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)…
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 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…
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…
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…
This study recorded brain activity (EEG) while 68 females aged 13–23 (35 with borderline personality disorder, 33 healthy) did a guessing task with equal wins and losses. People with BPD showed less difference in their brain responses to wins versus losses than healthy peers. Time-frequency tests suggested this smaller difference…
This study used network analysis to examine many parts of social life—friend and spouse ties, contact frequency, social engagement, support and strain, and relationship quality—in 502 South Korean adults aged 40–69 (mean 54.4; 49.4% male). Loneliness was most strongly connected to friend network size and the quality of friendships and…
