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New research on World Mental Health Day: parents play a smaller role in the emotional development of teenagers than previously believed. Caspar van Lissa (Tilburg University) developed an innovative machine learning technique to discover patterns in and predictors of youth behavior. During adolescence, young people learn to manage their emotions.

New research from Tilburg University, Centerdata, the University of Twente, and the Victim Support Fund reveals that experiencing new traumas significantly hinders the recovery from existing anxiety and depressive complaints. It also shows that if recovery does not occur within a year, the risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is substantially increased.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were major concerns about the potential impact of the new virus on the well-being of pregnant women and their babies. This led to strict safety measures for pregnant women worldwide. However, infection with the COVID-19 virus during pregnancy does not lead to an increased risk of pregnancy complications, according to a new dissertation by Frederieke Gigase, which she is defending this week at Tilburg University.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations in the United States reduced racial prejudice among white Americans, at least temporarily. This is according to research by social psychologist Max Primbs. 'Racial bias declined rapidly, but also gradually increased again as BLM protests received less attention.' The murder of George Floyd in 2020 revived the Black Lives Matter movement, a large scale social movement that aims to highlight and reduce structural racism and inequality in the United States.

Problematic substance use occurs relatively frequently in people with a mild intellectual disability. But the mainstream addiction care is not always effective for this group. During her PhD, psychologist Lotte Gosens and colleagues working in intellectual disability care and addiction care developed a treatment that does work.

Intensive and problematic social media use during pregnancy can lead to depressive symptoms. This is evident from new doctoral research by Tilburg University. "More attention needs to be paid to these risk factors for mental health problems, which can have unfavorable outcomes for both mother and child." For the past 30 years, Tilburg University has conducted extensive research into the general well-being of women during pregnancy.

Insomnia is a common problem that also increases the risk of depression. Unfortunately, we do not yet sufficiently understand the underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Research by neuroscientist Tom Bresser shows that the white matter in the brain, which connects different brain areas, differs in people with insomnia compared to people without sleep problems.

New research from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) suggests that individuals with higher levels of education have a lower risk of psychiatric problems. The study indicates that prolonged education may serve as a protective factor against conditions such as depression, ADHD, alcohol dependence, and anxiety.

Various studies have been conducted in recent years exploring how paying attention to nature can affect our well-being. A preliminary systematic review of these studies, conducted at the University of Twente, has shown that participants generally experience significantly more well-being compared to control groups.

PhD candidate Laury Quaedackers studied how a special app can improve the quality of life for people with narcolepsy. She defended her thesis on March 21 at the Department of Industrial Design. Narcolepsy is a rare but serious sleep disorder. People with narcolepsy fall asleep involuntarily at random times.

When people read a book, they typically imagine the story in their heads. But how do people experience a story if they find it difficult or impossible to imagine what is being described? Cognitive scientist Laura Speed and her colleagues found in an initial study of reading in people with so-called aphantasia that they do not enjoy reading less, but they do become less engaged with a story.

Feeling stressed? "Take Me Home, Country Roads", "Nothing Else Matters" or "Baby One More Time" might calm you down again. Psychologist and music scientist Krisna Adiasto discovered that music genre doesn't seem to play a role in the songs we choose to recover from stress, but the songs that work do have shared characteristics.

Depression is common among young people, but this target group often does not get the help they need. Books, exercise, and other depression prevention programmes do not achieve the envisioned results for everyone. Video games might help reach another part of this target group. Anouk Tuijnman co-developed two applied video games to target depression in adolescents and will defend her PhD at Radboud University on 28 November.

It appears beneficial for mothers and babies to have one hour of skin-to-skin contact per day in the first five weeks after birth. Mothers who do so may experience less anxiety and fatigue, and often continue to breastfeed for longer. Their babies cry less and may sleep longer. These are the conclusions of behavioural psychologist Kelly Cooijmans, who defended her PhD dissertation at Radboud University on 17 November.

People often feel strongly about politics and this drives their behaviour. For instance, anxiety often motivates people to learn more about a political issue and anger brings us to the voting booth. But we know relatively little about where these emotions come from or how to predict them. Political scientist Isabella Rebasso studied political emotions and found they do not follow the usual pattern of emotions, as we know them in everyday life.

Haiko Jessurun defended his PhD thesis at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences on August 29th. Employees often possess a wider range of talents than they need for their jobs; for example, they may be musically gifted or have great visual thinking capabilities. If these capabilities are not seen and valued, there is a higher risk of what PhD candidate Haiko Jessurun calls "chronic relative underperformance" (CRU).

When choosing their behaviour in socially difficult situations, anxious people use a less suitable section of the forebrain than people who are not anxious. This can be seen in brain scans, as shown by the research of Bob Bramson and Sjoerd Meijer at the Donders Institute of Radboud University. For example, an anxious and a non-anxious person both run into someone whom they've been in love with for quite some time.

In the first study of its kind, researchers at the University of Oxford and Tilburg University have collaborated with game developer FuturLab to create a unique open online data resource to study the effects of playing video games on the well-being of players. The scientists worked with FuturLab to develop a research edition of video game PowerWash Simulator.

Men and women are affected very differently by childhood trauma, according to a new international study led by Maastricht University (UM). Women with psychological problems in later life are more likely to have experienced emotional trauma and sexual abuse as children, while men's mental-health problems are more likely to result from emotional and physical neglect during childhood.

Potential talents of children with characteristics of giftedness are not always seen in mainstream education. Children's drawings, however, can play a role in early detection of their needs and talents, argues psychologist Sven Mathijssen in his dissertation titled "Back to the drawing board: Potential indicators of giftedness in human figure drawings," which he defends on March 22, 2023 2:00 pm.