Search results for: disorders

Schizophrenia is one of the most well-researched mental health conditions. Various studies have looked in depth at the genetic underpinnings of the disorder, the cognitive traits associated with it, and the most effective treatment options. Some scientists, though, have asked a simpler question: are people with schizophrenia happy? There’s no doubt that having schizophrenia can…

Do letters have colors for you? Do numbers have locations in space? Do sounds have smells? If so, you might have synesthesia. And, as it turns out, you might also be more likely to have autistic traits. Synesthesia is a tendency to automatically associate information across different senses. Commonly, people with synesthesia associate letters, words,…

Psychologists are still working on piecing together the details of what exactly video game addiction is. One of the open questions is how similar gaming addiction is to other addictions like gambling and drugs. The latest version of DSM, a handbook commonly used for diagnosing psychiatric disorders, lists “Internet Gaming Disorder” as a “Condition for…

There’s nothing wrong with a little daydreaming. In fact, as I wrote about last year, certain kinds of daydreaming are associated with having a greater sense of purpose in life.

Parental rejection may be an important catalyst for emotional eating during childhood – possibly more so than peer rejection. That’s according to a new study from psychologists at Ghent University in Belgium. In the study, 55 children between the ages of 11 and 15 kept daily diaries for a week, reporting on their eating habits…

Your teeth and your brain might not seem like they have much in common, but researchers have consistently found a relationship between mental health and oral health. For example, a systematic review of studies published in 2015 showed that people with severe mental illnesses tended to have more decayed, filled and missing teeth. Overall, they…

A little liquid courage can take the edge off anxiety, but too much liquid courage can cause all sorts of problems. Self-medicating with the anxiety-reducing properties of alcohol has been put forward as one possible explanation for why people with social anxiety disorder also have higher rates of alcohol use disorders. Of course, alcohol can…

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how giving children less autonomy puts them at higher risk for anxiety. Now a group of psychologists in Australia have proposed a solution to this problem: online interventions for overprotective parents. The researchers have long been interested in how interventions can help parents cultivate independence, but their latest…

What’s one way to make a kid anxious? Give them less autonomy, apparently. A study of 88 children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 17 has found that youth with higher levels of anxiety tend to report being granted less autonomy by their mothers. Done by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center and…

For children, the mental health consequences of being teased about their weight may be more significant than the consequences of simply being overweight – that’s according to a new study from researchers in Germany. The study surveyed over a thousand children between the ages of 7 and 11 over the course of two years. The…