TL;DR: When 60 volunteers braced for a shock they could dodge with a quick button press, their brains and bodies shifted into a focused, alert state. But they remembered faces seen during those moments no better than faces seen when they felt safe. Key Findings 60 adults, 270 trials: Each face came with a certain …
TL;DR: In mice with a painful, inflamed paw, two separate sets of neurons in a pain-and-emotion brain area seemed to drive different side effects. One set, wired to the amygdala, controlled anxiety-like behavior, while the other, wired to a reward hub, controlled loss of appetite. Key Findings Pain brought anxiety and poor appetite: Mice with …
TL;DR: Across 24 studies of adults with depression, anxiety or stress, talk therapy built around getting back to work was linked to a modestly higher chance of fully returning. Its edge over other care for symptoms was small and faded by later follow-up. Key Findings 24 studies, 3,279 treated: Adults with common mental disorders, mostly …
TL;DR: In a small Pakistan pilot, 23 of 25 adults given an Urdu version of a talk therapy for anxiety and depression finished all 14 weeks. The trial was too small to show the therapy works. Key Findings Signed up and stayed: 51 adults were randomly assigned to therapy or a waitlist. 42 of 51 …
TL;DR: In a small German study of 24 refugee women with trauma symptoms, scores on three symptom questionnaires stayed flat during an 8-week wait, then dropped after 8 weekly dance movement therapy sessions. The group’s average PTSD checklist score slipped just under the usual clinical cutoff. There was no separate comparison group, so the study …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in PLOS One found that emergency call takers and dispatchers who used more negatively valenced words when describing a stressful work event reported higher depression and anxiety symptoms, while arousal-related language did not predict distress. Key Findings 106 emergency communications workers described a stressful work-related event and completed the DASS-21, a …
TL;DR: Portable electroencephalography (EEG) recordings tracked perinatal anxiety most consistently in a preliminary medRxiv preprint, with delta power carrying the clearest longitudinal marker and alpha power appearing in visit-specific anxiety analyses. Key Findings First-trimester marker: Relative delta power before 16 gestational weeks was associated with third-trimester PHQ-9 depression and GAD-7 anxiety scores. Delta-anxiety link: Across …
TL;DR: A 2026 human study in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science found that low-intensity focused ultrasound aimed at salience-network hubs improved early skin-conductance habituation to repeated startle sounds, while eye-blink and EEG habituation did not change. Key Findings Forty healthy adults completed a crossover experiment: Participants attended separate low-intensity focused ultrasound (LIFU) sessions targeting the …
TL;DR: A 2026 fMRI study in Molecular Psychiatry linked abuse before age 13 to stronger hippocampal responses during non-conscious negative emotion processing, while abuse during adolescence was linked to stronger amygdala responses during conscious emotion viewing. Key Findings Timing split the limbic response: The sample included 635 adults after exclusions and quality checks, including people …
TL;DR: A 2026 meta-analysis in Psychological Medicine found that reduced resting-state connectivity between the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex was the most robust brain-network difference in anxiety disorders. Key Findings 15 datasets: The meta-analysis pooled 14 studies with 15 independent datasets of amygdala-based resting-state functional MRI. 783 total participants: Included samples covered 378 people with …
