A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
While the elderly are more likely to live alone, younger adults are likelier to have their life expectancy cut due to growing isolation, the researchers said. Loneliness is defined as living alone and social isolation as being lonely even when “surrounded by lots of people” said the study conducted at Brigham Young University in Utah, [...]
As a foetus grows, it's constantly getting messages from its mother. It's not just hearing her heartbeat and whatever music she might play to her belly; it also gets chemical signals through the placenta. A new study, which will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this [...]
A new study has revealed that almost two thirds of people identified as being harmed by the drinking of others in a 2008 survey, were still being harmed three years later. And it’s not your age, gender or the number of times that you go out that is most likely to determine whether you are [...]
One of the largest and most detailed studies to date on the experience of auditory hallucinations, commonly referred to as voice hearing, found that the majority of voice-hearers hear multiple voices with distinct character-like qualities, with many also experiencing physical effects on their bodies. The study also confirmed that both people with and without psychiatric [...]
Pheromones are chemical signals that help animals to communicate. Members of the same species respond to each other's pheromone releases by changing a behaviour or undergoing a physiological change. For example male house mice pheromones trigger aggression in other males and speed up puberty in young female mice. Though pheromones have been discovered across the [...]
The flipside of the placebo effect, the nocebo effect is where we experience negative symptoms because we expect them. Our minds are more powerful than most of us realise. The placebo effect accounts for as much as one third of symptom relief in sick people, according to the American Cancer Society. When we believe we will [...]
As a brand new school mum, I've recently discovered that schools have assumed the role of the Lunch Box Police. Every morning tea and lunch is a test to see if kids and their parents have faithfully followed the laws of healthy eating. It's a nice idea, but it's questionable whether this has anything to [...]
In recent years, hundreds of new synthetic recreational drugs have emerged – drugs that neither the general public nor the scientific community know very much about. Many of these new synthetic drugs – often referred to as “legal highs” – are dangerous and continue to lead to poisonings throughout the US and the rest of [...]
For example, raw speed in processing information appears to peak around age 18 or 19, then immediately starts to decline. Meanwhile, short-term memory continues to improve until around age 25, when it levels off and then begins to drop around age 35. For the ability to evaluate other people's emotional states, the peak occurred much [...]
Living your life with a strong sense of purpose may lower your risk for early death, heart attack or stroke, new research suggests. The finding is based on a broad review of past research involving more than 137,000 people in all. "Psychosocial conditions such as depression, anxiety, chronic stress and social isolation have strong associations [...]
