Search results for: disorders

Maybe you’ve heard that if you have a recurring nightmare, you should try imagining a new version of the dream and rescripting a more pleasant ending. It’s a simple idea, but one that psychology researchers have elaborated into an entire method of therapy for people with chronic nightmares. Most people experience nightmares from time to…

All non-anxious people are alike, but every anxious person is anxious in their own way – to paraphrase Tolstoy. Two broad kinds of anxiety people can experience are social anxiety and generalized anxiety. Social anxiety disorder, as the name suggests, is a fear of being scrutinized or judged by other people. Generalized anxiety disorder is…

A group of researchers in France have surveyed college students’ mental health and found that a number of symptoms of psychological distress are widespread on university campuses. The study, which involved 483 students between the ages of 18 and 24, tracked participants over the course of three months. Students were asked to complete a variety…

Researchers from University of Oxford and University College London have just published a new scale for measuring apathy. But who really cares, right? Whatever. Apathy is one of those basic emotions we all know about that still isn’t very well understood from a scientific perspective. Part of the problem is that psychologists haven’t really had…

It’s a common assumption that shy children are more likely to have mental health problems as adults, so a group of researchers from McMaster University decided to put that idea to the test. After all, scientists are in the business of questioning common assumptions. What the researchers found was that the picture is a little…

Ounce of prevention, pound of cure, all that. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could treat psychiatric disorders by preventing them? Recently, an international team of researchers did a test run of an intervention designed to do exactly that. In their study, they conducted both an internet version and an in-person group version of an…

How’s this for a cruel paradox: the more you want to be happy, the less happy you become. I’m not just suggesting that idea as a thought experiment. According to some research, that’s actually how things work – actively trying to be happy can make you less happy. The idea that we can deliberately become…

A study from researchers in New Zealand has added weight to the idea that people with ADHD are significantly more likely to have other mental health conditions that people without it. ADHD is a disorder marked by inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity, but people with ADHD often have additional, “comorbid” conditions like depression and anxiety that…

When we see a natural disaster in the news, we might see pictures of houses destroyed and estimates of how many people are dead or injured. For survivors, though, there’s a less tangible kind of damage natural disasters inflict that isn’t talked about as much: damage to people’s mental health. The mental health effects of…

A phobia or anxiety disorder is kind of like an onion. No, not because it can make you cry, but because it has several layers. First, there are the symptoms of the disorder itself – elevated heart rate, for example. But there are also what psychologists call the meta-emotional aspects of the disorder – how…