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<td><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:20px;font-weight:bold;">PsyPost – Psychology News</span></td>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/a-popular-weedkiller-may-induce-anxiety-by-disrupting-gut-bacteria-2026-03-26/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Glyphosate: A common weedkiller may induce anxiety by disrupting gut bacteria</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 30th 2026, 10:00</div>
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<p><p>Everyday exposure to the popular weedkiller glyphosate at levels deemed safe by government regulators causes heightened anxiety and alters the gut microbiome in animal models. The researchers observed that rats drinking the chemical developed hypervigilance toward harmless objects and sounds. This altered behavior was accompanied by abnormal changes in a specific dread-inducing region of the brain. The new research was published in the journal <a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/ftox.2025.1704231">Frontiers in Toxicology</a>.</p>
<p>Glyphosate is the active ingredient in many commercial weedkillers used around the globe. It destroys weeds by blocking a specific chemical pathway found in plants and bacteria. Because human and animal cells lack this specific biological machinery, regulators previously concluded that the chemical was entirely harmless to mammals. The Environmental Protection Agency currently sets the safe daily limit for long-term human exposure at 2.0 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.</p>
<p>In recent years, medical professionals have noticed a correlation between heavy weedkiller use and human mental health conditions. Past laboratory experiments have also shown that rodents exposed to the chemical display excessive fear. But those prior experiments exposed animals to enormously high daily amounts, reaching up to 500 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. The health results of long-term exposure at the much lower levels considered safe by the government remained largely untested.</p>
<p>A team of scientists wanted to see if chronic exposure to this government-approved dosage could alter emotional processing. Researchers Mauricio Cáceres-Chacón, Demetrio Sierra-Mercado, and their colleagues at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine led the investigation. They suspected that low but continuous doses of the chemical could incrementally influence brain networks responsible for fear. They also theorized that the chemical might disrupt the healthy balance of bacteria in the digestive tract, an area of the body that heavily influences human and animal mental health.</p>
<p>To test these ideas, the research team added the weedkiller to the drinking water of adult male rats. The team controlled the concentration so that the animals consistently consumed the exact threshold dose of 2.0 milligrams per kilogram of body weight each day. A separate, matched control group of rats received regular filtered water. The total exposure period lasted for 16 weeks, during which the scientists ran a variety of psychological tests to gauge the animals’ emotional states.</p>
<p>At the four-week mark, the team placed the rats in an open space to measure general comfort levels. At this early stage of the experiment, the scientists saw no clear behavioral differences between the two animal groups. Both groups explored the center of the testing area for roughly the same amount of time. The lack of an early effect suggests that the chemical might need prolonged time to accumulate in the body before altering brain function.</p>
<p>By the tenth week of the experiment, an unnatural shift in behavior emerged. The researchers tested the rats in a maze elevated high off the ground. The maze featured some enclosed, sheltered paths and some paths that were completely open and exposed to the room. The animals drinking the weedkiller spent far less time exploring the open paths than the control animals did, which is a standard indicator of elevated anxiety in rodents.</p>
<p>Four weeks later, the team examined how the animals reacted to new experiences. They introduced a completely harmless, novel object into the rodents’ testing environment. Rats usually investigate new items out of natural curiosity and a desire to forage. The exposed animals spent much less time exploring the unfamiliar object and spent more time frozen in place or hugging the perimeter of the testing space.</p>
<p>When the researchers introduced a new, unfamiliar rat into the space, the weedkiller-exposed rodents interacted with their living peer at completely normal levels. This specific detail showed that the chemical did not completely suppress social behavior. Instead, it seems the animals incorrectly processed the inanimate object as a potential threat. Avoiding harmless novelties is an action frequently associated with trauma and hypervigilance disorders in humans.</p>
<p>During the final week of testing, the scientists played brief, neutral audio tones for the animals. The exposed rats froze in place much more often than the control rats did when hearing these harmless sounds. But when the researchers paired the tones with a mild foot shock, both groups reacted with identical fear levels. The experiment revealed that the chemical caused the animals to misinterpret neutral stimuli as dangerous, without altering their normal response to actual physical threats.</p>
<p>To figure out how the herbicide caused this state of dread, the scientists examined the rats’ brain tissue. They looked for cellular activity in several regions known to process fear and emotion, including the amygdala and parts of the prefrontal cortex. The results from these brain regions were not statistically significant. This means the chemical did not appear to overstimulate or damage their baseline function.</p>
<p>However, the team did find heightened cellular activity in a specific area called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. This deep-brain structure is heavily involved in threat interpretation and the promotion of generalized anxiety. Overactivity in this region perfectly aligned with the behavioral observation that the rats were acting overly cautious. The animals were fundamentally misinterpreting safe environments as risky due to physical changes in this brain region.</p>
<p>Beyond the brain, the scientists also analyzed the animals’ digestive tracts. Using genetic sequencing on fecal samples, they found that the exposed rats experienced an unnatural shift in their gut microbiome. Specifically, the animals lost a large portion of a bacterial group known as Lactobacillus. This bacterial family relies heavily on manganese, a nutrient that the weedkiller tends to bind to and remove from circulation.</p>
<p>The loss of Lactobacillus provides a strong biological explanation for the rodents’ altered moods. These specific gut bacteria are essential for processing dietary proteins into the chemical messenger serotonin. Serotonin regulates mood, and in a healthy brain, it acts to keep the anxiety-promoting regions calm. Without enough friendly bacteria, serotonin production drops, leaving the brain susceptible to unwarranted fear responses.</p>
<p>The researchers noted a few limitations in their experimental design. The study only observed male rats, which leaves an open question regarding how female physiology might respond to the same chemical exposure. Male and female rodents often display different behavioral coping strategies when dealing with fear or stress. Additionally, their microbiomes can react differently to environmental toxins, meaning future investigations will need to include both sexes to build a complete picture of the chemical’s risks.</p>
<p>Additionally, the scientists only measured the gut bacteria located in the animals’ waste at the very end of the 16-week period. This specific measurement method does not capture the populations of bacteria that live deep within the protective mucus lining of the intestines. Checking the digestive tract makeup at multiple points throughout the experiment could help researchers see exactly when the bacterial die-off occurs. Following the timeline more closely would confirm whether the gut changes happen before or after the behavioral shifts.</p>
<p>Despite these boundaries, the experiment demonstrates a clear biological mechanism by which everyday chemical exposures alter mental states. Regulators based their original safety limits on the assumption that animal biology was immune to the weedkiller’s mechanism of action. Because the chemical targets the bacteria living inside the intestinal tract, it indirectly shapes brain health. The resulting loss of mood-stabilizing brain chemicals shows that environmental safety thresholds may need a thorough reevaluation.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/ftox.2025.1704231" target="_blank">Exposure to the herbicide glyphosate leads to inappropriate threat responses and alters gut microbial composition</a>,” was authored by Mauricio Cáceres-Chacón, Osmarie Martínez-Guzmán, Héctor A. Haddock-Martínez, Alexdiel Figueroa-Pérez, Sian Rodríguez-Rosado, Jaleniz Suárez-Pérez, Raúl Y. Ramos-Sánchez, Filipa Godoy-Vitorino and Demetrio Sierra-Mercado.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/psychopathic-traits-are-linked-to-a-lack-of-physical-and-emotional-connection-during-face-to-face-interactions/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Psychopathic traits are linked to a lack of physical and emotional connection during face-to-face interactions</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 30th 2026, 08:00</div>
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<p><p>A new study published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2026.2637546" target="_blank">Cognition and Emotion</a></em> provides evidence that people with psychopathic traits might struggle to share the emotions of others, even when they can accurately identify those feelings. The research suggests that empathy operates differently in real social interactions than in isolated clinical tests. These findings offer fresh insights into how human connection works and how certain personality traits interfere with social bonding.</p>
<p>Scientists have often studied empathy by asking people to fill out questionnaires or look at static images in a laboratory. But this approach removes the social element from a concept that is fundamentally about interacting with other human beings. A growing movement in psychology suggests shifting to a more interactive method to see how empathy unfolds in real time.</p>
<p>This interactive shift is especially needed in the study of psychopathy. Psychopathy is a set of personality traits that includes manipulation, impulsivity, taking risks, and a reduced capacity for guilt. A central feature of this condition is a lack of empathy for others.</p>
<p>Previous studies on psychopathic traits have mostly relied on artificial laboratory setups. The authors of the new study wanted to know if the empathy deficits associated with psychopathy look different during a real conversation. </p>
<p>“Research on empathy in psychopathy has almost exclusively relied on questionnaires or tasks where people react to emotional pictures or videos. And while these methods capture some parts of empathy, they do not reflect how empathy works in everyday life,” said study author Matthias Burghart, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law.</p>
<p>“Outside the lab, empathy usually develops through interactions with other people. For this reason, we wanted to study empathy in a more naturalistic setting by observing real social interactions between two people. As an added benefit, this approach also allowed us to examine physiological synchrony in psychopathy for the first time.”</p>
<p>For their study, the researchers recruited 82 people from the community in New Zealand. These participants were divided into 41 interacting pairs. About half of the pairs consisted of people who already knew each other, like friends or romantic partners.</p>
<p>The other half of the pairs were complete strangers who met for the first time at the laboratory. The scientists assessed each participant for psychopathic traits using a standard personality survey. This survey measures specific traits like fearless dominance, self-centered impulsivity, and coldheartedness.</p>
<p>Self-centered impulsivity involves reckless behavior and a lack of self-control. Coldheartedness refers to a deep emotional detachment and a general indifference toward others. After completing the survey, the participants put on special vests that recorded their physical reactions.</p>
<p>These sensors tracked heart rate and electrodermal activity throughout the experiment. Electrodermal activity measures tiny changes in sweat gland activity on the skin, which indicates physical arousal or an emotional response. Measuring these bodily changes allows scientists to study physiological synchrony.</p>
<p>Physiological synchrony happens when the physical responses of two interacting people naturally align. When two people share a deep conversation, their bodies might begin to react in identical ways at the exact same time. The scientists wanted to see if people with higher psychopathic traits showed less of this physical alignment.</p>
<p>During the experiment, each pair engaged in four six-minute conversations about major life events. They took turns sharing personal stories about positive moments, negative events, and major regrets. The researchers recorded video and physical data while the participants simply talked to each other naturally.</p>
<p>After the conversations, each person sat at a computer and rewatched the videos. They used a computer mouse to continuously rate the intensity of their own emotions during the conversation. Then, they watched the videos a second time to rate how intense they thought their partner’s emotions were.</p>
<p>This allowed the scientists to measure two distinct types of empathy. The first type is empathic accuracy, which is the ability to correctly guess what another person is feeling. The researchers measured empathic accuracy by comparing one person’s guess with their partner’s actual self-rating.</p>
<p>The second type of empathy is affective sharing, which involves actually feeling the same emotions as the other person. To measure this, the scientists compared the self-reported emotional intensity of both people in the pair. High affective sharing meant both people felt strong emotions at the exact same moments.</p>
<p>The findings showed that people who knew each other had higher empathic accuracy. Friends and partners could guess each other’s emotional intensity better than strangers could. Yet, even strangers demonstrated a significant ability to read each other accurately.</p>
<p>When looking at psychopathic traits, the scientists found no connection between psychopathy and empathic accuracy. People with higher psychopathic traits were just as capable of identifying another person’s emotional state. They did not seem to lack the mental ability to recognize feelings.</p>
<p>However, psychopathic traits did affect emotional and physical connections. The researchers found that self-centered impulsivity was linked to lower levels of affective sharing. People with this impulsive trait were less likely to actually feel the emotions their conversation partner was experiencing.</p>
<p>The physical data provided evidence for a similar pattern. While heart rates did not synchronize between participants, skin responses did align for many pairs. The scientists noted that coldheartedness tended to be associated with lower physiological synchrony.</p>
<p>Individuals scoring higher in coldheartedness were less likely to physically mirror their partner’s physical arousal. This suggests a physical disconnect that matches their mental emotional detachment. The topic of the conversation did not seem to change these outcomes.</p>
<p>“Empathy problems in psychopathy may be broader than previously thought,” Burghart told PsyPost. “We found that physiological synchrony, which is an automatic process that occurs between people during interaction, may also be reduced. This could help explain why people with psychopathic traits struggle with affective empathy and opens up an exciting new direction for future research.”</p>
<p>These findings must be interpreted with caution due to a few limitations. The study used a relatively small sample size, which means the statistical power was low. This lack of power suggests that the results are preliminary and require replication in larger studies.</p>
<p>Another limitation involves the natural conversation design itself. Because participants were allowed to talk freely, the conversation dynamics varied greatly between pairs. Some people dominated the discussion, while others shared the speaking time equally. Future research could measure these conversation styles and include them in the data analysis. </p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2026.2637546" target="_blank">Empathy, physiological synchrony, and psychopathy: preliminary insights from naturalistic dyadic interactions</a>,” was authored by Matthias Burghart, Roydon Goldsack, Areito Echevarria, and Hedwig Eisenbarth.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/chatgpt-acts-as-a-cognitive-crutch-that-weakens-memory-new-research-suggests/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">ChatGPT acts as a “cognitive crutch” that weakens memory, new research suggests</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 30th 2026, 06:00</div>
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<p><p>A recent experiment provides evidence that relying on artificial intelligence to help study new material tends to reduce how much information students remember weeks later. The findings suggest that while these tools can speed up initial learning, they might actually weaken the deep mental processing required to store knowledge over the long term. The study was published in the journal <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.102287" target="_blank">Social Sciences & Humanities Open</a></em>.</p>
<p>Generative artificial intelligence refers to computer programs capable of creating text, images, or other media in response to user prompts. These systems can answer complex questions, synthesize vast amounts of information, and write essays in seconds. Because of this convenience, millions of university students use these programs to assist with their coursework.</p>
<p>André Barcaui, a professor of the Business Management course at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, conducted the study to see how this technology affects memory. He wanted to test whether the ease of getting answers from a chatbot harms long-term learning.</p>
<p>When a student delegates mental tasks to an external tool, psychologists call it <a href="https://www.psypost.org/the-scientist-who-predicted-ai-psychosis-has-issued-another-dire-warning/" target="_blank">cognitive offloading</a>. In the past, this meant using a calculator for math or a notebook to remember a grocery list. Generative AI platforms take this a step further by performing the actual thinking, analyzing, and problem-solving.</p>
<p>“What motivated me most were my own undergraduate students,” Barcaui told PsyPost. “I feel there has been a growing loss of cognition and interest among students over the years. As I work with and teach AI, I understand the full potential of the tool and consider myself an enthusiast for the beneficial and responsible use of AI.” </p>
<p>“However, I began to see risks for teenagers, as their interest in reading decreases with each passing year, and with that, their creativity, critical thinking, text interpretation, and even writing and articulation skills also diminish. I have spoken with fellow professors in other countries and I don’t believe this is a phenomenon unique to Brazil. That’s why I decided to research it and see if it corroborated other equivalent research pointing in the same direction.”</p>
<p>Barcaui grounded his research in the concept of desirable difficulties. This psychological principle suggests that learning actually improves when a student faces a certain amount of productive struggle. Activities like actively trying to remember a fact or puzzling through a tough concept force the brain to build stronger memory pathways.</p>
<p>By providing immediate and polished answers, an automated chatbot might remove these necessary hurdles. Without that mental friction, students might experience weaker memory consolidation. Memory consolidation is the biological process where fragile new memories are stabilized and stored securely in the brain over time.</p>
<p>To investigate this dynamic, Barcaui recruited 120 undergraduate business administration students. The participants included 68 males and 52 females between the ages of 18 and 24. None of the students had formal training in computer science or machine learning.</p>
<p>The students were randomly divided into two equal groups of 60. Both groups received the same assignment, which required them to research basic artificial intelligence concepts. Topics included ethics, societal impacts, and technical foundations.</p>
<p>The task required the students to spend up to two weeks researching their assigned topic and prepare a ten-minute presentation. The first group was instructed to use a specific AI chatbot, known as ChatGPT, as a study aid. They interacted freely with the program to explain concepts, generate examples, and structure their presentations.</p>
<p>The second group used traditional study methods. These students were barred from using automated chatbots. Instead, they relied on course notes, academic databases, and standard internet search engines.</p>
<p>After the initial research period, the participants delivered their presentations to small groups of their peers. The students then went about their normal academic lives for a month and a half. This delay allowed the researcher to test natural memory decay over a realistic academic timeframe.</p>
<p>Forty-five days after the initial study phase, the researcher surprised the participants with a retention test. Eighty-five students returned to take this twenty-question multiple-choice exam. The test was specifically designed to measure how well the students understood the concepts, rather than just their ability to memorize definitions.</p>
<p>The students who used traditional study methods performed better. On average, the traditional learners answered 68.5 percent of the questions correctly. In contrast, the students who studied with the chatbot answered only 57.5 percent of the questions correctly.</p>
<p>The negative impact of the chatbot was most pronounced when students were learning highly technical topics. While the software also impaired memory for less technical topics, such as ethics and society, the gap between the two groups was not as wide. This pattern suggests that productive struggle is especially important when mastering complex or structurally difficult material.</p>
<p>Barcaui also tracked how much time the students spent preparing for their presentations. The automated chatbot allowed students to finish their work much faster. The technology-assisted group spent an average of 3.2 hours on the assignment, while the traditional group spent 5.8 hours.</p>
<p>Even when adjusting the data to account for this difference in study time, the traditional learners still scored higher on the final test. This detail indicates that the learning deficit was not just a result of spending less time on the material. Instead, the quality of the study time appeared to be lower.</p>
<p>Traditional learners likely spent their extra time re-reading materials, testing themselves, and manually connecting different ideas. These traditional study habits naturally force the brain to practice retrieving information. The chatbot users likely spent their time writing prompts and reading generated responses, which feels productive but fails to exercise the brain’s retrieval networks.</p>
<p>The researcher also found that a student’s prior experience with chatbots did not change the outcome. Frequent users of the technology performed just as poorly on the retention test as those who were relatively new to it. The evidence suggests that students might experience an illusion of competence, where the software makes them feel like they understand the material better than they actually do.</p>
<p>Barcaui highlighted three main takeaways:</p>
<p>“<strong>Productivity does not replace Competence</strong>: There is an abysmal difference between delivering a piece of work and understanding the process of its creation. The indiscriminate use of AI can create an ‘illusion of competence,’ where the individual obtains results without developing the synapses necessary to replicate that reasoning independently.”</p>
<p>“<strong>The Atrophy of the Critical ‘Muscle’</strong>: Just as the constant use of calculators reduced mental calculation skills, delegating writing and text interpretation to AI can atrophy the capacity for synthesis and critical thinking. Without the mental ‘friction’ of reading and writing, we lose the ability to articulate complex ideas and question information.”</p>
<p>“<strong>AI as Co-pilot, not Autopilot</strong>: The main lesson is that AI should be used to expand human capabilities (increase reach), not to replace them (eliminate effort). Human value will increasingly shift from the ability to execute to the ability to ask the right questions and critically curate the generated data.”</p>
<p>As with all research, the study has some limitations. Nearly thirty percent of the original 120 participants did not return for the surprise test forty-five days later. While the dropout rate was similar across both groups, this loss of data could slightly skew the final numbers.</p>
<p>The sample was also limited to business students at one university in Brazil. Students in different academic disciplines, such as engineering or the humanities, might interact with the software differently.</p>
<p>Future research should explore how different guidelines for technology use might change student outcomes. Scientists could test scenarios where students attempt to solve a problem on their own before consulting a chatbot for feedback. Researchers could also use digital tracking software to get a precise measurement of exactly how students divide their time when studying.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.102287" target="_blank">ChatGPT as a cognitive crutch: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial on knowledge retention</a>,” was authored by André Barcaui.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/electronic-dance-music-appears-to-provide-a-mental-health-boost-for-women-over-40/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Electronic dance music events appear to provide a mental health boost for women over 40</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 29th 2026, 20:00</div>
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<p><p>Women over 40 continue to participate in electronic dance music events to benefit their physical and mental health. The research, published in the journal <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356251329229">Psychology of Music</a>, reveals how these women navigate societal judgments about age and gender to maintain community ties. The authors found that a deep connection to the rhythms and the atmosphere keeps these attendees returning to the dance floor well into middle age.</p>
<p>Electronic dance music features repetitive beats and synthesized sounds. It is typically played at high volumes in nightclubs and at outdoor festivals. The culture surrounding this music has existed since the late 1980s.</p>
<p>Because the scene has matured over decades, many of its original fans are now middle-aged or older. However, the club environment is still largely imagined as a space for young adults.</p>
<p>Researchers wanted to understand the specific experiences of older women in a cultural space historically associated with youth. Alinka Greasley, a researcher at the University of Leeds, led the study alongside colleagues Alice O’Grady and Shauna Stapleton. They wanted to explore how age and gender shape a person’s involvement in nightlife.</p>
<p>Society often imposes strict expectations on how women should behave or dress as they get older. In club settings, these expectations can clash with an atmosphere focused on rebellious energy and physical stamina. The prevailing cultural idea is that late-night dancing is a phase people eventually outgrow to take on family and career responsibilities.</p>
<p>Older women in particular often face intersecting prejudices related to both aging and gender. Past studies suggest that women are more likely than men to stop attending music events after having children. Greasley and her team wanted to hear from the women who decided to keep going.</p>
<p>To gather this information, the research team created an online survey. They recruited 136 female clubbers ranging in age from 40 to 65. The majority of these women were in their forties. Most respondents had been attending electronic music events for over two decades.</p>
<p>The survey asked the women to rank their motivations for going out. It also included open-ended questions where they could write about their personal experiences in detail. The primary draw for these women was the music itself. Hearing a favorite artist or disc jockey perform live ranked as the highest motivation.</p>
<p>Socializing with existing friends came in second place. The opportunity to meet new people and the general atmosphere of the venue also rated highly. Finding a romantic or sexual partner was the lowest-ranked motivation across the entire group.</p>
<p>The researchers observed that electronic dance music played a central role in the participants’ lives. Almost all of the respondents agreed that attending these events contributed positively to their general well-being. Participants described dancing as a way to relieve stress and escape the routine of daily life. Many viewed the club as a supportive environment that allowed them to recharge emotionally.</p>
<p>Beyond emotional release, these events serve as a primary source of physical exercise for some attendees. Electronic dance music is characterized by a prominent bassline that encourages continuous movement. A few participants described clubbing as part of their regular fitness routine. They viewed dancing for several hours as a fun alternative to traditional gym workouts.</p>
<p>The combined benefits extended even deeper for a large portion of the group. More than 60 percent of the surveyed women described their time at clubs and festivals as a spiritual experience. They explained how the combination of the music, the lights, and the crowd created a feeling of immense happiness. For these women, the dance floor provided a space to connect with themselves on a profound level.</p>
<p>Because the researchers conducted the survey during the COVID-19 pandemic, the participants had a rare opportunity to reflect on what happens when they cannot access their music communities. Lockdowns temporarily closed venues and halted live music entirely. The respondents described this absence as terrible for their mental health. Without a place to dance, many women reported feeling lethargic, depressed, and disconnected from their core identities.</p>
<p>Belonging was a major theme in the survey responses. More than 90 percent of the women agreed that they felt at home at electronic dance music events. Many participants noted that a shared love for the music bridges generational divides. They often formed lasting friendships with people of all ages.</p>
<p>One respondent explained her perspective by writing about the warmth of the community. She wrote, “There’s a connection with people around you through dance, the bass, the rhythm, and a warmth of empathic body language that oozes that sense of belonging.”</p>
<p>While friendships were highly valued, the nature of these relationships varied. Some women maintained lifelong friendships that began when they were teenagers attending their first raves. Others appreciated the brief connections they made with strangers during a single event. A small group of respondents admitted that making new friends became a lower priority as they aged, and they preferred to spend their social energy on people they already knew well.</p>
<p>Despite these positive feelings, participating in nightlife as an older woman presents specific challenges. About a fifth of the respondents felt they were highly visible and out of place because of their age. A few women wrote that younger crowds occasionally judged them for being there. Some participants admitted they struggled with their own internal ideas about whether they were getting too old for the scene.</p>
<p>Appearance and clothing choices were a common concern for the surveyed women. Most of the participants prioritized comfort above all else. They wore supportive shoes or sneakers to ensure they could dance for hours without pain. At the same time, many women used club fashion as a form of self-expression.</p>
<p>They enjoyed wearing flamboyant or sequined outfits that they would rarely wear during a typical workday. Other women took the opposite approach to fashion. They intentionally wore casual clothing to try to blend into the crowd. These participants worried about looking like they were trying too hard to seem young.</p>
<p>The researchers noted that these conflicting approaches show how older women actively manage their self-image. They must navigate personal discomfort to fit into a space where youth is the norm. Safety was another prominent issue raised in the survey. While most participants said they generally felt safe when going out, the environment carries real risks.</p>
<p>Nearly half of the surveyed women reported experiencing unwanted physical contact at a club event. About 28 percent said they regularly received unwanted attention. To protect themselves, the women developed specific habits. Many preferred attending underground or alternative events over mainstream nightclubs.</p>
<p>The women felt that alternative venues attracted a respectful crowd who understood boundaries. They also relied on groups of friends to deter harassment and watched out for one another. Some women intentionally built relationships with the security staff and promoters so they would have help if a problem occurred.</p>
<p>Aging also changes how the human body handles late nights and physical exertion. Some women noted that recovering from a night out takes much longer in their forties and fifties than it did in their twenties. To sustain their hobby, the women described adopting a strategy of moderation.</p>
<p>Many participants reduced how frequently they went out. They opted to attend one highly anticipated event every few weeks instead of going out every weekend. They also planned their recovery time in advance. Some women reported scheduling time off work the Monday after a weekend festival so they could rest.</p>
<p>While many women acknowledged consuming alcohol or other substances, they emphasized a cautious approach. By pacing themselves, they managed to balance their passion for music with their family and professional commitments. They recognized that they needed to prioritize sleep and health to keep participating in the events they loved.</p>
<p>The researchers noted a few limitations in their findings. The survey participants were highly selective about the events they attended. Local scenes vary widely, and different cities or venues may have different attitudes toward older patrons. The current data might not apply to every electronic music community.</p>
<p>In addition, the study only captures the perspectives of women who currently participate in the scene. It leaves out the voices of women who completely abandoned the nightlife culture. Future investigations should look at the specific reasons why people stop attending.</p>
<p>Understanding why patrons leave could help venue owners create more inclusive environments for everyone. The authors also suggest exploring how race, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation affect the experiences of older individuals in dance communities.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356251329229" target="_blank">Age is just a number: Persistent participation in Electronic Dance Music by women over 40 years</a>,” was authored by Alinka E Greasley, Alice O’Grady, and Shauna E Stapleton.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/playing-video-games-to-win-is-associated-with-higher-anxiety-levels-2026-03-20/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">The psychological difference between playing video games to relax and playing to win</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 29th 2026, 18:00</div>
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<p><p>Video games offer adults a popular way to connect and unwind, but the specific reasons people pick up a controller can alter how they experience stress and life satisfaction. A new study reveals that playing primarily to win is linked to higher anxiety, while men and women often report different motivations for starting a game. These results were published in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2025.121142">Journal of Affective Disorders</a>.</p>
<p>People engage with digital worlds for many different reasons. Some look for a temporary escape from daily responsibilities. Others want to challenge their reflexes, socialize with distant friends, or experience an interactive story.</p>
<p>Psychologists categorize these motivations into a few broad buckets based on the rewards they provide. The most common reasons include playing to relax, playing to improve one’s skills, playing to simply have fun, and playing to win. The video game uses and gratifications theory proposes that players actively seek out different digital experiences to satisfy specific psychological needs. These diverse starting goals can strongly alter the emotional impact of a gaming session. </p>
<p>Many adults who play video games also experience mental health challenges in their daily lives. Generalized anxiety involves persistent, excessive worry about daily events that is difficult to control. Social anxiety centers on an intense fear of social situations and a strong desire to avoid them.</p>
<p>Digital environments can provide a safe space for people with social anxiety to interact with others from a comfortable distance. However, certain competitive environments might actually increase overall stress levels. Mental health outcomes in gaming also exist within a broad culture that frequently struggles with gender equality. </p>
<p>Movements within the gaming community have highlighted the severe online harassment directed at women. Women gamers often face a higher threshold to be accepted by their peers in digital spaces. They may endure sexual harassment or outright threats to their safety while just trying to enjoy a hobby.</p>
<p>Because of these negative experiences, women might approach online games with more caution than men. They might prefer quieter games or choose to avoid voice communication features entirely to protect themselves from verbal abuse. These environmental pressures could shape why different genders choose to play certain games. </p>
<p>Lead author Kayleigh Watters and co-author Mikael Rubin, both researchers at Palo Alto University, wanted to map out these relationships. They sought to identify how a person’s motivation to play connects to their anxiety levels, life satisfaction, and gender.</p>
<p>The researchers analyzed information from a publicly available database containing past survey responses from 13,464 adult gamers. The vast majority of the participants identified as men, while a smaller fraction identified as women. </p>
<p>Participants in the original database completed several questionnaires regarding their mental health. They answered questions about their social phobia, which included items about avoiding parties or fearing physical symptoms like trembling in public. They also filled out surveys detailing their general anxiety symptoms, such as feeling restless or being unable to stop worrying. </p>
<p>Most of the participants in this dataset primarily played League of Legends. This title is a hugely popular online multiplayer game where two teams of five players compete to destroy the opposing team’s base. League of Legends is broadly known for its intensely competitive ranking system. </p>
<p>Because players are assigned a rank based on their win and loss record, the pressure to perform is constant. Mistakes made by one player can cost the entire team the match. This dynamic frequently leads to frustration, anger, and verbal abuse in the game’s text chat. </p>
<p>Watters and Rubin used a statistical technique called network analysis. This method acts like a map of a city’s traffic grid, showing how a traffic jam on one street affects the flow on all surrounding streets. By controlling for all other variables at once, the researchers could isolate the specific relationships between gaming hours and mental health. This approach revealed a web of connections that traditional analysis methods might miss.</p>
<p>They created separate mathematical networks for players motivated by fun, relaxation, improvement, and winning. The data showed that playing to win created a distinct psychological pattern compared to the other three motivations. When people played to relax, have fun, or improve, avoiding social situations was strongly linked to playing more hours.</p>
<p>This pattern suggests that recreational players might use video games as a substitute for real-world social interactions. If they feel nervous about face-to-face gatherings, they can log more hours online to fulfill their social needs safely.</p>
<p>The dynamic changed completely for those who played primarily to win. In the win-motivated group, players did not show the same strong link between avoiding real-world social events and excessive gaming. Instead, higher levels of generalized anxiety in the competitive group were associated with playing fewer hours. </p>
<p>The researchers suspect that the pressure to perform well and the fear of negative evaluation from teammates might drive anxious players away from the game entirely. The study also found differences between men and women regarding their primary reasons for gaming. Women were more likely to report having fun or relaxing as their main motivation. </p>
<p>Men, on the other hand, more frequently stated that they played to improve their skills or to win. The researchers note that women might lean toward relaxation and fun partly because of the hostile environments they often encounter in competitive game modes. </p>
<p>Anxiety levels also differed across gender lines in the dataset. Women reported higher overall levels of generalized anxiety and social anxiety compared to men. Despite these differences, men and women reported similar levels of overall life satisfaction in their survey responses. </p>
<p>The researchers did find that higher generalized anxiety predicted lower life satisfaction for all players. This held true regardless of the participant’s original reason for booting up the game. This finding demonstrates the pervasive negative impact that chronic worry has on a person’s perceived quality of life.</p>
<p>The research team highlighted a few limitations in their work. The dataset contained a massive imbalance in gender, with nearly 13,000 men and only about 700 women. This large gap limits the strength of the conclusions regarding gender differences in gaming. </p>
<p>Future studies will need to intentionally recruit more women to ensure a balanced comparison. The results are also heavily influenced by the specific culture of League of Legends. Because this particular game is famously competitive and frequently toxic, the findings might not apply to other types of digital entertainment. </p>
<p>Other gaming communities, such as those centered around cooperative building games or single-player puzzle games, might show entirely different emotional patterns. The motivation to play and the resulting anxiety likely shift depending on the genre.</p>
<p>The authors suggest that mental health professionals should consider a patient’s specific gaming motivations when discussing screen time. Instead of treating all video game use as identical, tailored support strategies might yield better outcomes. For example, competitive players might benefit from strategies to manage performance anxiety, while recreational players might need help building social confidence in physical spaces. </p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2025.121142" target="_blank">Unique associations between different motivations to play video games and anxiety: Evidence from network analysis</a>,” was authored by Kayleigh N. Watters and Mikael Rubin.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/women-who-hate-men-study-finds-similarities-in-gendered-online-hate-speech-2026-03-26/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Women who hate men: Study finds similarities in gendered hate speech on Reddit</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 29th 2026, 16:00</div>
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<p><p>A new study reveals that online communities dedicated to hating men share strikingly similar behaviors and language patterns with communities dedicated to hating women. The research suggests that gender driven hate speech is a broad phenomenon characteristic of toxic digital groups, regardless of the victim’s gender. These findings were published in the journal <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-81567-9">Scientific Reports</a>.</p>
<p>Social media networks allow people around the world to share ideas and perspectives at an unprecedented scale. While these platforms can foster community building, they also create environments where discrimination and extreme ideologies can spread. One unexpected impact is the creation of echo chambers. An echo chamber is a closed environment where users only encounter information or opinions that mirror and reinforce their own.</p>
<p>Anonymity on the internet often accelerates the formation of these isolated spaces. Within these chambers, hate speech acts as a mechanism of communication that expresses an ideology using offensive stereotypes. This speech targets individuals based on traits like ethnicity, religion, or gender. Gendered hate speech specifically involves harassing or degrading people based entirely on whether they are men or women.</p>
<p>Historically, researchers and content moderators have focused heavily on misogyny, which is the hatred of or prejudice against women. A routine search of academic databases reveals hundreds of thousands of papers examining online misogyny over the past two decades. In contrast, academic attention toward misandry, defined as the hatred of or prejudice against men, remains notably scarce. Studies examining misandry only began to appear around 2014, leaving huge gaps in the scientific understanding of digital harassment.</p>
<p>Erica Coppolillo, a researcher at the University of Calabria and the National Research Council of Italy, initiated a project to address this literature gap. Coppolillo sought to determine if there are systematic differences between communities that target men and communities that target women. The goal was to see if the gender of the perpetrators changes the nature of the hostility. If the behavior remains identical, it suggests that the core issue is the toxicity of extremist online environments rather than the specific gender dynamics.</p>
<p>To investigate these questions, the study focused on Reddit. This platform is organized into thousands of individual communities, known as subreddits, dedicated to specific topics. Users interact by sharing posts and commenting on threads, creating dense networks of conversation. The researcher selected four subreddits known for extreme views on gender as the basis for the text analysis.</p>
<p>Two of these groups were chosen as examples of misandric communities. The first was a mainstream feminist subreddit discussing women’s issues, and the second was a radical feminist subreddit. The latter was banned by the platform in 2020 for violating hate speech policies. For the misogynistic side, the researcher selected a men’s rights subreddit and a group for involuntary celibates. The involuntary celibate community was also eventually banned for promoting hate and violence.</p>
<p>The primary data included text posts and comments generated between 2016 and 2022. To ensure the analysis focused strictly on gender targeting, a tight filtering process was applied. In the misandric groups, only texts mentioning terms like man, men, or husband were retained. In the misogynistic groups, the texts had to include terms like woman, women, or wife.</p>
<p>The analysis began with a linguistic comparison to identify the vocabulary shaping these conversations. A computational tool designed to process human language cleaned the text by removing punctuation and numbers. The researcher then examined the twenty most frequent words in each community. The results showed that most common terms occurred with similar frequency across all four groups.</p>
<p>There were no sharp linguistic boundaries separating the groups targeting men and those targeting women. Next, the study measured the toxicity of the content to see how aggressive these conversations were. Toxicity refers to how rude, disrespectful, or hateful a given comment appears to the reader. The researcher used an advanced artificial intelligence framework known as a transformer to evaluate the text.</p>
<p>A transformer is a deep learning model that understands the context of a word based on the surrounding sentence structure. This specific model had been trained on tens of thousands of manually annotated internet posts to learn the nuances of hate speech. It assigned a toxicity score to each post and comment, placing it on a continuous scale from completely harmless to intensely toxic.</p>
<p>The results of the toxicity analysis showed that the majority of content across all four communities was rated as non-toxic. Almost all the communities had a dual pattern, with a large peak indicating harmless text and a smaller peak indicating highly toxic text. The two misogynistic communities showed a slightly higher peak in extreme toxicity compared to the misandric groups. Even so, the overall distribution patterns of toxicity were remarkably similar.</p>
<p>The third phase of the study evaluated the specific emotions expressed within the texts. The researcher used two different machine learning algorithms capable of detecting emotions like sadness, joy, fear, and anger. For this analysis, the focus was narrowed exclusively to negative emotions. The algorithms evaluated each piece of text to see if sadness, anger, fear, or hate was the dominant sentiment.</p>
<p>When examining the emotions at a broad content level, all four communities expressed hate most frequently. Anger was the second most common emotion across the board. The men’s rights group and the mainstream feminist group displayed incredibly similar emotional patterns. The involuntary celibate group leaned slightly more toward sadness, while the radical feminist group leaned slightly toward fear.</p>
<p>Once again, the findings did not reveal sweeping differences between the two sides. The researcher also decided to evaluate the same emotions at an individual user level. Instead of looking at unlinked posts, the algorithms calculated the dominant emotion expressed by each individual user across all their lifetime contributions. When viewed this way, the pattern shifted dramatically.</p>
<p>The mainstream feminist community displayed the highest levels of user driven hate, followed by the radical feminist group and the men’s rights group. This shifted perspective suggests that misandric communities might harbor more concentrated negative sentiments among actively posting users than misogynistic ones do. Finally, the study mapped the conversational networks within each subreddit. The researcher built visual graphs in which every user was a point, and an interaction between two users was a connecting line.</p>
<p>This allowed the researcher to measure the structural properties of each community network. One measured property was modularity, which dictates how strongly a network divides into smaller, isolated sub-communities. Another structural property was the network diameter, which represents the longest chain of communication between two users.</p>
<p>The network structures did not align with the gender focus of the subreddits. The mainstream feminist group shared more structural features, like high modularity and wide diameter, with the men’s rights group. In contrast, the involuntary celibate community’s conversational network more closely resembled the radical feminist network. The structural analysis confirmed that the intended direction of the hate speech does not dictate how an online community organizes itself.</p>
<p>These findings suggest that content moderation strategies should address all hate speech neutrally. Recognizing misandric hostility as a serious issue could lead to safer digital spaces for everyone. Treating misogyny and misandry with equal seriousness pushes platforms toward universal interventions to curb toxic behavior.</p>
<p>However, the study relies on data scraped from an open internet platform, which inevitably contains noise and formatting errors. Real world social data is rarely perfectly clean, which can impact automated evaluation. The study also relies heavily on artificial intelligence algorithms to evaluate toxicity and emotions. While these computerized models are highly accurate, they are not flawless.</p>
<p>These models occasionally misclassify internet slang or sarcasm, which could introduce a small degree of uncertainty into the results. The findings are also specific to the analyzed Reddit communities. Content dynamics on different platforms, such as Facebook or a video sharing site, might yield completely different results.</p>
<p>Future research could investigate whether artificial bot accounts contribute to the spread of negativity in these specific forums. Researchers could also look for heavily radicalized sub-factions hidden within the broader internet communities. </p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-81567-9" target="_blank">Women who hate men: a comparative analysis across extremist Reddit communities</a>,” was authored by Erica Coppolillo.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/severe-emotional-outbursts-in-adhd-are-linked-to-distinct-brain-differences-study-finds/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Severe emotional outbursts in ADHD are linked to distinct brain differences, study finds</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 29th 2026, 14:00</div>
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<p><p>Children with ADHD who also experience severe emotional outbursts show distinct differences in brain structure and connectivity, according to a new study published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/s003329172510278x" target="_blank">Psychological Medicine</a></em>.</p>
<p>Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is widely known for symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity, but many children also grapple with intense emotional reactions—such as tantrums, anger, and an inability to calm down. These emotional challenges are not part of the official diagnostic criteria for ADHD, yet they can be among the most impairing aspects of the disorder. Previous brain‑imaging studies have struggled to pinpoint consistent neural markers of ADHD, partly because these emotional symptoms have often been overlooked.</p>
<p>Led by Amy Krain Roy from Fordham University, the researchers behind this new study wanted to understand whether emotional and behavioral difficulties in ADHD arise from the same brain mechanisms or distinct ones. They were particularly interested in children who experience “impairing emotional outbursts” (IEOs), defined as severe verbal or physical rages that occur several times a week, are developmentally inappropriate, and interfere with daily life.</p>
<p>To explore this, the team recruited 123 children (94 males) between the ages of 5 and 9.9 years old. The sample included 47 children with both ADHD and IEOs, 39 children with ADHD but no outbursts, and 37 neurotypical children. Parents completed detailed questionnaires about their children’s behavior and emotions, and the children underwent both structural and functional MRI brain scans.</p>
<p>Roy’s team first analyzed the behavioral data using a statistical method that identifies underlying behavioral dimensions. They extracted four key behavioral factors: externalizing behavior (such as aggression, anger, and hyperactivity), emotion dysregulation (positive and negative mood lability), internalizing behavior (such as anxiety), and surgency/impulsivity. The most striking difference was in the “externalizing behavior” factor, which was significantly higher in children with both ADHD and emotional outbursts compared to the other two groups.</p>
<p>Next, the researchers examined the children’s brain structure using a machine-learning technique called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). This data-driven approach allowed them to uncover hidden patterns in cortical thickness across the brain without relying on preconceived assumptions. They discovered that children with ADHD and emotional outbursts had greater cortical thickness in a region of the brain called the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) compared to neurotypical children. This region is heavily involved in self‑control, attention, and regulating emotions. Furthermore, the thickness of this region was directly associated with higher scores on the “externalizing behavior” factor.</p>
<p>To understand how this structural difference might affect brain function, the team utilized the DLPFC as a “seed” to examine how its communication with the rest of the brain differed across the groups during a resting-state fMRI scan.</p>
<p>Roy’s team found that, compared to neurotypical children, both ADHD groups showed weaker communication between the DLPFC and parts of the brain’s default mode network, which is involved in self‑reflection and daydreaming.</p>
<p>However, a crucial difference emerged when comparing the two ADHD groups to each other. Children with ADHD and emotional outbursts showed significantly weaker connectivity between the DLPFC and the visual, dorsal attention, and salience networks compared to children with ADHD who did not have outbursts. This specific miscommunication—a failure of the brain’s control center to properly interact with regions that process visual and emotional stimuli—suggests a distinct neural signature for severe emotion dysregulation in ADHD.</p>
<p>As the authors explain, combining behavioral, structural, and functional data reveals unique neural features associated with behavioral and emotional dysregulation. Their findings suggest that severe emotional outbursts in ADHD are not just behavioral issues but may reflect distinct, biologically based brain differences, lending support to the idea that emotion dysregulation should be considered a core component of the ADHD diagnosis for some children.</p>
<p>However, the study has limitations. Because it is cross‑sectional, it cannot determine whether these brain differences cause emotional outbursts or result from them over time. Furthermore, the behavioral factors were based exclusively on parent questionnaires, which can introduce bias. Finally, the fMRI scans only lasted six minutes to accommodate the young age of the participants; longer scans would have improved the reliability of the functional connectivity data.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/s003329172510278x" target="_blank">Mapping latent neuroanatomical substrates of behavioral and emotional dysregulation in ADHD</a>,” was authored by Shinwon Park, Margaret Benda, Anthony Mekhanik, Michael P. Milham, Seok Jun Hong, and Amy Krain Roy.</p></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.psypost.org/depression-in-early-adolescence-is-linked-to-attention-problems-that-worsen-over-time/" style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing:-1px;margin:0;padding:0 0 2px;font-weight: bold;font-size: 19px;line-height: 20px;color:#222;">Depression in early adolescence is linked to attention problems that worsen over time</a>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:left;color:#999;font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:15px;">Mar 29th 2026, 12:00</div>
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<p><p>A new study published in the <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2026.121282" target="_blank">Journal of Affective Disorders</a></em> provides evidence that while depression in early adolescence is linked to various cognitive difficulties at first, most of these issues do not persist as teens grow older. The exception is inattention, which tends to fuel a two-way relationship where poor attention worsens depression and vice versa. These findings suggest that addressing attention problems in school could be an effective way to help adolescents struggling with their mental health.</p>
<p>Depression is a major mental health concern that affects roughly eight percent of adolescents worldwide. As young people move through middle and high school, depression can negatively impact their relationships, physical health, and academic performance. Scientists recognize that depression in adults often comes with cognitive impairment, meaning difficulties with thinking, remembering, and concentrating.</p>
<p>When looking at adolescents, previous studies have provided mixed results regarding whether depression causes similar cognitive problems. Most prior research on young people has been cross-sectional. A cross-sectional study looks at a single moment in time. Because of this design, past research could not determine if depression leads to cognitive problems or if pre-existing cognitive struggles make a young person more likely to become depressed. </p>
<p>“Although research in adults has shown a strong association between depression and cognitive dysfunction, studies of adolescents have primarily looked at only one point in time and findings have been mixed. We wanted to examine the relationship between depression and cognition over time, to better understand whether one precedes the other. This information would be helpful in directing targeted intervention to improve mental health and educational outcomes for school aged children,” said study author <a href="https://www.korczaklab.com/" target="_blank">Daphne J. Korczak</a>, the SickKids’ Chair in Child and Youth Medical Psychiatry, director of the Children’s Integrated Mood and Body Depression Program, and an associate professor at the University of Toronto</p>
<p>The scientists used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. This is a massive, long-term project tracking youth health and brain development across the United States. The current study included an exact sample size of 10,552 participants. At the beginning of the study, the children had an average age of 9.9 years. About 48 percent of the group was female.</p>
<p>The researchers examined the participants at three different points in time. These included a baseline assessment, a two-year follow-up, and a four-year follow-up. Caregivers completed questionnaires about their children to measure the severity of depressive symptoms.</p>
<p>In addition, professionals conducted clinical interviews with both the children and their caregivers. This helped determine if a participant met the criteria for a formal depression diagnosis. Out of the total sample, 1,122 participants had a clinical diagnosis of depression.</p>
<p>To ensure accuracy, the scientists controlled for several outside factors. They accounted for participant age, sex at birth, ethnicity, caregiver education, annual household income, and the presence of other mental health conditions. Controlling for these variables ensures that the final results are actually due to depression and not a separate demographic factor.</p>
<p>To measure cognitive function, the participants completed a series of standardized tests using digital tablets. These assessments tested five specific areas of brain function. The scientists measured long-term memory, working memory, attention, language, and executive function.</p>
<p>Working memory refers to the ability to hold and manipulate information in the mind over short periods. Executive function involves higher-level skills like planning, controlling impulses, and following complex instructions. Long-term memory involves storing information over longer durations, while language assessments measure vocabulary skills.</p>
<p>During the baseline assessment, the scientists found that depression was broadly linked to poorer mental performance. Higher depressive symptoms and a formal depression diagnosis were associated with lower scores in attention, long-term memory, working memory, and executive function. These initial results aligned with previous research showing that depressed children often experience cognitive difficulties.</p>
<p>However, the longitudinal findings painted a different picture. Over the four-year tracking period, most of the initial cognitive deficits disappeared. By the two-year and four-year marks, issues with working memory, long-term memory, and executive function were no longer significantly linked to depression in the same way. </p>
<p>“Our study suggests that there are developmental shifts in the way that depression symptoms present in later childhood and early adolescence; cognitive symptoms may be more prominent in younger children,” Korczak told PsyPost.</p>
<p>The scientists suggest that this shift might happen because the nature of depression changes as children become teenagers. In early adolescence, depression often shows up as physical and mental fatigue, which directly impacts test performance.</p>
<p>As teenagers grow older, their depression tends to shift toward emotional and social issues. They might struggle more with identity development or face difficulties with peer relationships. This shift toward emotional concerns might explain why the direct effects on memory and planning fade away over time.</p>
<p>Despite most cognitive deficits fading, the researchers discovered a persistent and reciprocal relationship between depression and attention. Higher depressive symptoms at baseline predicted poorer attention two years later. In turn, lower attention scores at the two-year mark predicted higher depressive symptoms at the four-year mark.</p>
<p>“The findings suggest that depression and attention deficits may exacerbate one another over time, and contribute to an overall pattern that can impair academic performance and daily functioning,” Korczak said.</p>
<p>A depressed teenager might struggle to focus in class, which can lead to poor grades. The resulting academic failure can then make the teenager feel worse about themselves, ultimately increasing their depressive symptoms.</p>
<p>In an unexpected twist, the researchers also found that higher depressive symptoms predicted better language skills over time. The scientists suspect this might be related to rumination, which is the habit of repeatedly thinking about negative feelings. Teenagers who ruminate might develop a larger vocabulary to describe their emotional pain.</p>
<p>Alternatively, their advanced language skills might simply make their parents more aware of their struggles. Adolescents who can clearly articulate their sadness might prompt their caregivers to report higher levels of depression on questionnaires. Future studies are needed to fully explain this specific link between vocabulary and mood.</p>
<p>“Our findings have both educational and clinical implications,” Korczak explained. “In educational settings, these results highlight the importance of considering the etiological role of depression when inattention is identified, as teachers may be more likely to notice attentional difficulties than depression symptoms. In clinical settings, our study results suggest that children and adolescents referred for either depression or attention difficulties should be evaluated for both problems in order to receive the most appropriate academic accommodations and psychiatric treatment.”</p>
<p>While this research provides a detailed look at adolescent mental health, it has some limitations. The study relied heavily on caregiver reports to measure depressive symptoms. Parents might not always know exactly what their children are feeling internally. Future studies should include self-reported data directly from the adolescents. This would help capture a more complete picture of their emotional state. </p>
<p>The participants also came from the general community and generally had mild levels of depression. “More research is needed to see whether these patterns are similar in young people with more severe depression,” Korczak said.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2026.121282" target="_blank">Depression and cognition in adolescents: A comparison of cross-sectional and longitudinal effects</a>,” was authored by Sarah Kuburi, Anett Schumacher, Eric Tu, and Daphne J. Korczak.</p></p>
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<p><strong>Forwarded by:<br />
Michael Reeder LCPC<br />
Baltimore, MD</strong></p>
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