsy type 1 show that treatment with oveporexton led to statistically significant improvements over placebo on all measures. https://t.co/6FEuTfxRxz
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DATE: September 9, 2026 at 10:37AM
SOURCE: PsiAN Psychotherapy Action NetworkArticle link at end of text if there is one. PsiAN often just posts or retweets without an article. Follow X/Twitter link to read & respond.
3/ Dr. Gnaulati will explore practical interventions for reducing escalation, accessing vulnerable emotions, balancing the therapeutic alliance, and helping partners move from criticism and defensiveness toward greater responsibility and connection.
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DATE: September 9, 2026 at 10:37AM
SOURCE: PsiAN Psychotherapy Action NetworkArticle link at end of text if there is one. PsiAN often just posts or retweets without an article. Follow X/Twitter link to read & respond.
Friday, October 2, 2026 • 11:00 am–12:30 pm Central
Live via Zoom • 1.5 CE Credits Sponsored by ICSW
$30 • Free for Sustaining MembersRecording will be available to all registrants for a limited time.
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The Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN) advocates for awareness, policies and access to psychotherapies that create meaningful change. They offer membership and educational events.
Learn more at https://www.psian.org .
The PsiAN blog can be found at: https://www.psian.org/blog
This news robot is NOT officially affiliated with PsiAN. It merely rebroadcasts from their blog and X/Twitter accounts. Responses here are not monitored by PsiAN.
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DATE: September 9, 2026 at 10:37AM
SOURCE: PsiAN Psychotherapy Action NetworkArticle link at end of text if there is one. PsiAN often just posts or retweets without an article. Follow X/Twitter link to read & respond.
2/ On October 2, Psychotherapy Action Network welcomes clinical psychologist Enrico Gnaulati, PhD, for Striving for Excellence in Couples Therapy: Zeroing in on What Matters.
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PsiAN blog articles at https://www.psian.org/blog". X/Tweets can be responded to at https://x.com/PsiANorg
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The Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN) advocates for awareness, policies and access to psychotherapies that create meaningful change. They offer membership and educational events.
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DATE: September 9, 2026 at 10:37AM
SOURCE: PsiAN Psychotherapy Action NetworkArticle link at end of text if there is one. PsiAN often just posts or retweets without an article. Follow X/Twitter link to read & respond.
1/ What helps couples therapy move forward when conflict has become entrenched? Effective couples work requires more than making space for conversation. Therapists need ways to de-escalate conflict, strengthen the alliance, and help partners stay engaged. https://t.co/ZGylfMiyDQ https://t.co/yz8AQK7kpT
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Learn more at https://www.psian.org .
The PsiAN blog can be found at: https://www.psian.org/blog
This news robot is NOT officially affiliated with PsiAN. It merely rebroadcasts from their blog and X/Twitter accounts. Responses here are not monitored by PsiAN.
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DATE: September 9, 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: The brain’s fuel system rapidly recovers after you stop heavy drinking
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-brains-fuel-system-rapidly-recovers-after-you-stop-heavy-drinking/
New research suggests that when people with alcohol use disorder stop drinking, their brains show a sudden, sharp drop in the ability to burn a secondary fuel source called acetate, before recovering just a few weeks later. The study, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, provides evidence that the brain’s metabolic adaptation to heavy alcohol consumption is highly reversible.
Alcohol use disorder is a medical condition characterized by an inability to stop or control alcohol use despite adverse social, occupational, or health consequences. Chronic drinking alters the balance of chemical messengers in the brain, contributing to the intense physical and emotional symptoms that occur when a person tries to quit. However, alcohol also changes how the brain fuels itself.
The human brain usually runs on glucose, a simple sugar. But when a person drinks, the liver breaks down the alcohol into a chemical called acetate, which floods the bloodstream. A 2012 study showed that drinking alcohol leads the brain to rely less on glucose and instead take up this circulating acetate for energy. Specialized brain cells called astrocytes eagerly absorb the acetate, using it to power their operations and support nearby neurons.
“There are examples of the brain changing fuel sources, changing to one and changing away from another,” Graeme F. Mason, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging and psychiatry at the Yale Biomedical Imaging Institute at the Yale School of Medicine, told PsyPost. “One example is in starvation, when the brain reduces its reliance on sugar and increases its capacity to consume ketone bodies. Another is that in diabetes with hypoglycemia unawareness, the brain increases its capacity to consume things other than sugar.”
“Newer data also look like people with chronically high blood sugar are down-regulating their ability to transport glucose into the brain, which may be protecting the brain against having high sugar inside,” Mason continued. “Well, long ago, T.K. Li, the former director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, was talking with me about metabolism and highlighted that when people drink alcohol, it raises blood concentration of acetate.”
Because heavy drinkers are constantly exposed to this alternative fuel, their bodies adjust to the surplus. Previous research published in 2013 indicated that the brains of heavy drinkers develop an increased capacity to burn acetate compared to the brains of light drinkers. The brain essentially gets used to running on the breakdown products of alcohol.
“If somebody binges on the weekends, they have intermittently high blood acetate levels,” Mason explained. “And if somebody reaches a state at which they have difficulty not drinking, where they may want treatment, then their blood acetate levels are elevated almost constantly, even when they’re asleep. We have been wondering if there’s something in there that we might be able to use to help people stop drinking.”
Given these adaptations, scientists are exploring how this energy shift relates to the severe symptoms people experience during detoxification. When alcohol is removed, the sudden loss of acetate might shock the brain’s energy systems. Providing alternative brain fuels during detoxification might ease this transition. For instance, a 2021 clinical trial found that giving patients in alcohol detox a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet reduced withdrawal severity. This aligns with a study covered by PsyPost in 2026 noting that ketone supplements lowered alcohol cravings by providing the brain with a substitute energy source.
Building on this line of research, a team led by Chathura Kumaragamage of the University of Calgary and Mason investigated what happens to acetate metabolism in the brains of people with alcohol use disorder as they undergo detoxification and maintain sobriety. They wanted to see if the brain’s heightened ability to burn acetate would persist or normalize after drinking stopped.
“We found about 15 years ago that people who drink at risky levels are much more able to use the acetate in their blood, but that was a smallish study,” Mason said. “We really needed to test this finding to see if it was real, to see if we could reproduce it, or if it was just a fluke. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) gave us funds to test it in a new, larger group of people, and to extend the test to people who were seeking treatment.”
The researchers recruited four groups of participants. The sample included 13 light drinkers who consumed fewer than three standard drinks a week, and 15 heavy drinkers who drank at risky levels over the past six months. They also recruited six individuals in long-term recovery who had been abstinent for at least six months. Finally, they included a group of treatment-seeking individuals with alcohol use disorder who were undergoing medically supervised inpatient detoxification.
Of the treatment-seeking group, nine provided usable data at roughly one week of abstinence, and ten provided data at roughly one month of abstinence. Seven of these participants successfully completed scans at both time points, allowing the researchers to track their progress directly.
During the testing session, participants received an intravenous infusion of a specialized form of acetate containing a stable carbon isotope. This harmless carbon-13 isotope acts as a tracking tag. By taking frequent blood samples, the researchers could monitor how much acetate was in the bloodstream and how quickly the body was clearing it.
To see what was happening inside the head, the team used magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a non-invasive imaging technique that measures chemical signatures in the body. They focused the scanner on the occipital cortex at the back of the brain. They measured how quickly the tagged acetate was taken up by astrocytes and converted into neurotransmitters like glutamate and glutamine.
The researchers also calculated a metric called energy per cycle. This ratio compares the brain’s basic cellular energy consumption to the rate of chemical signaling between neurons. It provides a snapshot of whether the brain’s energy supply is keeping up with its communication demands.
Going into the study, the research team expected the newly abstinent group to show a massive capacity for acetate consumption, given their history of heavy alcohol use. Instead, the results went in the opposite direction. After one week of abstinence, the detoxification group showed a 64 percent lower rate of brain acetate oxidation compared to the heavy drinkers, and a 41 percent lower rate compared to those in long-term recovery.
“This latter group consumed way more alcohol than the risky drinkers, and so we assumed that the people seeking treatment would also use way more acetate,” Mason said. “To our surprise, we found that the people looking for treatment had a far lower capacity to consume acetate.”
“We think that this may happen because, just like with chronically elevated glucose leading to less capacity to transport glucose into the brain, the chronically elevated acetate may lead the brain to lower its transport capacity and protect itself,” Mason explained. “Acetate can do things like interact with the genome to change how DNA gets expressed, so there’s one reason that the brain might not want so much acetate around all the time.”
The blood tests confirmed this metabolic slowdown was happening across the whole body. The newly abstinent group had higher levels of acetate remaining in their blood during the infusion, indicating that their systems were clearing acetate unusually slowly.
The heavy drinking group, meanwhile, showed a 58 percent higher rate of brain acetate oxidation than the light drinking group. This confirmed the team’s 2013 findings, demonstrating that active heavy drinking increases the brain’s reliance on acetate.
“Maybe it is the intermittent acetate exposure of risky drinking can increase acetate consumption capacity, while chronic heavy acetate of dependence reduces the capacity to protect the brain,” Mason noted. “It is likely that the people who drink to the point of dependence have nearly constant elevations of acetate, and the brain resets so that it lets in a little bit, so that the brain, sitting behind its protective barrier, sees some acetate, but not as much as if it had not protected itself.”
The metabolic slump seen during early abstinence was strictly temporary. When the researchers tested the detoxification group again after one month of abstinence, their brain acetate consumption had increased by 43 percent. At this one-month mark, their acetate metabolism was nearly indistinguishable from that of the light drinkers, suggesting the brain rapidly readapts to functioning without alcohol.
“The good news is that after a month, this aspect of alcohol dependence has gone back close to normal,” Mason said. “There are other changes in the brain that can also normalize, given more time, like the volume loss (the brain shrinks with that heavy drinking and can return at least partway to normal).”
Despite the dramatic shifts in how quickly the brain burned acetate, the energy per cycle measurement was similar across all groups. This indicates that the fundamental balance between energy consumption and neurotransmitter cycling remained stable. Even as the type of fuel being burned shifted, the basic energetic health of the neuronal networks appeared intact.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Sample sizes were small, particularly for the long-term recovery and one-week abstinence groups. This limited the researchers’ statistical power, making it difficult to assess how other variables, such as sex differences or tobacco use, might influence brain metabolism.
The categories of light and heavy drinking were based on self-reported histories, which can sometimes be imprecise compared to objective medical markers. Additionally, the acetate was administered directly into a vein during the scan. This differs from real-world drinking, where acetate is produced gradually by the liver.
Mason also warned against drawing incorrect conclusions about drinking alcohol for a quick energy boost. “I have encountered two misinterpretations: just because acetate can be consumed for energy does not mean that alcohol is helpful when you are tired,” he said. “The process of getting from alcohol to acetate creates oxygen free radicals, hydrogen peroxide, and acetaldehyde, which is a powerful carcinogen and toxin. So, don’t drink alcohol in search of energy.”
Similarly, he cautioned against using household vinegar as a home remedy for withdrawal. “The second misinterpretation is that people should drink vinegar to help them stay sober,” Mason added. “To get the amount of acetate your body provides from a couple of margaritas, you would need to drink about a quart of grocery store vinegar. That will damage the enamel on your teeth and is a huge acid load that is hard on the throat and stomach.”
The authors suggest that the depressed acetate metabolism during early withdrawal might be a protective mechanism that limits the brain’s exposure to high acetate levels, or it could simply reflect temporary cellular sluggishness as the brain adjusts to the sudden absence of alcohol. Exploring how other alternative energy sources might smooth this transition could lead to new dietary or medical therapies for alcohol withdrawal.
“One practical outcome is another piece of evidence that alcohol dependence as a physical condition, one that can benefit from medical interventions,” Mason said. “I know that it’s difficult to stop, but the benefits are great, and there are FDA-approved medications proven to help people stop or reduce their drinking. The NIAAA web site has something called the Treatment Navigator to help people find resources.”
The study, “Reversible alterations of brain acetate metabolism associated with alcohol consumption,” was authored by Chathura Kumaragamage, Lihong Jiang, Gustavo A. Angarita, Robin A. de Graaf, Elizabeth Guidone, Anastasia Coppoli, Kevin L. Behar, Barbara I. Gulanski, Brian Pittman, Stuart A. Weinzimer, Douglas L. Rothman, John H. Krystal, and Graeme F. Mason.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-brains-fuel-system-rapidly-recovers-after-you-stop-heavy-drinking/
-------------------------------------------------
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-
DATE: September 9, 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: The brain’s fuel system rapidly recovers after you stop heavy drinking
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-brains-fuel-system-rapidly-recovers-after-you-stop-heavy-drinking/
New research suggests that when people with alcohol use disorder stop drinking, their brains show a sudden, sharp drop in the ability to burn a secondary fuel source called acetate, before recovering just a few weeks later. The study, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, provides evidence that the brain’s metabolic adaptation to heavy alcohol consumption is highly reversible.
Alcohol use disorder is a medical condition characterized by an inability to stop or control alcohol use despite adverse social, occupational, or health consequences. Chronic drinking alters the balance of chemical messengers in the brain, contributing to the intense physical and emotional symptoms that occur when a person tries to quit. However, alcohol also changes how the brain fuels itself.
The human brain usually runs on glucose, a simple sugar. But when a person drinks, the liver breaks down the alcohol into a chemical called acetate, which floods the bloodstream. A 2012 study showed that drinking alcohol leads the brain to rely less on glucose and instead take up this circulating acetate for energy. Specialized brain cells called astrocytes eagerly absorb the acetate, using it to power their operations and support nearby neurons.
“There are examples of the brain changing fuel sources, changing to one and changing away from another,” Graeme F. Mason, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging and psychiatry at the Yale Biomedical Imaging Institute at the Yale School of Medicine, told PsyPost. “One example is in starvation, when the brain reduces its reliance on sugar and increases its capacity to consume ketone bodies. Another is that in diabetes with hypoglycemia unawareness, the brain increases its capacity to consume things other than sugar.”
“Newer data also look like people with chronically high blood sugar are down-regulating their ability to transport glucose into the brain, which may be protecting the brain against having high sugar inside,” Mason continued. “Well, long ago, T.K. Li, the former director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, was talking with me about metabolism and highlighted that when people drink alcohol, it raises blood concentration of acetate.”
Because heavy drinkers are constantly exposed to this alternative fuel, their bodies adjust to the surplus. Previous research published in 2013 indicated that the brains of heavy drinkers develop an increased capacity to burn acetate compared to the brains of light drinkers. The brain essentially gets used to running on the breakdown products of alcohol.
“If somebody binges on the weekends, they have intermittently high blood acetate levels,” Mason explained. “And if somebody reaches a state at which they have difficulty not drinking, where they may want treatment, then their blood acetate levels are elevated almost constantly, even when they’re asleep. We have been wondering if there’s something in there that we might be able to use to help people stop drinking.”
Given these adaptations, scientists are exploring how this energy shift relates to the severe symptoms people experience during detoxification. When alcohol is removed, the sudden loss of acetate might shock the brain’s energy systems. Providing alternative brain fuels during detoxification might ease this transition. For instance, a 2021 clinical trial found that giving patients in alcohol detox a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet reduced withdrawal severity. This aligns with a study covered by PsyPost in 2026 noting that ketone supplements lowered alcohol cravings by providing the brain with a substitute energy source.
Building on this line of research, a team led by Chathura Kumaragamage of the University of Calgary and Mason investigated what happens to acetate metabolism in the brains of people with alcohol use disorder as they undergo detoxification and maintain sobriety. They wanted to see if the brain’s heightened ability to burn acetate would persist or normalize after drinking stopped.
“We found about 15 years ago that people who drink at risky levels are much more able to use the acetate in their blood, but that was a smallish study,” Mason said. “We really needed to test this finding to see if it was real, to see if we could reproduce it, or if it was just a fluke. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) gave us funds to test it in a new, larger group of people, and to extend the test to people who were seeking treatment.”
The researchers recruited four groups of participants. The sample included 13 light drinkers who consumed fewer than three standard drinks a week, and 15 heavy drinkers who drank at risky levels over the past six months. They also recruited six individuals in long-term recovery who had been abstinent for at least six months. Finally, they included a group of treatment-seeking individuals with alcohol use disorder who were undergoing medically supervised inpatient detoxification.
Of the treatment-seeking group, nine provided usable data at roughly one week of abstinence, and ten provided data at roughly one month of abstinence. Seven of these participants successfully completed scans at both time points, allowing the researchers to track their progress directly.
During the testing session, participants received an intravenous infusion of a specialized form of acetate containing a stable carbon isotope. This harmless carbon-13 isotope acts as a tracking tag. By taking frequent blood samples, the researchers could monitor how much acetate was in the bloodstream and how quickly the body was clearing it.
To see what was happening inside the head, the team used magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a non-invasive imaging technique that measures chemical signatures in the body. They focused the scanner on the occipital cortex at the back of the brain. They measured how quickly the tagged acetate was taken up by astrocytes and converted into neurotransmitters like glutamate and glutamine.
The researchers also calculated a metric called energy per cycle. This ratio compares the brain’s basic cellular energy consumption to the rate of chemical signaling between neurons. It provides a snapshot of whether the brain’s energy supply is keeping up with its communication demands.
Going into the study, the research team expected the newly abstinent group to show a massive capacity for acetate consumption, given their history of heavy alcohol use. Instead, the results went in the opposite direction. After one week of abstinence, the detoxification group showed a 64 percent lower rate of brain acetate oxidation compared to the heavy drinkers, and a 41 percent lower rate compared to those in long-term recovery.
“This latter group consumed way more alcohol than the risky drinkers, and so we assumed that the people seeking treatment would also use way more acetate,” Mason said. “To our surprise, we found that the people looking for treatment had a far lower capacity to consume acetate.”
“We think that this may happen because, just like with chronically elevated glucose leading to less capacity to transport glucose into the brain, the chronically elevated acetate may lead the brain to lower its transport capacity and protect itself,” Mason explained. “Acetate can do things like interact with the genome to change how DNA gets expressed, so there’s one reason that the brain might not want so much acetate around all the time.”
The blood tests confirmed this metabolic slowdown was happening across the whole body. The newly abstinent group had higher levels of acetate remaining in their blood during the infusion, indicating that their systems were clearing acetate unusually slowly.
The heavy drinking group, meanwhile, showed a 58 percent higher rate of brain acetate oxidation than the light drinking group. This confirmed the team’s 2013 findings, demonstrating that active heavy drinking increases the brain’s reliance on acetate.
“Maybe it is the intermittent acetate exposure of risky drinking can increase acetate consumption capacity, while chronic heavy acetate of dependence reduces the capacity to protect the brain,” Mason noted. “It is likely that the people who drink to the point of dependence have nearly constant elevations of acetate, and the brain resets so that it lets in a little bit, so that the brain, sitting behind its protective barrier, sees some acetate, but not as much as if it had not protected itself.”
The metabolic slump seen during early abstinence was strictly temporary. When the researchers tested the detoxification group again after one month of abstinence, their brain acetate consumption had increased by 43 percent. At this one-month mark, their acetate metabolism was nearly indistinguishable from that of the light drinkers, suggesting the brain rapidly readapts to functioning without alcohol.
“The good news is that after a month, this aspect of alcohol dependence has gone back close to normal,” Mason said. “There are other changes in the brain that can also normalize, given more time, like the volume loss (the brain shrinks with that heavy drinking and can return at least partway to normal).”
Despite the dramatic shifts in how quickly the brain burned acetate, the energy per cycle measurement was similar across all groups. This indicates that the fundamental balance between energy consumption and neurotransmitter cycling remained stable. Even as the type of fuel being burned shifted, the basic energetic health of the neuronal networks appeared intact.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Sample sizes were small, particularly for the long-term recovery and one-week abstinence groups. This limited the researchers’ statistical power, making it difficult to assess how other variables, such as sex differences or tobacco use, might influence brain metabolism.
The categories of light and heavy drinking were based on self-reported histories, which can sometimes be imprecise compared to objective medical markers. Additionally, the acetate was administered directly into a vein during the scan. This differs from real-world drinking, where acetate is produced gradually by the liver.
Mason also warned against drawing incorrect conclusions about drinking alcohol for a quick energy boost. “I have encountered two misinterpretations: just because acetate can be consumed for energy does not mean that alcohol is helpful when you are tired,” he said. “The process of getting from alcohol to acetate creates oxygen free radicals, hydrogen peroxide, and acetaldehyde, which is a powerful carcinogen and toxin. So, don’t drink alcohol in search of energy.”
Similarly, he cautioned against using household vinegar as a home remedy for withdrawal. “The second misinterpretation is that people should drink vinegar to help them stay sober,” Mason added. “To get the amount of acetate your body provides from a couple of margaritas, you would need to drink about a quart of grocery store vinegar. That will damage the enamel on your teeth and is a huge acid load that is hard on the throat and stomach.”
The authors suggest that the depressed acetate metabolism during early withdrawal might be a protective mechanism that limits the brain’s exposure to high acetate levels, or it could simply reflect temporary cellular sluggishness as the brain adjusts to the sudden absence of alcohol. Exploring how other alternative energy sources might smooth this transition could lead to new dietary or medical therapies for alcohol withdrawal.
“One practical outcome is another piece of evidence that alcohol dependence as a physical condition, one that can benefit from medical interventions,” Mason said. “I know that it’s difficult to stop, but the benefits are great, and there are FDA-approved medications proven to help people stop or reduce their drinking. The NIAAA web site has something called the Treatment Navigator to help people find resources.”
The study, “Reversible alterations of brain acetate metabolism associated with alcohol consumption,” was authored by Chathura Kumaragamage, Lihong Jiang, Gustavo A. Angarita, Robin A. de Graaf, Elizabeth Guidone, Anastasia Coppoli, Kevin L. Behar, Barbara I. Gulanski, Brian Pittman, Stuart A. Weinzimer, Douglas L. Rothman, John H. Krystal, and Graeme F. Mason.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-brains-fuel-system-rapidly-recovers-after-you-stop-heavy-drinking/
-------------------------------------------------
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 #AlcoholDetox #BrainMetabolism #AcetateEnergy #AlcoholUseDisorder #DetoxSupport #SobrietyJourney #NeuroscienceNews #KetoneVsAcetate #BrainRecovery #AlcoholResearch
-
DATE: September 9, 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: The brain’s fuel system rapidly recovers after you stop heavy drinking
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-brains-fuel-system-rapidly-recovers-after-you-stop-heavy-drinking/
New research suggests that when people with alcohol use disorder stop drinking, their brains show a sudden, sharp drop in the ability to burn a secondary fuel source called acetate, before recovering just a few weeks later. The study, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, provides evidence that the brain’s metabolic adaptation to heavy alcohol consumption is highly reversible.
Alcohol use disorder is a medical condition characterized by an inability to stop or control alcohol use despite adverse social, occupational, or health consequences. Chronic drinking alters the balance of chemical messengers in the brain, contributing to the intense physical and emotional symptoms that occur when a person tries to quit. However, alcohol also changes how the brain fuels itself.
The human brain usually runs on glucose, a simple sugar. But when a person drinks, the liver breaks down the alcohol into a chemical called acetate, which floods the bloodstream. A 2012 study showed that drinking alcohol leads the brain to rely less on glucose and instead take up this circulating acetate for energy. Specialized brain cells called astrocytes eagerly absorb the acetate, using it to power their operations and support nearby neurons.
“There are examples of the brain changing fuel sources, changing to one and changing away from another,” Graeme F. Mason, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging and psychiatry at the Yale Biomedical Imaging Institute at the Yale School of Medicine, told PsyPost. “One example is in starvation, when the brain reduces its reliance on sugar and increases its capacity to consume ketone bodies. Another is that in diabetes with hypoglycemia unawareness, the brain increases its capacity to consume things other than sugar.”
“Newer data also look like people with chronically high blood sugar are down-regulating their ability to transport glucose into the brain, which may be protecting the brain against having high sugar inside,” Mason continued. “Well, long ago, T.K. Li, the former director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, was talking with me about metabolism and highlighted that when people drink alcohol, it raises blood concentration of acetate.”
Because heavy drinkers are constantly exposed to this alternative fuel, their bodies adjust to the surplus. Previous research published in 2013 indicated that the brains of heavy drinkers develop an increased capacity to burn acetate compared to the brains of light drinkers. The brain essentially gets used to running on the breakdown products of alcohol.
“If somebody binges on the weekends, they have intermittently high blood acetate levels,” Mason explained. “And if somebody reaches a state at which they have difficulty not drinking, where they may want treatment, then their blood acetate levels are elevated almost constantly, even when they’re asleep. We have been wondering if there’s something in there that we might be able to use to help people stop drinking.”
Given these adaptations, scientists are exploring how this energy shift relates to the severe symptoms people experience during detoxification. When alcohol is removed, the sudden loss of acetate might shock the brain’s energy systems. Providing alternative brain fuels during detoxification might ease this transition. For instance, a 2021 clinical trial found that giving patients in alcohol detox a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet reduced withdrawal severity. This aligns with a study covered by PsyPost in 2026 noting that ketone supplements lowered alcohol cravings by providing the brain with a substitute energy source.
Building on this line of research, a team led by Chathura Kumaragamage of the University of Calgary and Mason investigated what happens to acetate metabolism in the brains of people with alcohol use disorder as they undergo detoxification and maintain sobriety. They wanted to see if the brain’s heightened ability to burn acetate would persist or normalize after drinking stopped.
“We found about 15 years ago that people who drink at risky levels are much more able to use the acetate in their blood, but that was a smallish study,” Mason said. “We really needed to test this finding to see if it was real, to see if we could reproduce it, or if it was just a fluke. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) gave us funds to test it in a new, larger group of people, and to extend the test to people who were seeking treatment.”
The researchers recruited four groups of participants. The sample included 13 light drinkers who consumed fewer than three standard drinks a week, and 15 heavy drinkers who drank at risky levels over the past six months. They also recruited six individuals in long-term recovery who had been abstinent for at least six months. Finally, they included a group of treatment-seeking individuals with alcohol use disorder who were undergoing medically supervised inpatient detoxification.
Of the treatment-seeking group, nine provided usable data at roughly one week of abstinence, and ten provided data at roughly one month of abstinence. Seven of these participants successfully completed scans at both time points, allowing the researchers to track their progress directly.
During the testing session, participants received an intravenous infusion of a specialized form of acetate containing a stable carbon isotope. This harmless carbon-13 isotope acts as a tracking tag. By taking frequent blood samples, the researchers could monitor how much acetate was in the bloodstream and how quickly the body was clearing it.
To see what was happening inside the head, the team used magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a non-invasive imaging technique that measures chemical signatures in the body. They focused the scanner on the occipital cortex at the back of the brain. They measured how quickly the tagged acetate was taken up by astrocytes and converted into neurotransmitters like glutamate and glutamine.
The researchers also calculated a metric called energy per cycle. This ratio compares the brain’s basic cellular energy consumption to the rate of chemical signaling between neurons. It provides a snapshot of whether the brain’s energy supply is keeping up with its communication demands.
Going into the study, the research team expected the newly abstinent group to show a massive capacity for acetate consumption, given their history of heavy alcohol use. Instead, the results went in the opposite direction. After one week of abstinence, the detoxification group showed a 64 percent lower rate of brain acetate oxidation compared to the heavy drinkers, and a 41 percent lower rate compared to those in long-term recovery.
“This latter group consumed way more alcohol than the risky drinkers, and so we assumed that the people seeking treatment would also use way more acetate,” Mason said. “To our surprise, we found that the people looking for treatment had a far lower capacity to consume acetate.”
“We think that this may happen because, just like with chronically elevated glucose leading to less capacity to transport glucose into the brain, the chronically elevated acetate may lead the brain to lower its transport capacity and protect itself,” Mason explained. “Acetate can do things like interact with the genome to change how DNA gets expressed, so there’s one reason that the brain might not want so much acetate around all the time.”
The blood tests confirmed this metabolic slowdown was happening across the whole body. The newly abstinent group had higher levels of acetate remaining in their blood during the infusion, indicating that their systems were clearing acetate unusually slowly.
The heavy drinking group, meanwhile, showed a 58 percent higher rate of brain acetate oxidation than the light drinking group. This confirmed the team’s 2013 findings, demonstrating that active heavy drinking increases the brain’s reliance on acetate.
“Maybe it is the intermittent acetate exposure of risky drinking can increase acetate consumption capacity, while chronic heavy acetate of dependence reduces the capacity to protect the brain,” Mason noted. “It is likely that the people who drink to the point of dependence have nearly constant elevations of acetate, and the brain resets so that it lets in a little bit, so that the brain, sitting behind its protective barrier, sees some acetate, but not as much as if it had not protected itself.”
The metabolic slump seen during early abstinence was strictly temporary. When the researchers tested the detoxification group again after one month of abstinence, their brain acetate consumption had increased by 43 percent. At this one-month mark, their acetate metabolism was nearly indistinguishable from that of the light drinkers, suggesting the brain rapidly readapts to functioning without alcohol.
“The good news is that after a month, this aspect of alcohol dependence has gone back close to normal,” Mason said. “There are other changes in the brain that can also normalize, given more time, like the volume loss (the brain shrinks with that heavy drinking and can return at least partway to normal).”
Despite the dramatic shifts in how quickly the brain burned acetate, the energy per cycle measurement was similar across all groups. This indicates that the fundamental balance between energy consumption and neurotransmitter cycling remained stable. Even as the type of fuel being burned shifted, the basic energetic health of the neuronal networks appeared intact.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Sample sizes were small, particularly for the long-term recovery and one-week abstinence groups. This limited the researchers’ statistical power, making it difficult to assess how other variables, such as sex differences or tobacco use, might influence brain metabolism.
The categories of light and heavy drinking were based on self-reported histories, which can sometimes be imprecise compared to objective medical markers. Additionally, the acetate was administered directly into a vein during the scan. This differs from real-world drinking, where acetate is produced gradually by the liver.
Mason also warned against drawing incorrect conclusions about drinking alcohol for a quick energy boost. “I have encountered two misinterpretations: just because acetate can be consumed for energy does not mean that alcohol is helpful when you are tired,” he said. “The process of getting from alcohol to acetate creates oxygen free radicals, hydrogen peroxide, and acetaldehyde, which is a powerful carcinogen and toxin. So, don’t drink alcohol in search of energy.”
Similarly, he cautioned against using household vinegar as a home remedy for withdrawal. “The second misinterpretation is that people should drink vinegar to help them stay sober,” Mason added. “To get the amount of acetate your body provides from a couple of margaritas, you would need to drink about a quart of grocery store vinegar. That will damage the enamel on your teeth and is a huge acid load that is hard on the throat and stomach.”
The authors suggest that the depressed acetate metabolism during early withdrawal might be a protective mechanism that limits the brain’s exposure to high acetate levels, or it could simply reflect temporary cellular sluggishness as the brain adjusts to the sudden absence of alcohol. Exploring how other alternative energy sources might smooth this transition could lead to new dietary or medical therapies for alcohol withdrawal.
“One practical outcome is another piece of evidence that alcohol dependence as a physical condition, one that can benefit from medical interventions,” Mason said. “I know that it’s difficult to stop, but the benefits are great, and there are FDA-approved medications proven to help people stop or reduce their drinking. The NIAAA web site has something called the Treatment Navigator to help people find resources.”
The study, “Reversible alterations of brain acetate metabolism associated with alcohol consumption,” was authored by Chathura Kumaragamage, Lihong Jiang, Gustavo A. Angarita, Robin A. de Graaf, Elizabeth Guidone, Anastasia Coppoli, Kevin L. Behar, Barbara I. Gulanski, Brian Pittman, Stuart A. Weinzimer, Douglas L. Rothman, John H. Krystal, and Graeme F. Mason.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-brains-fuel-system-rapidly-recovers-after-you-stop-heavy-drinking/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AlcoholDetox #BrainMetabolism #AcetateEnergy #AlcoholUseDisorder #DetoxSupport #SobrietyJourney #NeuroscienceNews #KetoneVsAcetate #BrainRecovery #AlcoholResearch
-
DATE: September 9, 2026 at 09:37AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMESDirect article link at end of text block below.
According to new 52-week topline data, COMP360 for the management of treatment-resistant depression has demonstrated rapid onset, substantial effect, and sustained durability through 1 year with just a few doses. https://t.co/gpTjrAoL6p
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".
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #psychotherapist #TreatmentResistantDepression #RapidOnset #COMP360 #ClinicalTrial #MentalHealthAwareness
-
DATE: September 9, 2026 at 09:37AM
SOURCE: PSYCHIATRIC TIMESDirect article link at end of text block below.
According to new 52-week topline data, COMP360 for the management of treatment-resistant depression has demonstrated rapid onset, substantial effect, and sustained durability through 1 year with just a few doses. https://t.co/gpTjrAoL6p
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 #TreatmentResistantDepression #RapidOnset #COMP360 #ClinicalTrial #MentalHealthAwareness