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.
Anxiety disorders are a group of conditions marked by persistent, excessive fear or worry and behaviors (like avoidance) that cause real trouble in daily life. They are the most common class of psychiatric disorder — large surveys report that up to 33.7% of people will have one in their lifetime…
This review combined results from 10 intervention studies to see if physical activity programs change cortisol (a stress hormone) and sleep in adults. The pooled results found lower cortisol after activity programs and some improvement in sleep quality. The authors say the evidence is moderate for cortisol and low for…
Treatments for depression have gotten better and far more people can get them since the 1980s. Yet the share of people in the general population with depression has not gone down. The authors call this the “treatment-prevalence paradox” and review seven possible explanations. They find little evidence that more cases…
This article introduces a journal issue about debilitating performance anxiety. It says clinicians often treat problems like public speaking anxiety, stage fright, test-taking anxiety, and writing block that can threaten careers or make people perform below their abilities. The article notes an estimated 2% of the U.S. population has this…
This study reports that both full panic disorder (PD) and milder, “subthreshold” panic are linked with other mental health problems, trouble at work, and high use of health services. The authors used data from a large U.S. household survey to compare people with PD and varying levels of panic symptoms.…
This study followed women with diagnosed social anxiety disorder (n = 91) or specific phobia (n = 130) for 18 months. It found that higher general anxiety at the start predicted higher general anxiety 18 months later in both groups. Clinician-rated avoidance of feared situations changed that pattern only for…
Researchers combined baseline data from 548 people in four clinical trials who all had current major depression. They used a network analysis, a method that maps how symptoms link to each other, to see which borderline personality disorder (BPD) and depression symptoms connect. After accounting for how severe the depression…
