Psychology

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, one concern for many parents has been the impact of additional TV or computer screen time on their children and their already disrupted sleep habits. According to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, media use in the hour preceding bedtime impacts the sleep only of children who struggle to self-regulate their behavior. Frequent media use before bed in these children predicted later bedtimes and less sleep, but it had little…

Mentors and awards can really make a difference. That’s one lesson from a new paper by Dr. Danielle N. Lee (Southern Illinois University) that looks at the history of diversity within the Animal Behavior Society. Another finding is of the important contributions made by under-represented minorities to the field of animal behavior. Amongst early contributions highlighted in the paper are those of Charles Henry Turner (1867–1923) who, in 1907, was the first African American to get a Ph.D. (in…

Psychologists have long been interested in understanding what factors influence whether a person takes recreational drugs. Personality traits are well known to influence many areas of a person’s life, and drug-taking is no exception. Several studies on the subject have looked at the Big 5 personality traits: openness to experience, which relates to the breadth and complexity of a person’s mental life; conscientiousness, which relates to organization and self-discipline; extraversion, related both to sociability and pleasure-seeking; agreeableness, related to cooperation and consideration for others; and neuroticism,…

In a paper published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, researchers analysed self-reported sleep quality and quantity from teenagers and found that there was a significant relationship between poor sleep and mental health issues. The team, based at the University of Reading, and Goldsmiths and Flinders Universities found that among the 4790 participants, those who experienced depression reported both poor quality and quantity of sleep, while those with anxiety had poor quality of sleep…

In a 2015 paper, “Cognitive Debt and Alzheimer’s Disease,” Natalie Marchant and Robert Howard, who is a professor of Old Age Psychiatry at University College London (UCL), proposed a novel concept called the “cognitive debt hypothesis,” which posits that repetitive negative thinking (RNT) might be linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Recently, a follow-up study led by Marchant investigated the association between RNT and various markers of Alzheimer’s (the most common form of dementia) in a cohort of 292 people…