Summary: A national poll from the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital finds that parental stress commonly clouds the holiday season for families. About one in five parents say their children hold unrealistic expectations about the holidays, and one in four parents admit they put unrealistic pressure on themselves to create a “perfect” holiday. … Read more

Summary: New research suggests that hotter temperatures and climates with less seasonal variation are associated with greater aggression and violence. Source: Ohio State University Climate, Behavior, and the CLASH Model A team of psychologists has proposed a new framework to explain why violent crime and aggressive behavior tend to be more common in regions nearer … Read more

Summary: Researchers have decoded the sensory processing mechanisms that make the sensation of eating chocolate so irresistible to most people. Source: University of Leeds Scientists at the University of Leeds have mapped the physical processes that occur in the mouth when a piece of chocolate transforms from a solid into a smooth, lubricating emulsion — … Read more

Pitt Researchers Publish Mathematical Model Showing How Clustered Neurons Drive Brain Dynamics Summary: Mathematical modeling by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh reveals how neurons organized into clustered networks produce unpredictable, competitive dynamics in the brain. These clustered groups can dominate activity at different times, and even weak stimuli can bias which groups prevail. The … Read more

Summary: Researchers have advanced psychiatric genomics by identifying 641 genes newly associated with schizophrenia. The study combined genetic data from more than 102,000 people with postmortem brain tissue from six cortical regions and employed novel computational models that go beyond traditional local-only mapping. These models capture long-range, network-wide regulatory relationships among genes, revealing coordinated genetic … Read more

Skin Biopsy Reveals Potential Biomarker for Early Parkinson’s Disease: Alpha-Synuclein in Cutaneous Nerves Researchers have identified a possible, accessible biomarker for Parkinson’s disease located just beneath the skin. Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder in the United States, affecting more than one million people. Diagnosis today relies largely on clinical history and … Read more

TAU researchers find unresponsive patients’ brains may recognize photographs of their family and friends. Patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are awake, breathe on their own, and often cycle through sleep and wakefulness, yet they show no overt responses to their surroundings and traditionally have been considered without conscious awareness. Because they cannot … Read more

Summary: A large new study finds that heart failure is linked to accelerated cognitive decline, with affected individuals showing the mental equivalent of ten years of aging within seven years of diagnosis. Researchers followed nearly 30,000 adults and observed a sharp drop in cognitive performance at the time heart failure was diagnosed, followed by more … Read more

Summary: Researchers at the University of Southern California have developed an AI-driven system that tracks tiny ingestible devices designed to monitor disease markers inside the gut. This non-invasive approach could enable people to evaluate and monitor gastrointestinal (GI) health at home, reducing the need for invasive hospital procedures. The system combines a discreet wearable coil … Read more

Summary: Researchers report that memory and language are closely connected through the hippocampus. Source: UC Berkeley New research finds that completing someone’s sentence or answering a fill-in-the-blank task engages the hippocampus, a brain region long associated with memory but often overlooked in studies of language. It may seem obvious that language depends on memory—words, context, … Read more