🧠 Psychology & Cognitive Science

Post-traumatic growth—positive psychological change following the struggle with adversity—can coexist with PTSD symptoms. Recent meta-analyses examine whether CBT can deliberately foster growth (not just reduce symptoms), with implications for how we conceptualize trauma recovery.

One in three university students meets clinical criteria for insomnia, and poor sleep is the strongest modifiable predictor of depression, anxiety, and psychosis onset. Digital CBT-I interventions are showing remarkable efficacy in RCTs—but the gap between trial results and real-world engagement remains a chasm.

Ecological momentary interventions deliver therapeutic content at the precise moment of need—when anxiety spikes, when mood drops, when insomnia begins. Combined with CBT principles and smartphone sensors, EMIs represent a meaningful evolution from session-based to continuous mental healthcare. But do they work?

Supervised EEG classification for depression achieves 99%+ accuracy—on clean benchmark datasets with expert labels. Unsupervised approaches promise to work without labels, enabling scalable monitoring. But the gap between benchmark accuracy and clinical utility remains wide. We examine why.

Exercise upregulates BDNF; omega-3 fatty acids provide the substrate for synaptic membrane synthesis. The hypothesis that combining both amplifies cognitive benefits beyond either alone is biologically plausible—but the clinical evidence remains surprisingly thin. We examine what the data show and where they fall short.

Adolescents with chronic illness face 2–3x the risk of depression and anxiety, yet most receive medical care that addresses the body while neglecting the mind. New interdisciplinary interventions integrating educational psychology, public health, and CBT show promising results—but implementation barriers remain substantial.

Terrorism survivors with PTSD that persists for years—even decades—are often considered treatment-resistant. A new RCT from Spain demonstrates that TF-CBT produces clinically significant improvement even in long-duration PTSD, challenging the assumption that chronicity implies intractability.

MDMA-assisted therapy achieved a large majority PTSD remission in Phase 3 trials—but the FDA declined approval in 2024, citing methodological concerns about blinding and expectancy effects. We examine the evidence, the controversy, and what it means for the psychedelic therapy field.

Post-traumatic growth—the positive psychological change arising from trauma—is reported by 30–a large majority of trauma survivors. But is PTG a genuine transformation, an adaptive illusion, or a measurement artifact? Recent studies across war, pandemic, and medical contexts reveal a more complex picture than the popular resilience narrative suggests.

Autistic youth experience trauma at disproportionately high rates yet are systematically excluded from PTSD treatment research. A pilot telehealth study demonstrates that TF-CBT can be adapted for autistic adolescents—with both the adaptations and the delivery modality addressing longstanding access barriers.

Exercise is healthy—until it isn't. New research reveals that narcissism, amplified through social media 'fitspiration' content, can transform exercise from a health behavior into an addictive pattern. The mediation chain runs from personality through platform to pathology, with 6+ citations confirming the pathway.

The screen time debate generates more heat than light. The ABCD study (N=9,538) finds prospective associations between screen time and behavioral problems—but effect sizes are small, content and context matter enormously, and parental stress may be the stronger driver of both screen use and child difficulties.

Germany has published the first AWMF-certified national guideline for preventing dysregulated screen media use in children—a policy milestone that illustrates both the demand for evidence-based guidance and the challenge of making recommendations when effect sizes are small and contexts vary enormously.

Parents face a paradox: monitoring reduces adolescent smartphone problems, but psychological control increases them through reactance. A study with 14 citations shows that restrictive mediation backfires when perceived as controlling, while active mediation (discussing content) produces more durable results.

Most screen time interventions restrict children externally. A new child-centered UX approach asks a different question: can digital interfaces be designed to help preschoolers develop internal self-regulation skills—making external restriction eventually unnecessary?

Screen time, sleep disturbance, and behavioral problems form a triangle—but which arrows point which way? New evidence suggests sleep is the mediating variable: screens disrupt sleep, and disrupted sleep drives behavioral problems. Targeting sleep may be more effective than restricting screens.

Remote work solved the commute problem and created the connection problem. As organizations settle into hybrid arrangements, a growing body of research documents what many employees already sense: tha...

Moral injury—the psychological damage that follows from perpetrating, witnessing, or failing to prevent acts that violate one's deepest moral beliefs—was originally studied in military contexts. The C...

The Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku—forest bathing, or immersive time spent among trees—has evolved from a cultural tradition into a growing evidence-based therapeutic modality. As urbanization conc...

Climate anxiety—persistent worry, fear, and emotional distress related to environmental degradation and climate change—has emerged as a distinct psychological phenomenon that does not fit neatly into ...

Every generation of adolescents has navigated appearance pressures, but the current generation faces a qualitatively different challenge: social media platforms that combine ubiquitous exposure to ide...

The pursuit of excellence and the pursuit of perfection are often conflated in academic cultures, but they lead to very different psychological outcomes. Excellence is adaptive—it drives growth, persi...

An estimated 15 to 20 percent of the global population is neurodivergent—a category that encompasses ADHD, autism spectrum conditions, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and other variations in cognitive processing...

The mindfulness app market generates approximately $1.5–1.8 billion annually (2024 estimate), projected to exceed $2 billion by 2028, with leading apps like Calm and Headspace claiming tens of million...

Parasocial relationships—the one-sided emotional bonds that audiences form with media figures—were first described by Horton and Wohl in 1956, when the media figures in question were television hosts....

With no disease-modifying drug for Alzheimer's yet proven effective at scale, the prevention paradigm for cognitive decline has shifted toward modifiable lifestyle factors. The 2024 Lancet Commission ...

First responders—paramedics, firefighters, police officers, military personnel—work in environments where exposure to traumatic events is not occasional but routine. The psychological toll is well doc...

Death, once the most private of human experiences, has become increasingly public in the digital age. Social media platforms have created new spaces for mourning that are simultaneously intimate and e...

Every wave of technological change has generated anxiety about job displacement, from the Luddites to the automation fears of the 1960s. But AI represents something qualitatively different: for among ...

The average adult now spends over seven hours daily engaged with digital screens, and for adolescents the figure is often higher. The growing awareness that excessive screen time is associated with sl...

Over 123 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced (UNHCR 2024 Global Trends Report), and among refugee populations PTSD prevalence rates range from 20 to 40 percent—roughly ten times the ...

Can a generative AI chatbot deliver effective psychotherapy? A question that once belonged to science fiction has received its first rigorous empirical answer.

Few topics in contemporary psychology generate as much heat — and as little clarity — as the relationship between social media use and adolescent mental health. Adolescent depression and anxiety ha...

Can changing how you eat, exercise, and engage socially slow the progression toward dementia? The US POINTER trial — published in *JAMA* in 2025 — provide...

The pandemic-era promise was simple: remote work would liberate employees from commutes, rigid schedules, and office politics. Five years later, a growing body of research suggests that remote work...

Psilocybin — the psychoactive compound in psychedelic mushrooms — has moved from the margins of psychiatry to its clinical mainstream at remarkable speed. The pivotal Phase 2b COMP360 trial (Goodwi...

In November 2023, the World Health Organization established a Commission on Social Connection, formally recognizing loneliness and social isolation as threats to global health. The move elevated wh...

Most adults know that poor sleep impairs thinking. What recent research clarifies is the *shape* of that impairment — how it accumulates, which cognitive domains are most vulnerable, and what the b...

The dominant narrative around trauma in psychology has been one of damage — post-traumatic stress disorder, emotional scarring, lasting impairment. But a parallel body of research documents somethi...

Exposure therapy — the systematic, controlled confrontation with feared stimuli — remains one of the most effective treatments for anxiety disorders. Its central limitation has always been practica...

Few findings in psychology have had as turbulent a trajectory as ego depletion. The original theory, articulated by Baumeister and colleagues in the late 1990s, proposed a simple and intuitive mode...