Older people who regularly exercise at a moderate to intense level may be less likely to develop the small brain lesions, sometimes referred to as “silent strokes,” that are the first sign of cerebrovascular disease, according to a new study.

Obesity among people who eat a high-fat diet may involve injury to neurons, or nerve cells, in a key part of the brain that controls body weight, according to the authors of a new animal study.

A new crop of college graduates have just landed on the job market. Right now they’re probably just hoping to get any job, if at all. However, for psychology majors, the salary outlook in both the short and long term is particularly poor, according to a new study.

Suffering from parental abuse as a child increases a person’s chances of having poor sleep quality in old age, according to a research article in the current issue of the Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences (Volume 66B, Number 3)…

Suffering from parental abuse as a child increases a person’s chances of having poor sleep quality in old age, according to new research.

Hundreds of small genetic variations are associated with autism spectrum disorders, including an area of DNA that may be a key to understanding why humans are social animals, according to a multi-site collaborative study.

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are devastating developmental disorders characterized by altered social interactions and behavior. Although genetic risks are known to contribute to the development of ASDs, the genetic causes of the disease are not well understood. Now, three new papers provide new insight into the diversity of the genetic abnormalities that contribute to autism and represent a step towards the future design of treatments specifically targeted to different kinds of autism.

When a person has a family history of cancer, their worry about developing the disease may lead to them refusing to have preventive tests. Advice from genetic counseling units reduces their anxiety but, until now, nobody knew how much. Now, a scientific team has validated the “Escala de Preocupación por el Cancer — EPC” (equivalent of the “Cancer Worry Scale”), the first of its kind in the Spanish language, in order to evaluate it.

Contrary to lay intuition, counteractive control theory posits that tempting food cues can help individuals to act in accordance with their long-term dieting goal. However, studies have shown that temptations trigger goal-directed behavior only in successful but not in unsuccessful self-regulators. The aim of the present study was to test whether it is possible to create facilitated temptation–goal associations in unsuccessful dieters using implementation intentions (e.g., “If I see or smell chocolate then I will follow my goal to diet”) and whether this indeed stimulates more successful self-regulation. It was found that implementation intentions linking a temptation to a dieting goal lead to self-perceived improved resistance to (Study 1) as well as reduced consumption (Study 2) of tempting snacks compared to a control condition. Moreover, Study 2 revealed that the reduced snack consumption was indeed related to facilitated temptation–goal associations in participants who had formed implementation intentions.

Lower-class individuals, because of their lower rank in society, are theorized to be more vigilant to social threats relative to their high-ranking upper-class counterparts. This class-related vigilance to threat, the authors predicted, would shape the emotional content of social interactions in systematic ways. In Study 1, participants engaged in a teasing interaction with a close friend. Lower-class participants—measured in terms of social class rank in society and within the friendship—more accurately tracked the hostile emotions of their friend. As a result, lower-class individuals experienced more hostile emotion contagion relative to upper-class participants. In Study 2, lower-class participants manipulated to experience lower subjective socioeconomic rank showed more hostile reactivity to ambiguous social scenarios relative to upper-class participants and to lower-class participants experiencing elevated socioeconomic rank. The results suggest that class affects expectations, perception, and experience of hostile emotion, particularly in situations in which lower-class individuals perceive their subordinate rank.