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27 papers
The WHO Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) has 18 questions about recent ADHD symptoms, and a shorter six-question screener was tested against blind clinical diagnoses in 154 people from the US National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Each ASRS item was linked to the clinical rating, but agreement varied a lot across…
This review says adult ADHD affects about 2.5% of adults and often occurs with other mental health problems. Adults with ADHD commonly have trouble with attention, memory, planning, self-control, and emotions. The condition is often missed or undertreated, is linked with big personal and social problems, and the evidence on…
Researchers used PET brain scans to compare dopamine reward-system markers in 45 adults with ADHD and 41 adults without ADHD. People with ADHD scored lower on an Achievement scale (a stand-in measure for motivation), and in the ADHD group those lower scores were linked to lower availability of dopamine D2/D3…
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…
Researchers ran two fMRI studies using a gambling task to see how personality and a dopamine gene relate to brain reward signals. Rewards were given either right after a response (Study 1) or after a 7.5-second wait (Study 2). The studies found that people’s extraversion scores and whether they carried…
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 review looks at studies in humans and animals that link anxiety and stress with poorer cognitive flexibility — the ability to change strategies when rules or goals change. It describes evidence that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is central to flexible behavior, that anxiety or PFC disruptions are associated with…
Research links ADHD — which shows up as inattention, impulsivity, and too much activity — to weaker structure and function in the brain’s prefrontal cortex (PFC), especially on the right side. The PFC helps control top-down attention, stop inappropriate actions, and regulate emotion, and it needs the right balance of…
Meditation involves attentional regulation and may lead to increased activity in brain regions associated with attention such as dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined whether DLPFC and ACC were activated during meditation. Subjects who meditate were recruited and scanned…
Psychological Types is C. G. Jung’s book that grew from about twenty years of his clinical work. It explains his idea that people have different psychological types—most famously introversion and extraversion—and describes four basic functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition). Jung wrote the book to link his clinical observations with wider…
This paper reviews task-based fMRI studies of emotion in people with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The authors narrowed 608 papers down to 30 studies that measured BOLD (blood oxygenation level–dependent) responses during emotional tasks. Results across studies were mixed: some found increased brain responses, some found decreased responses, and some…
