TL;DR: A 2026 study in Environmental Science & Technology found that male guppies exposed for 11 days to environmentally relevant amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant detected in waterways, made more spatial-learning errors in a maze while females were largely unaffected. Key Findings 170-fish learning test: Researchers tested wild-caught male and female guppies across 12 maze trials …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv review found that mental-health AI agents are moving quickly toward large-language-model chatbots, but most systems still rely on text self-report, narrow depression/anxiety/suicide use cases, and offline tests rather than prospective clinician or patient trials. Key Findings More than 300 recent papers were reviewed: Researchers audited mental-health AI agent systems from 2023 …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science found that trauma-exposed adolescents, especially those with higher posttraumatic stress symptoms, showed disrupted parent-cued fear extinction across skin-conductance, behavioral-learning, and functional MRI (fMRI) measures. Key Findings 87 dyads entered the extinction task: The analysis included typically developing adolescents and trauma-exposed adolescents with lower or higher …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint from the ENIGMA Addiction Working Group used structural MRI from 2,782 people with substance use disorder (SUD) and 1,951 controls and reported that addiction-related brain differences followed cortical network hubs and neurotransmitter receptor maps. Key Findings 4,733-person MRI sample: Researchers compared 2,782 people with SUD against 1,951 controls across 51 …
TL;DR: A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis posted as a medRxiv preprint found that mindfulness-based programs were linked to a small improvement in executive function, meaning inhibition, working memory, and flexible thinking, across 13 youth trials. Key Findings 13 trials were included: The meta-analysis pooled randomized and quasi-randomized trials in 1,560 children and adolescents aged …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in Psychological Medicine found that people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and higher avolition or moderate-to-high delusion severity appeared to improve more after virtual reality cognitive behavioral therapy for psychosis (VR-CBTp), while lower delusion severity favored standard CBTp. Key Findings FaceYourFears dataset: The exploratory moderator study used trial data from 254 participants, …
TL;DR: A 2026 preprint on medRxiv tested transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS), a noninvasive ear-based stimulation method, during a grip-strength reward task and found that people with severe depressive symptoms made more efficient effort choices under active stimulation than under sham. Key Findings Reward-effort task included 98 participants: The analysis included 53 people with major …
TL;DR: A 2026 machine-learning study in PLOS One used student mental-health survey features to test an interpretable FT-Transformer plus LSTM model, which reached 95% accuracy for low, medium, and high risk prediction in a public dataset. Key Findings 95% accuracy: the full interpretable FT-Transformer plus LSTM model outperformed AdaBoost, SVM, logistic regression, Random Forest, LSTM, …
TL;DR: A 2026 review in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews found that chronic primary pain studies most consistently linked higher pain sensitivity with lower mean arterial pressure, higher cortisol, higher heart rate during recovery, and lower parasympathetic recovery. Key Findings The evidence base covered 52 studies; 37 contributed qualitative evidence and 21 had enough data for …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that soluble CD27 (sCD27), a T-cell activation marker, was elevated in a subgroup of patients with severe psychiatric disorders and was more common when autoimmune disease or abnormal cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) inflammation markers were present. Key Findings The immunopsychiatry cohort included 115 patients: Researchers compared severe psychiatric-disorder cases enriched …
