News by Subject Social & Behavior

The millions of people who have chronic sinusitis deal not only with stuffy noses and headaches, they also commonly struggle to focus and experience depression and other symptoms that implicate the brain's involvement in their illness. New research links sinus inflammation with alterations in brain activity, specifically with the neural networks that modulate cognition, introspection and response to external stimuli.

If relatives of people with mental illness become better at accepting the difficult emotions and life events they experience - which is what training in compassion is about - their anxiety, depression and stress is reduced. These are the results of a new study from the Danish Center for Mindfulness at Aarhus University.

A group of scientists have discovered a node in the brains of male mice that modulates the sounds they make in social situations. This discovery, published in Nature, could help identify similar locations in the human brain, and potentially lead to a better understanding of social disorders such as autism or depression.

Eric Shattuck, assistant professor of research in the UTSA Institute for Health Disparities Research (IHDR) at The University of Texas at San Antonio, is studying the phenomenon of social distancing in response to infectious disease and its effects on pathogen transmission and the health of individuals and communities. Many animals, including humans, exhibit behavioral changes during the early stages of an infection, including reduced social contacts, called sickness behavior. His findings suggest innate social distancing might help prevent the infection from spreading within social groups.

Researchers found that people who frequently engage in "persuasive bullshitting" are actually quite poor at distinguishing intentionally profound or scientifically accurate fact from impressive but meaningless fiction and are also much more likely to fall for fake news headlines.

Pandemic-related anxiety, boredom, and irregular routines were cited as major drivers of increased nicotine and tobacco use during the initial COVID-19 "lockdown," according to research just released by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The study highlights ways that public health interventions and policies can better support quit attempts and harm reduction, both during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Many women who were exposed to severe abuse or neglect in childhood nonetheless manage to feel a sense of wellbeing in adulthood. How can this be? Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, University West and Örebro University have jointly explored this question in a study focusing on what generates health, rather than ill health. Knowledge of this kind can contribute to better public initiatives to support women who were abused at an early age.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented economic disruption and unemployment worldwide, and it may be challenging for career counselors to determine how best to provide effective career counseling to unemployed people in the post-COVID-19 world. In an article published in the Journal of Employment Counseling, experts suggest applying a holistic model of career counseling that addresses the multifaceted needs of long-term unemployed people.

Individuals with cancer face a higher risk of suicide than people in the general population, but little is known about the characteristics of patients with cancer who have died by suicide. A new study published in Psycho-Oncology compared the characteristics of suicide cases with and without cancer.