news 2020

Published Monday , the study was conducted prior to the onset of the coro rus pandemic that has limited human movements around the globe. But the researchers believe it may offer insights for those confined to their homes and limited in their interactions by the guidelines and restrictions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Children with autistic traits are more likely than their peers to develop an eating disorder, according to a new UCL-led study. Previous research has found that autism and eating disorders can occur together, as 20-30% of adults with eating disorders have autism, and 3-10% of children and young people with eating disorders.

What impact has the lockdown had on our mental health, and what determines how people cope with isolation? These are a few of the questions researchers hope to answer as part of a new crowd-sourced science project, The Great British Wellbeing Survey. The work builds on the success of the Great British Intelligence Test , a collaborative project with BBC Horizon to gauge the nation's intelligence and wellbeing.

Are today's children, who grew up with mobile technology from birth, worse at reading emotions and picking up cues from people's faces than children who didn't grow up with tablets and smar tp hones' A new UCLA psychology study suggests today's kids are all right. Infancy and early childhood are critical developmental phases during which children learn to interpret important non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, tone of voice and gestures.

Infants spend most of their first year of life asleep. Those hours are prime time for brain development, when neural connections form and sensory memories are encoded. But when sleep is disrupted, as occurs more often among children with autism, brain development may be affected, too. New research led by the University of Washington finds that sleep problems in a baby's first 12 months may not only precede an autism diagnosis, but also may be associated with altered growth trajectory in a key part of the brain, the hippocampus.

The coronavirus crisis confronts us with questions concerning common interest and self-interest. Do people and countries think of themselves or others? Research shows that while people are willing to set aside their own interests, most do so to help their own group. The Netherlands has prioritised the common interest in complying with the coronavirus measures.

When it comes to reading emotions on people's faces, artificial intelligence still lags behind human observers, according to a new study involving UCL. The difference was particularly pronounced when it came to spontaneous displays of emotion, according to the findings published in PLOS One. The research team, led by Dublin City University, looked at eight "out of the box" automatic classifiers for facial affect recognition (artificial intelligence that can identify human emotions on faces) and compared their emotion recognition performance to that of human observers.

Signals from the brain's fear center make it more difficult for anxious and stressed children to regulate their emotions, a first-of-its-kind brain scanning study from Stanford shows. In chronically stressed or anxious children, the brain's fear center sends signals to the decision-making part of the brain that make it harder to regulate negative emotions, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The intelligent lockdown is certainly necessary, but is also causing serious damage to society on almost every conceivable level. That's why it's essential to resume 'normal life' as quickly as possible. So it's a quest for the ideal exit strategy. The new crowdsourcing website Strategies versus Corona invites network researchers, programmers, data scientists, psychologists and economists to come up with exit strategies and also to directly calculate the consequences.

Experts have called for real time monitoring of mental health to be rolled out urgently in the UK and globally in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The University of Glasgow's Rory O'Connor, Professor of Health Psychology at the Institute of Health and Wellbeing, is joint first author on a new paper, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, which highlights an urgent need to tackle the harmful impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health, and potentially the brain, and calls for research on these areas to be central to the global response to the pandemic.

Participants wanted: Bioinformaticians attempt to trace new COVID-19 hotspots - further studies concerned with psychological impacts How do people deal with their feelings in everyday life during the pandemic caused by the coronavirus and at what locations might a new hotspot of COVID-19 infections be developing? These questions are the focus of two studies for which Heidelberg University scientists are looking for participants from all age groups.

Can theater improvisation actually make adults feel better and more creative? "Yes, and. A new study by researchers at the University of Michigan and Stony Brook University found that 20 minutes of improv experience causes people to feel comfortable and more tolerant of uncertainty. "Individuals also reported a happier mood compared to a control group, who didn't get the same satisfaction when performing scripted tasks,” said study co-author Colleen Seifert, U-M professor of psychology.

Stanford Medicine researchers used high doses of magnetic stimulation, delivered on an accelerated timeline and targeted to individual neurocircuitry, to treat patients with severe depression. A new form of magnetic brain stimulation rapidly relieved symptoms of severe depression in 90% of participants in a small study conducted by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

We all want children to be able to function well in social groups, and various social skills training programmes are available for children for whom this is a challenge. Studies have already proven these training programmes to be effective in general, and UvA scientists have now discovered what specific elements determine the success of such training programmes.

People are no better than chance at identifying when someone else is recounting a false or real memory of a crime, according to a new UCL study. The findings, published in Frontiers in Psychology , build on a previous study that was the first to successfully implant false memories of committing a crime - involving either assault or assault with a weapon that resulted in police contact.

The gap between children with the highest and lowest socio-emotional skills has increased over the past three decades, and the socio-economic status of mothers is a significant contributing factor, according to a new UCL study. The study, published in the Journal of Public Economics , compares the socio-emotional skills of two cohorts of children born in England 30 years apart, and shows for the first time that inequality in these early skills has increased.

The EmoDémos project - led by the University of Geneva among children aged 7 to 12 years - has shown that playing an instrument in an orchestra can facilitate the acquisition of cognitive and emotional skills in two years.

The rapid spread of the coronavirus is generating anxiety, stress and pressure. How does this affect people? Some studies claim that stress and pressure make people greedy. Other studies, in contrast, predict solidarity and benevolence. UvA scientists have also researched how people are affected by stress, and their conclusion is an optimistic one.

Disrupted and poor quality sleep in the earliest months of a child's life can be an indicator of depression, anxiety and behavioural problems among toddlers, according to a new study. Researchers at the Institute for Mental Health, at the University of Birmingham in collaboration with the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, in Helsinki , found a clear relationship between sleep problems in infancy such as frequent night wakings, short sleep duration or difficulty in falling asleep and particular emotional and behavioural problems at 24 months of age.

See us on twitter See us on youtube See us on linkedin See us on instagram A Stanford researcher and two collaborators conducted an extensive review of Alcoholics Anonymous studies and found that the fellowship helps more people achieve sobriety than therapy does. Alcoholics Anonymous, the worldwide fellowship of sobriety seekers, is the most effective path to abstinence, according to a comprehensive analysis conducted by a Stanford School of Medicine researcher and his collaborators.