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.
27 papers
This review sums up research showing that being in or exposed to nature is linked to better mental functioning and mood. Lab and field experiments find short-term improvements in stress and mood from nature sights, sounds, and walks in green places. Population studies also find people living near green or…
This review says our sense of being a body comes from the brain combining many body signals. It describes three parts of bodily self-consciousness: self-identification (feeling a body is mine), self-location (where I feel I am), and the first-person perspective (the point from which I see). Experiments that create mismatched…
This open review explains burnout as a gradual response to long-term work stress that can harm thinking, feelings, and attitudes. It describes common causes, effects, ways to measure burnout, and actions to prevent or reduce it. The review highlights three main parts of burnout—emotional exhaustion, detachment or cynicism, and feeling…
This ADDA article explains ADHD masking — when people hide or copy others to appear "normal." Masking can help someone function but often uses a lot of mental and emotional energy. The article says masking can delay diagnosis, cause burnout or mood problems, and may help explain why women are…
This 2022 paper by Stephen Porges presents Polyvagal Theory as a way to study how feelings of safety come from the body's nervous system. It proposes that safety is not just a mood but has measurable brain–body signals. The paper explains neural pathways (like the ventral vagal complex and a…
This chapter explains three ways people think about health. It says the best view — the "complete state" — includes both the lack of disease and the presence of positive mental capacities and functioning. The author reviews studies that support using this complete-state view for mental health and suggests that…
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,…
This article updates a theory about how personality traits form. The author reviews their 2008 model and then expands it by bringing in ideas from evolutionary biology. The revised model adds two systems called “pliable” and “elastic” to help explain how traits change or stay the same. The paper is…
This review paper suggests that problems in body-based senses — especially the vestibular system (balance/motion) and the somatosensory system (touch and body position) — may help explain many symptoms of trauma-related disorders. The authors propose that trauma can disrupt low-level, brainstem sensory processing and that this disruption can cascade into…
The article says long-term health changes work best when they become a routine. Routines are repeated behaviors that take time to form and are different from habits that rely on a specific cue. Research and examples in the paper show routines help with things like sleep, family functioning, and keeping…
Writing Therapy (WT) is defined as a process of investigation about personal thoughts and feelings using the act of writing as an instrument, with the aim of promoting self-healing and personal growth. WT has been integrated in specific psychotherapies with the aim of treating specific mental disorders (PTSD, depression, etc.).…
This paper is a broad review that looks at how therapy that uses drugs together with psychotherapy should be done. The authors collect ideas from other studies about what therapists need to know, including ethical questions and the spiritual side of some treatments. They point out that the helpful effects…
