Your Psychology Psychology articles and news

A significant obstacle to progress in understanding psychiatric disorders is the difficulty in obtaining living brain tissue for study so that disease processes can be studied directly. Recent advances in basic cellular neuroscience now suggest that, for some purposes, cultured neural stem cells may be studied in order to research psychiatric disease mechanisms…

Feeling like you’re part of the gang is crucial to the human experience. All people get stressed out when we’re left out. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that a feeling of inclusion can come from something as simple as eye contact from a stranger…

“Be all you can be,” the Army tells potential recruits. The military promises personal reinvention…

A family history of psychiatric conditions such as autism and depression could influence the subjects a person finds engaging, new research suggests. Although preliminary, the findings provide a new look at the oft-studied link between psychiatric conditions and aptitude in the arts or sciences.

Psychologists have found that buying experiences makes people happier than possessions, but who spends their spare cash on experiences? Extraverts and people who are open to new experiences are more likely to make a habit of “experience shopping” and are happier as a result, according to new research.

A key feature of human and animal brains is that they are adaptive; they are able to change their structure and function based on input from the environment and on the potential associations, or consequences, of that input. To learn more about such neural adaptability, researchers have explored the brains of insects and identified a mechanism by which the connections in their brain change to form new and specific memories of smells.

Could depression in adulthood be tied to a parent’s level of education? A new study by a medical sociologist suggests this is the case.

Measuring brain activity in infants as young as six months may help to predict the future development of autism symptoms. In their first year of life, babies who will go on to develop autism already show different brain responses when someone looks at or away from them. The findings suggest that direct brain measures might help to predict the future development of autism symptoms in infants as young as six months.

“Stand by me” is a common refrain when it comes to friendship but new research demonstrates that the concept goes beyond pop music: keeping friends close has real physiological and psychological benefits.

The Mayo Clinic released its study of aging report today and announced that more than six percent of Americans, aged seventy to eighty-nine years, suffered from mild cognitive impairment (MCI). They also state that the data show more men are affected than women, and those with only high school education seem more affected than those with some level of higher education…