Clinical Psychology
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety: It Works for Both Teens and Adults, but Not Necessarily in the Same Way
A common treatment for anxiety disorders is cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT for short. CBT aims to help people develop effective coping strategies for addressing stressful situations and managing their emotions. It provides a set of techniques that people can use to confront negative thoughts and negative behaviors, hence the name. Because CBT involves engaging with…
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Teenagers Who Self-Harm, 20 Years Later
When mental health conditions appear during the teenage years, one of the most complex questions is what the long-term implications are. Some conditions tend to be life-long, but for behaviors like self-harm, it’s harder to know what to expect over the course of decades. Part of the reason our knowledge in this area is still…
Read MoreSelf-Compassion Consistently Linked With Mental Health in Teenagers
Being able to treat themselves with kindness might make a real difference for teens when it comes to mental health. That idea makes intuitive sense, and now a meta-analysis by researchers at University of Edinburgh suggests it has a substantial amount of scientific evidence to back it up. The theory that self-compassion and mental health…
Read MoreStigma Toward Borderline Personality Disorder Is Improving
People with borderline personality disorder struggle with symptoms that range from fear of abandonment to difficulties with emotion regulation to self-harm. Unfortunately, they’ve also traditionally struggled with another problem: stigma from mental health care providers. Stereotypically, borderline personality disorder is considered hard to treat, and people with borderline personality disorder are seen by clinicians as…
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Emotional Skills Can Undo the Link Between Stress and Cardiovascular Health
Ongoing stress is looking like an increasingly guilty suspect in sabotaging people’s health. The American Psychological Association now cites chronic stress as a risk factor for heath disease, high blood pressure and stroke. But does chronic stress have the same effects on everyone? Probably not. A recent study by researchers at Yale and University of…
Read MoreThe Roles of Shame and Guilt in Anxiety
Psychology researchers have become increasingly interested in the idea that people who are more prone to feelings of shame and guilt are at higher risk for mental health conditions like anxiety disorders. The emotion of shame in particular is now being viewed as a possible culprit that needs to be explored in treating these conditions.…
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Being Especially Scrupulous Could Raise Risk for Hoarding
Ever bought something and then never gotten around to using it? Most of us don’t like that feeling. We naturally don’t want to see things go to waste. For some of us, though, the feeling is stronger than others. So a team of researchers came up with a questionnaire for measuring material scrupulosity, which they…
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The Personality of a Team Player
If you’re looking for someone who is good at teamwork, your ideal candidate is probably extraverted, agreeable and conscientious – but not too extraverted, agreeable or conscientious, according to a new study. The study was, fittingly, a collaboration between researchers in Romania, the Netherlands and Singapore. In it, the researchers examined the personality traits associated…
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Why Caring Too Much About Power Leads to Unhappiness
Some things in life, like building genuine connections with other people or having a job you love, can lead to an ongoing sense of happiness. Other things, like chasing power and money, can make you feel good in the short-term but have more complicated long-term psychological consequences. This idea is common in the folk wisdom…
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How Personality Relates to Sexuality
Someone’s personality can tell you how they approach all sorts of different things in life, including sex. But how exactly do personality and sexuality relate to each other? That’s the question psychologists asked in a review of 137 studies on the topic, titled Linking Big Five Personality Traits to Sexuality and Sexual Health. Analyzing the…
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