Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
This meta-analysis combined 241 effect sizes from 114 studies to test how six habitual emotion-regulation strategies relate to symptoms of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance-related problems. Rumination showed the strongest (large) link with symptoms. Avoidance, problem solving, and suppression showed medium-to-large links, while reappraisal and acceptance showed smaller (small-to-medium)…
Postpartum depression can affect fathers too. Research summarized in this article says about 10% of men experience clinical paternal postpartum depression, often during pregnancy or in the first year after birth (with the highest risk in the first 3–6 months). The article lists common symptoms, risk factors like a partner’s…
Putting feelings into words, called affect labeling, can reduce how strong emotions feel. It often does not feel like a deliberate way to control feelings. The review finds that affect labeling shows effects similar to a deliberate strategy called reappraisal across people's experience, bodily responses, brain activity, and behavior. The…
The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) is a self-report test made by Hans J. Eysenck and Sybil B. G. Eysenck to measure four personality scales: Extraversion (E), Neuroticism (N), Psychoticism (P), and a Lie or social-desirability scale (L). It is based on Eysenck's theory that temperament has biological and genetic roots,…
Researchers ran eight studies to test whether people with an avoidant attachment style (people who feel uncomfortable with closeness) are more likely to be interested in other romantic partners and to be unfaithful. Across the studies, people high in avoidant attachment had more permissive attitudes about infidelity, paid more attention…
This small study asked 15 people who had SSRI-related sexual problems to rate their emotions on a questionnaire. Compared with control participants, most of these patients reported weaker emotional responses across many areas, and 80% described clinically meaningful emotional blunting. The reduced emotional scores were statistically significant (p
Researchers asked people with major depression and people without psychiatric disorders to write open, free descriptions of themselves and of other people. Compared with the control group, the depressed group named fewer positive traits and more negative traits for themselves and for parents and close others. A clustering analysis also…
The study asked 63,894 U.S. adults to imagine which would upset them more: their partner having sex with someone else (but not falling in love) or their partner falling in love with someone else (but not having sex). Heterosexual men were more likely than heterosexual women to say sexual cheating…
These two studies tested whether men and women differ in jealousy when real infidelity happened rather than in made-up stories. One study used a paper survey with students and the other used a web survey with non-students. Both studies found that men reported more jealousy about the sexual parts of…
Researchers showed people a set of computer-made male and female bodies and asked them to rate many personality traits. Raters tended to sort bodies along two main ideas: whether a body looked to them like a person with positive versus negative traits, and whether a body looked to them like…
This review paper suggests that common anxiety symptoms can be seen as exaggerated versions of normal defensive responses. Those defensive responses change depending on how close a threat is (pre-encounter, post-encounter, circa-strike). The author reviews animal and human research linking specific symptoms—like excessive vigilance, persistent worry, bodily arousal, and avoidance—to…
Anger and aggression have large impact on people's safety and the society at large. In order to provide an intervention to minimise aggressive behaviours, it is important to understand the neural and cognitive aspects of anger and aggression. In this systematic review, we investigate the cognitive and neural aspects of…
