A research team of psychologists and physicists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg investigated the neurobiological processes in different types of decision-making. In the journal
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New research from Trinity College Dublin suggests that older adults can be more focused, less impeded by anxiety and less mentally restless than younger adults. The team at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN) (today, Wednesday, 10th February, 2021) show that older adults appear to mitigate the negative aspects of cognitive decline by increasing motivation and adopting more efficient strategies to suspend the wandering mind when focus is required.
The study, published in the journal
Psychology and Aging (American Psychological Association) is the first to adjudicate between competing theories of age-related mind-wandering dominant in the field. It highlights the influential roles of affective and motivational factors in driving age-related differences in unintentional mind-wandering and provide reasons to be less persuaded by previous cognitive resources accounts.
Researchers at the University of Tsukuba report two areas of the monkey brain that represent expected value when making economic decisions. Analyses showed that neuronal activity in the VS and the cOFC provided stable representations of expected value, while other regions that are part of the reward network in the brain did not. State-space analysis revealed that the way expected value was represented over time differed in these two areas.
Credit: Photo by Madeline Mortensen
As teens use of social media has grown over the past decade, so too has the suicide rate among younger people, with suicide now being the second leading cause of death among those ages 10 to 34. Many have suggested that social media is driving the increased suicide risk, but because social media is still relatively new, it s been difficult to determine its long-term effects on mental health.
In the longest study to date on social media use and suicidality, BYU research recently published in the
Journal of Youth and Adolescence now offers some answers.
Through annual surveys from 2009 to 2019, researchers tracked the media use patterns and mental health of 500 teens as part of the Flourishing Families Project. They found that while social media use had little effect on boys suicidality risk, for girls there was a tipping point. Girls who used social media for at least two to three hours per day at the beginning of the study when they were abo
It s well understood that a difficult childhood can increase the likelihood of mental illness, but according to new research from the University of South Australia, a happy and secure childhood does not always protect a child from developing a mental illness later in life.