Old or young, beautiful or sinister – the choices are endless when designing an avatar or a virtual alter ego. In the end, do people choose one that is really different from themselves? Usually not, according to new Concordia University research that shows in most cases, avatars reflect the personality of their creators…

A new survey of child psychiatrists indicates that insomnia is a major problem among children in mental health treatment and at least a quarter of these patients are given sleep medication…

New investments in mental health care announced by the government today will pay dividends, according to the Australian Psychological Society…

Moms who shower their infants with affection equip them to cope well with life stressors as adults, new research finds.

Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and a new study in the August 2010 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family finds significant national differences in the degree of conflict between older parents and their adult children…

When your mind drifts, it’s hard to remember what was going on before you stopped paying attention. Now a new study has found that the effect is stronger when your mind drifts farther – to memories of an overseas vacation instead of a domestic trip, for example, or a memory in the more distant past. Psychologists have known for a while that context is important to remembering…

Children with brain injuries have difficulty developing story-telling skills even though other language abilities, such as vocabulary, tend to catch up with other children as they mature, research at the University of Chicago shows…

Relationships between elder and younger members of a family can be strained and positive and negative in nature, even when affection is shared. A new study from the Journal of Marriage and Family finds that long-term caretaking duties puts further strain on adult parent-child relationships…

How does the brain link the visual basic traits of letters and numbers to abstract representations and to words? Scientists from the Basque Research Center on Cognition, Brain and Language have analyzed the influence of context on the visual recognition of a written word regardless of the format in which these letters may be displayed…

New research shows people with severe depression find it harder to interpret facial expressions than healthy people – particularly expressions of disgust. The study, published in the August issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, was carried out by researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand…