Author: dispatchtimes news

A long-running Australian study has found that higher cardiorespiratory fitness in childhood is linked to a lower risk of developing clinical depression decades later, with the association appearing stronger in women. The research tracked more than 1,000 Australians over roughly 32 years, from a 1985 national fitness survey to adulthood in the mid-to-late 2010s, and analysed whether childhood endurance and muscle performance predict depression in later life. Depression remains a major public health challenge. While physical activity is widely promoted for well-being, scientists have sought to understand how fitness itself, as an objective measure of the body’s capacity, relates to…

A new study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior shows that working alongside a colleague who consistently logs long hours can push others to raise their own performance, while also prompting them to speak ill of the overachiever in private. The ripple effect appears strongest when observers believe the workaholic is driven by personal ambition rather than a team-wide aim. Psychologists define workaholism as a compulsive, excessive need to work. For decades, research focused on the toll it takes on the individual—burnout, health problems and disrupted personal life—rather than on how a single workaholic shapes the daily experience of…

A new longitudinal study has found that teenagers raised by parents who rely on strict, punitive discipline with little warmth tend to hold more enduring antisocial beliefs, and may later experience rises in anxiety and depression. Researchers from Syracuse University analysed 491 US adolescents across four survey waves conducted between late 2021 and mid-2023 to explore how authoritarian parenting and young people’s thinking and emotions develop over time. Authoritarian parenting is characterised by rigid rules, high control, verbal hostility and punishments delivered without explanation, paired with very little warmth. Prior work has linked this punitive approach to both internalising problems…

A new study published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality reveals that people who leave their religion often shed the conservative attitudes associated with their former faith but retain a strict, authoritarian style of thinking. Formerly religious participants exhibited the highest levels of left-wing authoritarianism in the survey, compared with those who remain religious or have never been religious. The research, conducted by Daryl R. Van Tongeren of Hope College and Shauna M. Bowes of Vanderbilt University, used a United States sample of 804 participants to explore what the authors describe as religious residue. Authoritarianism, in psychology, describes a particular…

Anxious attachment may shape how people respond after a partner harms them, according to new findings published in The Journal of Social Psychology. Across three preregistered studies, researchers found that individuals who worry about rejection are more likely to hold grudges, withdraw, and struggle to forgive, particularly when the offending partner delivers a nonapology or simply ignores the wrongdoing. The work was led by Brianna Davison, a PhD candidate in the University of Calgary Love Lab, who conducted the research while at York University, alongside C. Ward Struthers, Jingyuan Sophie Li and Amy Muise. The team aimed to understand how…

A new public survey finds that people generally prefer facial profiles with a slightly protruding upper jaw over a perfectly straight profile. The study, published in the Journal of Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery, suggests that jaw surgeons and orthodontists should consider everyday aesthetic tastes alongside clinical measurements when planning procedures. The human face plays a central role in social communication and biological signalling. Evolutionary pressures appear to have shaped neural processes that recognise facial patterns, with facial attractiveness often acting as a marker of reproductive fitness. Structural features, it argues, heavily influence how individuals are perceived by others. Attractiveness also…

A new longitudinal analysis suggests that in older adults without memory problems, the buildup of Alzheimer’s-related tau protein in the brain tends to precede a rise in mild depressive symptoms, implying mood changes may be an early consequence of brain changes rather than a trigger for disease progression. The findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, indicate that subtle late-life mood shifts may reflect underlying pathology in cognitively healthy individuals, offering a potential window for early observation of Alzheimer’s-related brain changes. Alzheimer’s disease is characterised biologically by the accumulation of amyloid-beta plaques outside brain cells and misfolded tau tangles inside…

A new comparative study into sexual activity among married couples finds that those in South Korea report higher rates of sexual inactivity than their counterparts in the United States, even though both groups show similar links between age, personal motivation and intimacy. The work, conducted by researchers from Yonsei University, and published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, sheds light on how cultural and structural differences shape physical closeness in long-term relationships. Physical intimacy is widely regarded as a central component of marital well-being, with regular sexual activity commonly associated with higher relationship satisfaction and overall health. Conversely, a lack…

A major new analysis of more than 25,000 calls and text messages to a national psychedelic helpline offers what its researchers describe as the largest real‑world portrait to date of who seeks support during or after a psychoactive drug experience. The study, published in Science Advances, finds that distress rates are broadly similar across substances once the timing of the call is taken into account, and that most callers whose setting was recorded were alone. By linking thousands of anonymous support logs with caller feedback surveys, the dataset provides a new way to study whether individual peer supporters influence caller…

A team led by Kanhao Zhao and Yu Zhang at Lehigh University has identified a distinctive pattern of brain connectivity that both differentiates cocaine use disorder from healthy controls and forecasts who will benefit from a non-invasive brain stimulation therapy aimed at curbing cravings. The researchers used resting-state brain scans from participants in Mexico to train a machine learning model, and then tested the pattern on participants in the United States and Mexico. The findings were published in Nature Mental Health. Cocaine use disorder is characterised by compulsive drug seeking and high relapse rates, with current psychosocial treatments helping some…