Mental Health

Seven-year-old children only need to interact with a person once to learn who to trust and seek information from, according to a study by Queen's University researchers.

Young adults who get fewer than eight hours of sleep per night have greater risks of psychological distress, a combination of high levels of depressive and anxious symptoms, according to a study in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal SLEEP.

Hispanic middle school students may be more likely to smoke, drink or use marijuana than their peers of other races and ethnicities, whereas Asian students seem to have the lowest risk, according to new research in the September issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Ezlopitant, a compound known to suppress craving for alcohol in humans, was shown to decrease consumption of sweetened water by rodents in a study by researchers at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center, which is affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco.

In Alzheimer's disease, the problem is beta-amyloid, a protein that accumulates in the brain and causes nerve cells to weaken and die. Drugs designed to eliminate plaques made of beta-amyloid have a fatal problem: they need to enter the brain and remove the plaques without attacking healthy brain cells. New research from the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Paul Greengard, however, suggests that treatments modeled on the blockbuster cancer drug Gleevec could be the solution. The findings are reported in the Sept. 2 issue of the journal Nature.

New research shows that mentally stimulating activities such as crossword puzzles, reading and listening to the radio may, at first, slow the decline of thinking skills but speed up dementia later in old age. The research is published in the September 1, 2010, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Phenotypes are measurable and/or observable traits or behaviors. The heritability of an alcohol-related phenotype depends upon the social environment within which it is measured, such as urbanicity, marital status, or religiosity. A new study of the effects of religiosity on the genetic variance of problem alcohol use in males and females has found that religiosity can moderate genetic effects on problem alcohol use during adolescence but not during early adulthood.

Anxiety and uncertainty can cause us to become more idealistic and more radical in our religious beliefs, according to new findings by York University researchers, published in this month's issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Thinking about God may make you less upset about making errors, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers measured brain waves for a particular kind of distress-response while participants made mistakes on a test. Those who had been prepared with religious thoughts had a less prominent response to mistakes than those who hadn't.

A study of university students found no overlap between those reporting excessive Internet use and those with problem gambling. However, both addictive behaviors are associated with psychological issues such as depression, anxiety, stress, and loneliness, according to a provocative Rapid Communication in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/cyber