Researchers map how the brain regulates emotions

Ever want to scream during a particularly bad day, but then manage not to? Thank the human brain and how it regulates emotions, which can be critical for navigating everyday life. As we perceive events unfolding around us, the ability to be flexible and reframe a situation impacts not only how we feel, but also our behavior and decision-making.

In fact, some of the problems associated with mental health relate to individuals' inability to be flexible, such as when persistent negative thoughts make it hard to perceive a situation differently.

To help address such issues, a new Dartmouth-led study is among the first of its kind to separate activity relating to emotion generation from emotion regulation in the human brain. The findings are published in Nature Neuroscience.

"As a former biomedical engineer, it was exciting to identify some brain regions that are purely unique to regulating emotions," says lead author Ke Bo, a postdoctoral researcher in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab (CANlab) at Dartmouth. "Our results provide new insight into how emotion regulation works by identifying targets which could have clinical applications."

For example, the systems the researchers identified could be good targets for brain stimulation to enhance the regulation of emotion.

Using computational methods, the researchers examined two independent datasets of fMRI studies obtained earlier by co-author Peter Gianaros at the University of Pittsburgh. Participants' brain activity was recorded in an fMRI scanner as they viewed images that were likely to draw a negative reaction such as a bloody scene or scary- looking animals.

The participants were then asked to recontextualize the stimulus by generating new kinds of thoughts about an image to make it less aversive, before a neutral image was presented followed by another dislikable image.

By examining the neural activity, researchers could identify the brain areas that are more active when emotions are regulated versus when emotions are generated.

The new study reveals that emotion regulation, also known in neuroscience as "reappraisal," involves particular areas of the anterior prefrontal cortex and other higher-level cortical hierarchies whose role in emotion regulation had not previously been isolated with this level of precision. These regions are involved in other high-level cognitive functions and are important for abstract thought and long-term representations of the future.

The more people are able to activate these emotion regulation-selective brain regions, the more resilient they are to experiencing something negative without letting it affect them personally. These findings build on other research linking these areas to better mental health and the ability to resist temptations and avoid drug addiction.

The results also demonstrated that the amygdala, which is known as the threat-related brain region responsible for negative emotion and has long been considered an ancient subcortical threat center, responds to aversive experiences the same way, whether people are using their thoughts to self-regulate down-regulate negative emotion or not. "It's really the cortex that is responsible for generating people's emotional responses, by changing the way we see and attach meaning to events in our environments," says Bo.

The researchers were also interested in identifying the neurochemicals that interact with emotion regulation systems. Neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin shape how networks of neurons communicate and are targets for both illicit drugs and therapeutic treatments alike. Some neurotransmitters may be important for enabling the ability to self-regulate or "down-regulate."

The team compared the emotion regulation brain maps from the two datasets to neurotransmitter binding maps from 36 other studies. The systems involved in regulating negative emotion overlapped with particular neurotransmitter systems.

"Our results showed that receptors for cannabinoids, opioids, and serotonin, including 5H2A, were especially rich in areas that are involved in emotion regulation," says senior author Tor Wager, the Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience and director of the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center at Dartmouth. "When drugs that bind to these receptors are taken, they are preferentially affecting the emotion regulation system, which raises questions about their potential for long-term effects on our capacity to self-regulate."

Serotonin is well-known for its role in depression, as the most widely used antidepressant drugs inhibit its reuptake in synapses, which transmit signals from one neuron to another.

5H2A is the serotonin receptor most strongly affected by another exciting new type of treatment for mental health -- psychedelic drugs. The study's findings suggest that the effects of drugs on depression and other mental health disorders may work in part by altering how we think about life events and our ability to self-regulate. This may help explain why drugs, particularly psychedelics, are likely to be ineffective without the right kind of psychological support. The study could help improve therapeutic approaches by increasing our understanding of why and how psychological and pharmaceutical approaches need to be combined into integrated treatments.

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Half the population to have a mental health disorder by 75

A global study co-led by researchers from The University of Queensland and Harvard Medical School has found one in two people will develop a mental health disorder in their lifetime.

Professor John McGrath from UQ's Queensland Brain Institute, Professor Ronald Kessler from Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues from 27 other countries, analysed data from more than 150,000 adults across 29 countries between 2001 and 2022, taken from the largest ever coordinated series of face-to-face interviews -- the World Health Organisation's World Mental Health Survey initiative.

Lead author Professor McGrath said the results demonstrate the high prevalence of mental health disorders, with 50 per cent of the population developing at least one disorder by the age of 75.

"The most common were mood disorders such as major depression or anxiety," Professor McGrath said.

"We also found the risk of certain mental disorders differed by sex."

The 3 most common mental health disorders among women:
 

• Depression
• Specific phobia (a disabling anxiety that interferes with daily life)
• Post-traumatic stress (PTSD)

The 3 most common mental health disorders among men:
 

• Alcohol abuse
• Depression
• Specific phobia

The research also found mental health disorders typically first emerge in childhood, adolescence or young adulthood.

"The peak age of first onset was at 15 years old, with a median age of onset of 19 for men and 20 for women," Professor McGrath said.

"This lends weight to the need to invest in basic neuroscience to understand why these disorders develop."

Professor Kessler said investment was also needed in mental health services with a particular focus on young people.

"Services need to be able to detect and treat common mental disorders promptly, and be optimised to suit patients in these critical parts of their lives," Professor Kessler said.

"By understanding the age at which these disorders commonly arise, we can tailor public health interventions and allocate resources to ensure that appropriate and timely support is available to individuals at risk."

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Older people have better mental well-being than 30 years ago

This was observed in a study conducted at the Gerontology Research Center at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences, University of Jyväskylä (Finland). The study examined differences in depressive symptoms and life satisfaction between current 75- and 80-year-olds and the same-aged people who lived in the 1990s.

The results showed that 75- and 80-year-old men and women today experience fewer depressive symptoms than those who were 75 and 80 years old in the 1990s. The differences were partly explained by the better perceived health and higher education of those born later.

"In our previous comparisons, we found that older people today have significantly better physical and cognitive functioning at the same age compared to those born earlier," says Professor Taina Rantanen from the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences. "These new results complement these positive findings in terms of mental well-being."

Today, 75- and 80-year-olds are more satisfied with their lives to date. However, there was no similar difference in satisfaction with their current lives. In fact, 80-year-old men who lived in the 1990s were even more satisfied with their current lives than 80-year-old are men today.

"These men born in 1910 had lived through difficult times, which may explain their satisfaction with their current lives in the 1990s when many things were better than before," says postdoctoral researcher Tiia Kekäläinen.

"Individuals adapt to their situation and living conditions. Both in the 1990s and today, the majority of older adults reported being satisfied with their current lives."

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Some types of stress could be good for brain functioning

It may feel like an anvil hanging over your head, but that looming deadline stressing you out at work may actually be beneficial for your brain, according to new research from the Youth Development Institute at the University of Georgia.

Published in Psychiatry Research, the study found that low to moderate levels of stress can help individuals develop resilience and reduce the risk of developing mental health disorders, like depression and antisocial behaviors. Low to moderate stress can also help individuals to cope with future stressful encounters.

"If you're in an environment where you have some level of stress, you may develop coping mechanisms that will allow you to become a more efficient and effective worker and organize yourself in a way that will help you perform," said Assaf Oshri, lead author of the study and an associate professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences.

The stress that comes from studying for an exam, preparing for a big meeting at work or pulling longer hours to close the deal can all potentially lead to personal growth. Being rejected by a publisher, for example, may lead a writer to rethink their style. And being fired could prompt someone to reconsider their strengths and whether they should stay in their field or branch out to something new.

But the line between the right amount of stress and too much stress is a thin one.

"It's like when you keep doing something hard and get a little callous on your skin," continued Oshri, who also directs the UGA Youth Development Institute. "You trigger your skin to adapt to this pressure you are applying to it. But if you do too much, you're going to cut your skin."

Good stress can act as a vaccine against the effect of future adversity

The researchers relied on data from the Human Connectome Project, a national project funded by the National Institutes of Health that aims to provide insight into how the human brain functions. For the present study, the researchers analyzed the project's data from more than 1,200 young adults who reported their perceived stress levels using a questionnaire commonly used in research to measure how uncontrollable and stressful people find their lives.

Participants answered questions about how frequently they experienced certain thoughts or feelings, such as "in the last month, how often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly?" and "in the last month, how often have you found that you could not cope with all the things that you had to do?"

Their neurocognitive abilities were then assessed using tests that measured attention and ability to suppress automatic responses to visual stimuli; cognitive flexibility, or ability to switch between tasks; picture sequence memory, which involves remembering an increasingly long series of objects; working memory and processing speed.

The researchers compared those findings with the participants' answers from multiple measures of anxious feelings, attention problems and aggression, among other behavioral and emotional problems.

The analysis found that low to moderate levels of stress were psychologically beneficial, potentially acting as a kind of inoculation against developing mental health symptoms.

"Most of us have some adverse experiences that actually make us stronger," Oshri said. "There are specific experiences that can help you evolve or develop skills that will prepare you for the future."

But the ability to tolerate stress and adversity varies greatly according to the individual.

Things like age, genetic predispositions and having a supportive community to fall back on in times of need all play a part in how well individuals handle challenges. While a little stress can be good for cognition, Oshri warns that continued levels of high stress can be incredibly damaging, both physically and mentally.

"At a certain point, stress becomes toxic," he said. "Chronic stress, like the stress that comes from living in abject poverty or being abused, can have very bad health and psychological consequences. It affects everything from your immune system, to emotional regulation, to brain functioning. Not all stress is good stress."

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How sleep helps to process emotions

Researchers at the Department of Neurology of the University of Bern and University Hospital Bern identified how the brain triages emotions during dream sleep to consolidate the storage of positive emotions while dampening the consolidation of negative ones. The work expands the importance of sleep in mental health and opens new ways of therapeutic strategies.

Rapid eye movement (REM or paradoxical) sleep is a unique and mysterious sleep state during which most of the dreams occur together with intense emotional contents. How and why these emotions are reactivated is unclear. The prefrontal cortex integrates many of these emotions during wakefulness but appears paradoxically quiescent during REM sleep. "Our goal was to understand the underlying mechanism and the functions of such a surprising phenomenon," says Prof. Antoine Adamantidis from the Department of Biomedical Research (DBMR) at the University of Bern and the Department of Neurology at the Inselspital, University Hospital of Bern.

Processing emotions, particularly distinguishing between danger and safety, is critical for the survival of animals. In humans, excessively negative emotions, such as fear reactions and states of anxiety, lead to pathological states like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD). In Europe, roughly 15% of the population is affected by persistent anxiety and severe mental illness. The research group headed by Antoine Adamantidis is now providing insights into how the brain helps to reinforce positive emotions and weaken strongly negative or traumatic emotions during REM sleep. This study was published in the journal Science.

A Dual mechanism

The researchers first conditioned mice to recognize auditory stimuli associated with safety and others associated with danger (aversive stimuli). The activity of neurons in the brain of mice was then recorded during sleep-wake cycles. In this way, the researchers were able to map different areas of a cell and determine how emotional memories are transformed during REM sleep.

Neurons are composed of a cell body (soma) that integrates information coming from the dendrites (inputs) and send signals to other neurons via their axons (outputs). The results obtained showed that cell somas are kept silent while their dendrites are activated. "This means a decoupling of the two cellular compartments, in other words soma wide asleep and dendrites wide awake," explains Adamantidis. This decoupling is important because the strong activity of the dendrites allows the encoding of both danger and safety emotions, while the inhibitions of the soma completely block the output of the circuit during REM sleep. In other words, the brain favours the discrimination of safety versus danger in the dendrites, but block the over-reaction to emotion, in particular danger.

A survival advantage

According to the researchers, the coexistence of both mechanisms is beneficial to the stability and survival of the organisms: "This bi-directional mechanism is essential to optimize the discrimination between dangerous and safe signals," says Mattia Aime from the DBMR, first author of the study. If this discrimination is missing in humans and excessive fear reactions are generated, this can lead to anxiety disorders. The findings are particularly relevant to pathological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorders, in which trauma is over-consolidated in the prefrontal cortex, day after day during sleep.

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Seven hours of sleep is optimal in middle and old age, say researchers

Seven hours is the ideal amount of sleep for people in their middle age and upwards, with too little or too much little sleep associated with poorer cognitive performance and mental health, say researchers from the University of Cambridge and Fudan University.

Sleep plays an important role in enabling cognitive function and maintaining good psychological health. It also helps keep the brain healthy by removing waste products. As we get older, we often see alterations in our sleep patterns, including difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep, and decreased quantity and quality of sleep. It is thought that these sleep disturbances may contribute to cognitive decline and psychiatric disorders in the aging population.

In research published today in Nature Aging, scientists from the UK and China examined data from nearly 500,000 adults aged 38-73 years from the UK Biobank. Participants were asked about their sleeping patterns, mental health and wellbeing, and took part in a series of cognitive tests. Brain imaging and genetic data were available for almost 40,000 of the study participants.

By analysing these data, the team found that both insufficient and excessive sleep duration were associated with impaired cognitive performance, such as processing speed, visual attention, memory and problem-solving skills. Seven hours of sleep per night was the optimal amount of sleep for cognitive performance, but also for good mental health, with people experiencing more symptoms of anxiety and depression and worse overall wellbeing if they reported sleeping for longer or shorter durations.

The researchers say one possible reason for the association between insufficient sleep and cognitive decline may be due to the disruption of slow-wave -- 'deep' -- sleep. Disruption to this type of sleep has been shown to have a close link with memory consolidation as well as the build-up of amyloid -- a key protein which, when it misfolds, can cause 'tangles' in the brain characteristic of some forms of dementia. Additionally, lack of sleep may hamper the brain's ability to rid itself of toxins.

The team also found a link between the amount of sleep and differences in the structure of brain regions involved in cognitive processing and memory, again with greater changes associated with greater than or less than seven hours of sleep.

Having a consistent seven hours' sleep each night, without too much fluctuation in duration, was also important to cognitive performance and good mental health and wellbeing. Previous studies have also shown that interrupted sleep patterns are associated with increased inflammation, indicating a susceptibility to age-related diseases in older people.

Professor Jianfeng Feng from Fudan University in China said: "While we can't say conclusively that too little or too much sleep causes cognitive problems, our analysis looking at individuals over a longer period of time appears to support this idea. But the reasons why older people have poorer sleep appear to be complex, influenced by a combination of our genetic makeup and the structure of our brains."

The researchers say the findings suggest that insufficient or excessive sleep duration may be a risk factor for cognitive decline in ageing. This is supported by previous studies that have reported a link between sleep duration and the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and dementia, in which cognitive decline is a hallmark symptom.

Professor Barbara Sahakian from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, one of the study's authors, said: "Getting a good night's sleep is important at all stages of life, but particularly as we age. Finding ways to improve sleep for older people could be crucial to helping them maintain good mental health and wellbeing and avoiding cognitive decline, particularly for patients with psychiatric disorders and dementias."

Read more at Science Daily

Repeated exposure to major disasters has long-term mental health impacts

Repeated exposure to major disasters does not make people mentally stronger, a recent study from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health found: individuals who have been repeatedly exposed to major disasters show a reduction in mental health scores.

Additionally, the research team found that the more experience the individuals had with such events, the lower their mental health was.

"We discovered the reverse of the adage 'what does not kill you makes you stronger,'" said the study's lead author Garett Sansom, research assistant professor in the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health at the School of Public Health.

Sansom and a team of Texas A&M researchers studied individuals from the Houston area, which is susceptible to hurricanes and flooding as well as industrial emergencies. The results of the study were published recently in the journal Natural Hazards.

From 2000 to 2020, Texas -- one of the states most prone to natural disasters -- experienced 33 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) declared major disasters. Many of these -- hurricanes, winter weather, drought and flooding -- impacted the Houston area. The area has also been impacted by emergencies such as explosions and chemical releases at nearby industrial facilities.

According to the research team, the combination of natural disasters and emergencies from industrial facilities presents a unique opportunity to observe the impacts.

"There is an unfortunate truth that many communities that reside along the Gulf Coast are at the nexus of exposures from natural and anthropogenic, or human-caused, hazards," Sansom said.

The team used a 12-item short form health survey to gather information. The survey assessed cumulative impacts from exposure to evaluate changes over time, producing a composite score for both mental (MCS) and physical (PCS) health.

The majority of the respondents reported that they experienced many hazardous events over the past five years. Hurricanes and flooding (96.35 percent) were the events experienced the most, followed by industrial fires (96.08), chemical spills (86.84) and tornados (79.82).

The team found that when individuals experienced two or more events over the past five years, their MCS averages fell below the expected national levels.

"Mental health is often overlooked in responding to and preparing for hazard exposures," Sansom said. "However, in order to reach community resilience efforts, mental conditions need to be accounted for."

The results of the study help to reveal the long-term mental impact hazards can have. More importantly, they underscore the need for public health interventions targeted toward these individuals as well as the communities where they reside.

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17-year study of children associates poverty with smaller, slower-growing subcortical regions

Children in poverty are more likely to have cognitive and behavioral difficulties than their better-off peers. Plenty of past research has looked into the physical effects of childhood poverty, or documented mental health disparities between socioeconomic classes. But Deanna Barch, chair and professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and her colleague Joan Luby, MD, the Samuel and Mae S. Ludwig Professor of Child Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, wanted to look at a suite of outcomes to determine whether poverty continues to affect people as they enter adulthood.

And if so, how?

To answer these questions, Luby and Barch, who is also a professor of radiology? and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, and colleagues collected data for 17 years from families who agreed to participate, including 216 preschoolers who were followed through early adulthood. During the course of the study, the young participants underwent brain imaging to help tease out the relationships among their socioeconomic status in preschool, and provided information on a host of outcomes -- including cognitive, social and psychiatric -- in early adulthood.

The results were published July 14 in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

"First and foremost: yes," Barch said, "Early poverty sadly continues to predict worse outcomes in all of these domains." That holds true even if a child's socioeconomic status changes before adulthood.

The risks for these outcomes, the research showed, are mediated through brain development.

"We think poverty and all of the things associated with it" -- such as stress, inadequate nutrition, less access to health care -- "impact brain development." she said. "If we can prevent poverty, we can help circumvent some of these negative outcomes."

For the study, the researchers recruited primary caregivers and their 3- to 5-year-old children. They used a specific recruiting questionnaire that would ensure there were more children with elevated symptoms of depression. This would later allow researchers to separate the effects of poverty from existing psychological disorders.

The children were interviewed annually, and once they were at least 16, researchers tested them for cognitive function, psychiatric disorders, high-risk behaviors, educational function and social function. During the 17 years, the participants also received five brain scans that measured the volumes of local and global brain matter, giving the researchers a unique insight into whether brain development was a mediating factor -- are changes to the brain the way that poverty "gets into" someone?

After controlling for variables including preschool psychopathology and any significant life events throughout the years, the researchers were able to show socioeconomic status in preschool was associated with cognitive function, high-risk behaviors, social function and educational function 13+ years after the then-children joined the study.

Brain-scan results showed the physical marks of poverty.

The children who were living below the poverty level as preschoolers had smaller volumes of certain subcortical brain regions, including the hippocampus, caudate, putamen, and thalamus. "But also they had less growth in these regions over time," Barch said. "So they're starting out smaller and not growing as much."

Subcortical regions aren't a prime research target because they are not necessarily responsible for a specific cognitive or emotional function. Instead, information must travel through them in order to reach regions of the brain associated with higher-order functioning.

"The thalamus, for example, doesn't always get a lot of love in the literature," Barch said, "but it's a very important relay structure that helps coordinate the transfer of information from the brainstem to higher-order cortical areas.

"These brain regions are like important waypoints on the highway of the brain," Barch said. And they are particularly sensitive to environmental factors such as pollutants or poor nutrition, factors more likely to affect those living in poverty.

To be clear, this data does not paint a deterministic picture. "Plenty of kids have wonderful outcomes despite growing up in poverty," Barch said. That is often because they have had additional support and additional resources. She's putting this theory to the test in upcoming research where she and her colleagues will be tracking the effects of the child tax credit on children's development.

"Growing up in poverty makes things harder for people, but it is preventable," Barch said. "That's the good news: We can do something about this."

Read more at Science Daily

High BMI causes depression – and both physical and social factors play a role

A largescale new study provides further evidence that being overweight causes depression and lowers wellbeing and indicates both social and physical factors may play a role in the effect.

With one in four adults estimated to be obese in the UK, and growing numbers of children affected, obesity is a global health challenge. While the dangers of being obese on physical health is well known, researchers are now discovering that being overweight can also have a significant impact on mental health.

The new study, published in Human Molecular Genetics, sought to investigate why a body of evidence now indicates that higher BMI causes depression. The team used genetic analysis, known as Mendelian Randomisation, to examine whether the causal link is the result of psychosocial pathways, such as societal influences and social stigma, or physical pathways, such as metabolic conditions linked to higher BMI. Such conditions include high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

In research led by the University of Exeter and funded by the Academy of Medical Sciences, the team examined genetic data from more than 145,000 participants from the UK Biobank with detailed mental health data available. In a multifaceted study, the researchers analysed genetic variants linked to higher BMI, as well as outcomes from a clinically-relevant mental health questionnaire designed to assess levels of depression, anxiety and wellbeing.

To examine which pathways may be active in causing depression in people with higher BMI, the team also interrogated two sets of previously discovered genetic variants. One set of genes makes people fatter, yet metabolically healthier, meaning they were less likely to develop conditions linked to higher BMI, such as high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. The second set of genes analysed make people fatter and metabolically unhealthy, or more prone to such conditions. The team found little difference between the two sets of genetic variants, indicating that both physical and social factors play a role in higher rates of depression and poorer wellbeing.

Lead author Jess O'Loughlin, at the University of Exeter Medical School, said: "Obesity and depression are both major global health challenges, and our study provides the most robust evidence to date that higher BMI causes depression. Understanding whether physical or social factors are responsible for this relationship can help inform effective strategies to improve mental health and wellbeing. Our research suggests that being fatter leads to a higher risk of depression, regardless of the role of metabolic health. This suggests that both physical health and social factors, such as social stigma, both play a role in the relationship between obesity and depression."

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Living near woodlands is good for children and young people's mental health

Analysis of children and young people's proximity to woodlands has shown links with better cognitive development and a lower risk of emotional and behavioural problems, in research led by UCL and Imperial College London scientists that could influence planning decisions in urban areas.

In what is believed to be one of the largest studies of its kind, researchers used longitudinal data relating to 3,568 children and teenagers, aged nine to 15 years, from 31 schools across London. This period is a key time in the development of adolescents' thinking, reasoning and understanding of the world.

The study, published in Nature Sustainability, looked at the links between different types of natural urban environments and the pupils' cognitive development, mental health and overall well-being.

The environments were divided into what planners call green space (woods, meadows and parks) and blue space (rivers, lakes and the sea), with green space separated further into grassland and woodland. Researchers used satellite data to help calculate each adolescent's daily exposure rate to each of these environments within 50m, 100m, 250m and 500m of their home and school.

After adjusting for other variables, the results showed that higher daily exposure to woodland (but not grassland) was associated with higher scores for cognitive development, and a 16% lower risk of emotional and behavioural problems two years later.

A similar but smaller effect was seen for green space, with higher scores for cognitive development, but this was not seen for blue space. The researchers note though that access to blue space in the cohort studied was generally low.

Examples of other explanatory variables considered included the young person's age, ethnic background, gender, parental occupation and type of school, e.g., state or independent. The level of air pollution might have influenced adolescents' cognitive development, but researchers did not feel these observations were reliable or conclusive, and these require further investigations.

It is already estimated that one in 10 of London's children and adolescents between the ages of five and 16 suffer from a clinical mental health illness and excess costs are estimated between £11,030 and £59,130 annually for each person. As with adults, there is also evidence that natural environments play an important role in children and adolescents' cognitive development and mental health into adulthood, but less is known about why this is.

The results of this study suggest that urban planning decisions to optimise ecosystem benefits linked to cognitive development and mental health should carefully consider the type of natural environment included. Natural environments further away from an adolescent's residence and school may play an important role too, not just their immediate environment.

Lead author, PhD student Mikaël Maes (UCL Geography, UCL Biosciences and Imperial College London School of Public Health) said: "Previous studies have revealed positive associations between exposure to nature in urban environments, cognitive development and mental health. Why these health benefits are received remains unclear, especially in adolescents.

"These findings contribute to our understanding of natural environment types as an important protective factor for an adolescent's cognitive development and mental health and suggest that not every environment type may contribute equally to these health benefits.

"Forest bathing, for example (being immersed in the sights, sounds and smells of a forest), is a relaxation therapy that has been associated with physiological benefits, supporting the human immune function, reducing heart rate variability and salivary cortisol, and various psychological benefits. However, the reasons why we experience these psychological benefits from woodland remain unknown."

Joint senior author Professor Mireille Toledano (Director, Mohn Centre for Children's Health and Wellbeing and Investigator, MRC Centre for Environment and Health and Principal Investigator of the SCAMP study, Imperial College London) said: "It's been suggested previously that the benefits of natural environments to mental health are comparable in magnitude to family history, parental age and even more significant than factors like the degree of urbanisation around you, but lower than your parents' socio-economic status. Sensory and non-sensory pathways have been suggested as potentially important for delivering cognition and mental health benefits received from exposure to nature.

"It's critical for us to tease out why natural environments are so important to our mental health throughout the life course -- does the benefit derive from the physical exercise we do in these environments, from the social interactions we often have in them, or from the fauna and flora we get to enjoy in these environments or a combination of all of these?"

Joint senior author Professor Kate Jones (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, UCL Biosciences) said: "One possible explanation for our findings may be that audio-visual exposure through vegetation and animal abundance provides psychological benefits, of which both features are expected in higher abundance in woodland. Even though our results show that urban woodland is associated with adolescent's cognitive development and mental health, the cause of this association remains unknown. Further research is fundamental to our understanding of the links between nature and health."

To arrive at the findings, researchers analysed a longitudinal dataset of 3,568 adolescents between 2014 and 2018, whose residence was known, from the Study of Cognition, Adolescents and Mobile Phones (SCAMP) across the London metropolitan area. They assessed adolescents' mental health and overall well-being from a self-reported Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) -- covering areas such as emotional problems, conduct, hyperactivity and peer problems -- and the KIDSCREEN-10 Questionnaire taken by each adolescent for SCAMP.

Limitations of the study include an assumption that living or going to school near natural environments means more exposure to them, which may not always be the case due to how easily they can be accessed by a child or young person or how usable they are.

Also, a considerable proportion of the participants (52.21%) were in the group whose parents had a managerial/professional occupation, so adolescents in less favourable socio-economic groups may be underrepresented and pupils requiring special needs may be differently affected compared with their peers. Crime rates, which may have influenced the results too, were not taken into account.

Read more at Science Daily

Astronauts' mental health risks tested in the Antarctic

Astronauts who spend extended time in space face stressors such as isolation, confinement, lack of privacy, altered light-dark cycles, monotony and separation from family. Interestingly, so do people who work at international research stations in Antarctica, where the extreme environment is characterized by numerous stressors that mirror those present during long-duration space exploration.

To better understand the psychological hurdles faced by astronauts, University of Houston professor of psychology Candice Alfano and her team developed the Mental Health Checklist (MHCL), a self-reporting instrument for detecting mental health changes in isolated, confined, extreme (ICE) environments. The team used the MHCL to study psychological changes at two Antarctic stations. The findings are published in Acta Astronautica.

"We observed significant changes in psychological functioning, but patterns of change for specific aspects of mental health differed. The most marked alterations were observed for positive emotions such that we saw continuous declines from the start to the end of the mission, without evidence of a 'bounce-back effect' as participants were preparing to return home," reports Alfano. "Previous research both in space and in polar environments has focused almost exclusively on negative emotional states including anxiety and depressive symptoms. But positive emotions such as satisfaction, enthusiasm and awe are essential features for thriving in high-pressure settings."

Negative emotions also increased across the study, but changes were more variable and predicted by physical complaints. Collectively, these results might suggest that while changes in negative emotions are shaped by an interaction of individual, interpersonal and situational factors, declines in positive emotions are a more universal experience in ICE environments. "Interventions and counter measures aimed at enhancing positive emotions may, therefore, be critical in reducing psychological risk in extreme settings," said Alfano.

At coastal and inland Antarctic stations, Alfano and her team tracked mental health symptoms across a nine-month period, including the harshest winter months, using the MHCL. A monthly assessment battery also examined changes in physical complaints, biomarkers of stress such as cortisol, and the use of different emotion regulation strategies for increasing or decreasing certain emotions.

Study results also revealed that participants tended to use fewer effective strategies for regulating (i.e., increasing) their positive emotions as their time at the stations increased.

 Read more at Science Daily

Loss of a pet can potentially trigger mental health issues in children

 The death of a family pet can trigger a sense of grief in children that is profound and prolonged, and can potentially lead to subsequent mental health issues, according to a new study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). In a paper appearing in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the team found that the strong emotional attachment of youngsters to pets might result in measurable psychological distress that can serve as an indicator of depression in children and adolescents for as long as three years or more after the loss of a beloved pet.

"One of the first major losses a child will encounter is likely to be the death of a pet, and the impact can be traumatic, especially when that pet feels like a member of the family," says Katherine Crawford, CGC, previously with the Center for Genomic Medicine at MGH, and lead author of the study. "We found this experience of pet death is often associated with elevated mental health symptoms in children, and that parents and physicians need to recognize and take those symptoms seriously, not simply brush them off."

Roughly half of households in developed countries own at least one pet. And as the MGH investigators reported, the bonds that children form with pets can resemble secure human relationships in terms of providing affection, protection and reassurance. What's more, previous studies have shown that children often turn to pets for comfort and to voice their fears and emotional experiences. While the increased empathy, self-esteem and social competence that often flow from this interaction is clearly beneficial, the downside is the exposure of children to the death of a pet which, the MGH study found, occurs with 63 percent of children with pets during their first seven years of life.

Prior research has focused on the attachment of adults to pets and the consequences of an animal's death. The MGH team is the first to examine mental health responses in children. Their analysis is based on a sample of 6,260 children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), in Bristol, England. This population-based sample is replete with data collected from mothers and children that enabled researchers to track the experience of pet ownership and pet loss from a child's early age up to eight years.

"Thanks to this cohort, we were able to analyze the mental and emotional health of children after examining their experiences with pet death over an extended period," notes Erin Dunn, ScD, MPH, with the MGH Center for Genomic Medicine and Department of Psychiatry, and senior author of the study. "And we observed that the association between exposure to a pet's death and psychopathology symptoms in childhood occurred regardless of the child's socio-economic status or hardships they had already endured in their young lives."

Researchers also learned that the relationship between pet death and increased psychopathology was more pronounced in male than female children -- a finding that surprised them in light of prior research -- and that the strength of the association was independent of when the pet's death occurred during childhood, and how many times or how recently it occurred. According to Dunn, this latter finding speaks to "the durability of the bond with pets that is formed at a very early age, and how it can affect children across their development."

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Binge drinkers beware, Drunkorexia is calling

Mojito, appletini or a simple glass of fizz -- they may take the edge off a busy day, but if you find yourself bingeing on more than a few, you could be putting your physical and mental health at risk according new research at the University of South Australia.

Examining the drinking patterns of 479 female Australian university students aged 18-24 years, the world-first empirical study explored the underlying belief patterns than can contribute to Drunkorexia -- a damaging and dangerous behaviour where disordered patterns of eating are used to offset negative effects of consuming excess alcohol, such as gaining weight.

Concerningly, researchers found that a staggering 82.7 per cent of female university students surveyed had engaged in Drunkorexic behaviours over the past three months. And, more than 28 per cent were regularly and purposely skipping meals, consuming low-calorie or sugar-free alcoholic beverages, purging or exercising after drinking to help reduce ingested calories from alcohol, at least 25 per cent of the time.

Clinical psychologist and lead UniSA researcher Alycia Powell-Jones says the prevalence of Drunkorexic behaviours among Australian female university students is concerning.

"Due to their age and stage of development, young adults are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviours, which can include drinking excess alcohol," Powell-Jones says.

"Excess alcohol consumption combined with restrictive and disordered eating patterns is extremely dangerous and can dramatically increase the risk of developing serious physical and psychological consequences, including hypoglycaemia, liver cirrhosis, nutritional deficits, brain and heart damage, memory lapses, blackouts, depression and cognitive deficits.

"Certainly, many of us have drunk too much alcohol at some point in time, and we know just by how we feel the next day, that this is not good for us, but when nearly a third of young female uni students are intentionally cutting back on food purely to offset alcohol calories; it's a serious health concern."

The harmful use of alcohol is a global issue, with excess consumption causing millions of deaths, including many thousands of young lives.

In Australia, one in six people consume alcohol at dangerous levels, placing them at lifetime risk of an alcohol-related disease or injury. The combination of excessive alcohol intake with restrictive eating behaviours to offset calories can result in a highly toxic cocktail for this population.

The study was undertaken in two stages. The first measured the prevalence of self-reported, compensative and restrictive activities in relation to their alcohol consumption.

The second stage identified participants' Early Maladaptive Schemes (EMS) -- or thought patterns -- finding that that the subset of schemas most predictive of Drunkorexia were 'insufficient self-control', 'emotional deprivation' and 'social isolation'.

Powell-Jones says identifying the early maladaptive schemas linked to Drunkorexia is key to understanding the harmful condition.

These are deeply held and pervasive themes regarding oneself and one's relationship with others, that can develop in childhood and then can influence all areas of life, often in dysfunctional ways. Early maladaptive schemas can also be influenced by cultural and social norms.

Drunkorexic behaviour appears to be motivated by two key social norms for young adults -- consuming alcohol and thinness.

"This study has provided preliminary insight into better understanding why young female adults make these decisions to engage in Drunkorexic behaviours," Powell-Jones says.

"Not only may it be a coping strategy to manage social anxieties through becoming accepted and fitting in with peer group or cultural expectations, but it also shows a reliance on avoidant coping strategies.

"It is important that clinicians, educators, parents and friends are aware of the factors that motivate young women to engage in this harmful and dangerous behaviour, including cultural norms, beliefs that drive self-worth, a sense of belonging, and interpersonal connectedness.

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