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 paper explains how habits form and how doctors might use habit-based advice in routine care. It says repeating a simple action in the same context can make that action automatic, so it needs less attention and may last after motivation falls. The authors report studies (for example, an average…
Anxiety has long been linked to worse performance in evaluative social settings such as sex, sport, and stage. This paper asks three main questions: how each field understands anxiety and performance, what they can learn from one another, and how they could share useful ideas. The authors review existing models…
This review looked at research on exercise addiction from 2010 to 2022. It says there are over 1,000 papers, but exercise addiction is not a formal clinical diagnosis. Many studies use scales and questionnaires that mix up true addiction with high commitment or exercise used for other problems (like eating…
This study followed people from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 to see how self-esteem in young adulthood links to depression later on. The authors found that, for men, alcohol and drug use in young adulthood partly explained how low self-esteem led to more depression. They also found that…
This paper challenges the common idea that aggression only happens when self-control fails. It reviews many studies that show aggression can also result from successful self-control. The author explains how theories of aggression could be changed to include both cases, and says this opens new research questions. The paper also…
Researchers tested 133 undergraduate students to see how anxious (AX) and avoidant (AV) attachment styles change people’s feelings after being excluded, equally included, or over-included in a ball-toss game. They measured threats to four needs (belonging, self-esteem, control, meaningful existence). People high in avoidant attachment felt less threat to self-esteem…
