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 review examines studies on how testosterone relates to anxiety and depression and how that might help explain sex differences in these disorders. About 18% of U.S. adults have an anxiety disorder each year and about 7% have major depressive disorder, and women are more than twice as likely as…
Evolution has endowed all humans with a continuum of innate, hard-wired, automatically activated defense behaviors, termed the defense cascade. Arousal is the first step in activating the defense cascade; flight or fight is an active defense response for dealing with threat; freezing is a flight-or-fight response put on hold; tonic…
Researchers studied mouse vagus nerve cells and found two small, separate groups of sensory neurons (called P2ry1 and Npy2r). Each group has only a few hundred neurons and sends dense branches into the lung but to different brainstem areas. Using optogenetics (light to activate chosen neurons), turning on P2ry1 neurons…
This 2014 review explains that the brain’s reward system — especially a region called the striatum — responds not only to things like food or money but also to social outcomes such as praise. The authors summarize many studies showing that the striatum carries signals when people evaluate social rewards,…
Researchers studied 32-day-old juvenile rats that were allowed 30 minutes of rough-and-tumble play. Right after play, the rats showed higher levels of BDNF messenger RNA in the amygdala and dorsolateral frontal cortex, measured with in situ hybridization. The authors suggested this could mean play helps shape brain areas tied to…
This review paper brings together animal and human studies to explain how alcohol and stress hormones may change the prefrontal cortex and the body’s stress system as drinking moves from casual use toward dependence. The authors say alcohol raises stress hormones (glucocorticoids) right away, and repeated heavy use can produce…
This 2023 hypothesis paper says cognitive reappraisal — changing how we interpret events to change our feelings — often works in labs or therapy but may not carry over to real life. The authors explain this by comparing reappraisal to extinction learning, which creates new, context-dependent memories instead of erasing…
This rat study tested whether stress during the peripuberty period (seven non-consecutive days between postnatal day 28 and 42) changed play fighting at adolescence and later brain markers. Rats exposed to peripubertal stress showed more play fighting at P45. The researchers found that animals with very high play fighting in…
