Neighborhood violence has been associated with adverse health effects on youth, including sleep loss, asthma and metabolic syndrome. Yet some youth living in high-crime neighborhoods manage to avoid these effects. A new Northwestern University study aims to answer a resilience puzzle: Why does a second-hand or indirect experience of neighborhood violence affect some youth, but …
Exercise and physical activity are good for our health, and soon Generation 100, a comprehensive study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) on the effects of exercise on aging will be able to tell us whether exercise actually prolongs life. But merely knowing that exercise yields big health gains doesn’t mean much …
Researchers have discovered evidence that endurance exercise, such as running, swimming, cross-country skiing and cycling, will help you age better than resistance exercise, which involves strength training with weights. Endurance exercise but not resistance exercise can prevent telomeres shortening, or can even lengthen them, according to the first prospective randomized controlled study of the effect …
With global politics becoming more unpredictable – highlighted by the UK’s vote for Brexit and the presidential elections of Donald Trump in the USA and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil – it is being used to examine the stability of democracies. An international, interdisciplinary team including mathematicians, economists, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and political scientists publishes a …
Feedback loops are powerful forces of nature. Melting polar ice caps reduce the earth’s reflectivity, causing it to absorb more heat from the sun, which accelerates the melting. The cumulative, accelerating aspects of such loops make it imperative to break the cycle before it gets out of control. Below, I identify three feedback loops among …
Imagining a threat can help you conquer your fear of it, according to research conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published November 21 in the journal Neuron. The study has strong implications for the treatment of anxiety and fear-related disorders. The research focused on the difference between how fear is …
Personality traits and mental health affect how people value personal control in decision making, according to a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. Our brain’s reward and motivation systems show higher activity when we feel personal control in a situation and when we receive rewards that we’ve earned, rather than been given–but …
The results showed that participants who had in-person contact at least a few times per week had about 50 percent lower odds for both major depression and PTSD symptoms, compared with participants who saw friends and family infrequently. The researchers caution that the results cannot prove a direct cause and effect between social contact and …
New research from King’s College London has found that MDMA, the main ingredient in ecstasy, causes people to cooperate better – but only with trustworthy people. In the first study to look in detail at how MDMA impacts cooperative behaviour the researchers also identified changes to activity in brain regions linked to social processing. Problems …
A large American Cancer Society study links social isolation with a higher risk of death from all causes combined and heart disease for all races studied, and with increased cancer mortality in white men and women. The study, appearing in the American Journal of Epidemiology, says addressing social isolation holds promise if studies show interventions …