Happy New Year?

According to today’s Guardian “The use of antidepressants has risen by more than a quarter in England in just three years, amid fears that more people are suffering from depression due to the economic crisis. The number of prescriptions for antidepressants increased by 28% from 34m in 2007-08 to 43.4m in 2010-11, according to the NHS information centre”. But […]

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Is Facebook making us depressed?

“Misery Has More Company Than People Think,” a paper in the January issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, draws on a series of studies examining how college students evaluate moods, both their own and those of their peers. Led by Alex Jordan, who at the time was a Ph.D. student in Stanford’s psychology department, the researchers […]

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How will you be voting tomorrow?

Maybe it’ll be something to do with the size of your anterior cingulate cortex: “Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual’s political orientation,” said Ryota Kanai of the University College London. “ Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure.” Kanai said his study was prompted by reports from […]

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