Healthy people given the serotonin-enhancing antidepressant citalopram were willing to pay almost twice as much to prevent harm to themselves or others than those given placebo drugs in a moral decision-making experiment at UCL. In contrast, the dopamine-boosting Parkinson's drug levodopa made healthy people more selfish, eliminating an altruistic tendency to prefer harming themselves over others. The study was a double-blind randomized controlled trial and the results are published in Current Biology.
A new pair of brain-imaging studies suggest that researchers may be able to predict how likely young adults are to develop problem drinking or risky sexual behavior in response to stress. The research is part of the ongoing Duke Neurogenetics Study or DNS, which began in 2010 to better understand how interactions between the brain, genome, and environment shape risky behaviors predicting mental illnesses including depression, anxiety, and addiction.
Boys are more likely than girls to receive a prescription for antipsychotic medication regardless of age, researchers have found. Approximately 1.5 percent of boys ages 10-18 received an antipsychotic prescription in 2010, although the percentage falls by nearly half after age 19. Among antipsychotic users with mental disorder diagnoses, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was the most common among youth ages 1-18, depression was the most common diagnosis among young adults ages 19-24 receiving antipsychotics.
Despite concerns that use of antipsychotic medications in treating young people has increased, use actually declined between 2006 and 2010 for children ages 12 and under, and increased for adolescents and young adults.
Finding a job is difficult for veterans with PTSD and individuals with severe mental illness, who have high unemployment rates though many want to work. The job interview can be a major hurdle. A special training program using a virtual human -- originally used to train FBI agents -- helped vets with PTSD and individuals with severe mental illness build job interview skills and snag nine times more job offers, reports a new study.
A study reveals how the hippocampus contributes to social behavior.
The brains of people with recurrent depression have a significantly smaller hippocampus -- the part of the brain most associated with forming new memories -- than healthy individuals, a new global study of nearly 9,000 people reveals. Published in Molecular Psychiatry, the ENIGMA study is co-authored by University of Sydney scholars at the Brain and Mind Research Institute.
Children of parents who are frequently in conflict process emotional interactions differently and may face social challenges later in life compared with children from low conflict homes. The findings are based on measuring research subjects' brain activity during a psychological test.
A new study examines how reasons for illicit marijuana use relates to the use of other drugs individually, rather than grouping them into a single 'illicit drug' group.
A UCLA study shows an injectable drug given every two weeks works better than a daily pill for those who have been recently diagnosed with schizophrenia.