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About one-third of women’s wage gains through the 1990s are due to the availability of oral contraceptives, according to a new study that’s the first to quantify the Pill’s impact on women’s labor market advances.

Cognitive training including puzzles, handicrafts and life skills are known to reduce the risk, and help slow down the progress, of dementia amongst the elderly. A new study has shown that cognitive training was able to improve reasoning, memory, language and hand eye co-ordination of healthy, older adults.

In a widely noticed study, developmental psychologists reported that 14-month-old infants imitate an unusual action if it was chosen deliberately by the person they observed, but not if it could be attributed to external constraints. This selective imitation was put forth as evidence for an early understanding of rational action and action goals. Scientists now present a much simpler explanation for the finding.

A new study concludes that “for groups to be successful, they must effectively exploit the knowledge of their (individual) members.”

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Advisory Committee for Women’s Services released a new report, which demonstrates that 18 to 49 year old women on probation or parole have an almost two-fold higher risk of experiencing mental illness compared with other women. The study demonstrated that nearly half of the women in this age range who were on probation (49…

Fatigue and unrealistic expectations of parenthood may help contribute to post-adoption depression in women, according to a Purdue University study. “Feeling tired was by far the largest predictor of depression in mothers who adopted,” said Karen J. Foli, an assistant professor of nursing who studied factors that could predict depression in adoptive mothers…

One cup or two faces? What we believe we see in one of the most famous optical illusions changes in a split second; and so does the path that the information takes in the brain…

Studying the role of social stigma in depression for lung cancer patients, researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., have found that depression can be heightened by a lung cancer patient’s sense of social rejection, internalized shame and social isolation. These factors may contribute to depression at rates higher than experienced by patients with other kinds of cancer…

Nodding off in class may not be such a bad idea after all. New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that going to sleep shortly after learning new material is most beneficial for recall, Titled “Memory for Semantically Related and Unrelated Declarative Information: The Benefit of Sleep, the Cost of Wake,” the study was publishe in PLOS One…

Criteria for a broadened syndrome of acute onset obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) have been proposed by a National Institutes of Health scientist and her colleagues…