Did you know that there is a dental floss that can measure stress? Or that AI may understand our emotions better than we do? Did you ever wonder if handedness is related to brain functioning, specifically neurological disorders? Or how a smartphone app could change mental health care? Maybe you are more interested in sleep disturbances and how they impact preadolescents, or how stress and puberty can raise the risk of depression and anxiety? Or even how nerve stimulation can erase PTSD?
Those are a lot of questions, but luckily this article helps to provide some answers. This blog post provides a brief review of some of the latest mental health research studies. While reading research studies might not be interesting to everyone, I actually enjoy it. Research summaries from Science Daily, Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and Neuroscience News were reviewed in order to share some of the latest news in mental health research with you. Below are some examples, but there are many, many more out there. If you are interested in some other topics, or just seeing what topics have been studied, click the links above.
Research Roundup
A Dental Floss That Can Measure Stress
A Tufts interdisciplinary engineer and his team devised a specially designed floss that can accurately measure cortisol, a stress hormone. Specifically, the floss pick samples cortisol within saliva as a marker of stress and quantifies it. The technology can be adapted to capture other markers, such as estrogen for tracking fertility, or glucose for tracking diabetes.
Could AI Understand Emotions Better Than We Do
The study is out of Switzerland and found that AI outperformed average human performance when given emotionally charged scenarios designed to assess the ability to understand, regulate, and manage emotions. These findings were consistent across various AI platforms. The results open up new possibilities for AI in education, coaching, and conflict management.
How Is Handedness Linked To Neurological Disorders
As a lefty I am always interested in handedness studies. This particular research found that left and mixed-handedness is common in individuals who have early diagnosis of dyslexia schizophrenia, or autism. The reason why handedness is associated with these disorders is probably because of processes affected by early brain development.
How A Smartphone App Could Transform Mental Health Care
This study is from Kyoto (Japan) University. Their team of researchers developed a smartphone app to treat depression and anxiety. The app uses the core techniques of cognitive-behavioral therapy to provide individual treatment to users. The results are significant as the sample size included nearly 4,000 adults.
This study, out of St. Louis, found that weekly self-reports of trouble sleeping were found to predict reports of increased depression and engagement in self-harm behaviors the following week. In addition, reports of fatigue predicted increased depression.
Childhood Stress and Early Onset Female May Raise Risk Of Depression and Anxiety In Adolescence
In this study from London researchers explored early onset puberty in females and the impact on developing internalizing symptoms, such as those associated with depression and anxiety. They also assessed whether those exposed to trauma and those who were not had different risk profiles.
Vagus Nerve Stimulation Erases PTSD
Researchers from Texas found that pairing traditional PTSD treatment with vagus nerve stimulation eliminated PTSD six months later. The nerve stimulation enhanced brain rewiring, which led to better outcomes for patients who had been therapy-resistant. While the study had a small sample size, the results are positive, supporting the next step for a larger study.
These are just a handful of the recent research that has been completed in the field of mental health. Please visit Science Daily, Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and Neuroscience News for more!