Here are seven recent papers on panic, attention training, and the effects of childhood sexual abuse (all details & abstracts to these studies are listed further down this blog post).  Pfaltz & colleagues report on a novel ambulatory respiratory monitoring system that seems to demonstrate that panic sufferers are not routinely suffering from breathing abnormalities (e.g. hyperventilation) when they go about their daily lives.  The CBT theory of panic disorder would go along with this - panic being seen as due, in part, to catastrophizing about the meaning of experienced physical sensations rather than due to simply having unusual physical sensations.  Shelby et al's paper extends this understanding concluding that with sufferers from non-cardiac chest pain (NCCP) "Chest pain and anxiety were directly related to greater disability and indirectly related to physical and psychosocial disability via pain catastrophizing.

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 13,500 abstracts. 

Here are a couple of good psychology websites that I've come across recently.  One is the British Psychological Society's Research Digest Blog with its tag line "Bringing you reports on the latest psychology research."  The site provides an almost daily, brief description of a particularly interesting recent psychology research paper.  Examples in November include "Performing horizontal eye movement exercises can boost your creativity", "How to increase altruism in toddlers", and "Facial emotional expressions are universal and culturally specific".  The site also provides "taster pages" from the monthly magazine "The Psychologist", a list advertising jobs for psychologists, links to a variety of other psychology websites, a whole variety of learning resources, and a bunch of other fun things like "What is the mos

Here are half a dozen recent research papers on depression (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Yonkers et al's publication is a very welcome one - "The management of depression during pregnancy: a report from the American Psychiatric Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists."  At last here's a major review giving good advice on this extremely important subject.  To learn more it's worth getting hold of a copy of the complete text.  You may have access to this through your academic department.  If not, authors are usually happy to send a PDF via email when asked to - emails can be dug out via a little Google detective work.  Following the [Abstract/Full Text] link will also provide various access routes including a low-cost patient information option.  In further work looking at depression

Here are half a dozen research papers that have recently interested me in the broad areas of emotional and relationship "intelligence" (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Kelley et al report on "Patient and practitioner influences on the placebo effect" which in this study was " ... twice as large as the effect attributable to treatment group assignment."  Practitioners assigned to give warm, empathic consultations achieved considerably better outcomes than those assigned to neutral consultations, although the " ...

Here are half a dozen recent research papers with broad social implications (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Kay and colleagues publish on "Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be."  They report four studies showing how widely this motivation acts - with political power, public funding, gender demographics, and in attacks on those who are trying to work for change.  There's relevance here to the second paper by Wilper et al on "Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults" estimating that, even after adjusting for income, education, health status, weight, exercise, smoking and alcohol use, lack of insurance was associated with about 45,000 excess deaths annually in the United States among people aged 18 to 64.  Still in the area of inequality and discrimination, Wexler et al publish on

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains nearly 13,500 abstracts. 

Here are half a dozen research papers that have recently interested me (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  The first by Fournier et al is about whether to choose antidepressants or psychotherapy to treat depression.  They found that marriage, unemployment and having experienced a greater number of recent life events all predicted a better response to cognitive therapy than to antidepressants.  In the second study Luby et al looked at depression in children aged between 3 and 6 years old.  Worryingly they found forms of depression even in kids this young.  They also found over two years of follow-up that "Preschool depression, similar to childhood depression, is not a developmentally transient syndrome but rather shows chronicity and/or recurrence."  Hopefully this kind of research will mean these troubled children have a bit more chance of being identified and helped.

Here are half a dozen studies on weight, bite size, vitamin D, dietary supplements, and ways of avoiding dementia.  Andrew et al report on the "Incident cancer burden attributable to excess body mass index in 30 European countries" estimating that about 6% of cancers could be avoided if we could maintain healthier weights (abstracts & links for all six articles mentioned appear further down this page).  Zijlstra and colleagues suggest a possible response!  They randomized subjects to eating with different bite (mouthful) sizes and different chewing times.  They found that " ... greater oral sensory exposure to a product, by eating with small bite sizes rather than with large bite sizes and increasing OPT (oral processing time), significantly decreases food intake."  As Mum might put it "Don't wolf your food!"

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 13,000 abstracts.