What if a jury could decide a man’s guilt through mind reading? What if reading a defendant’s memory could betray their guilt? And what constitutes ‘intent’ to commit murder? These are just some of the issues debated and reviewed in the inaugural issue of WIREs Cognitive Science, the latest interdisciplinary project from Wiley-Blackwell, which for registered institutions will be free for the first two years. [continue reading…]
January 2010
The extent of mental health problems is increasing, and has become one of the biggest challenges facing Europe today. As much as 10-25 per cent of women are at risk of developing serious depression during their lifetime. This implies that a large number of European women will experience mental problems such as anxiety and depression, which are more frequent among women than men. How can the health services improve safeguarding women’s mental health? Kristin Akerjordets thesis at the University of Stavanger offers an important clue: By training health personnel in emotional intelligence, they will be better equipped to prevent women from developing depressive illnesses. [continue reading…]
A group of 74 US veterans has been involved in clinical trials which appear to have objectively diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), something conventional brain scans, be it X-ray, CT or MRI, have thus far failed to do.
The findings, published today, Wednesday, 20 January, in IOP Publishing’s Journal of Neural Engineering, have sprung from advances in magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive measurement of magnetic fields in the brain. [continue reading…]
Recent research indicates that school burnout among adolescents is shared with parental work burnout. Children of parents suffering from burnout are more likely than others to experience school burnout. Funding from the Academy of Finland has supported the first ever scientific study into the associations between adolescents’ and parents’ burnout. School burnout is a chronic school-related stress syndrome that is manifested in fatigue, experiences of cynicism about school and a sense of inadequacy as a student.
For this study estimates of school burnout were obtained from 515 ninth-grade schoolchildren aged 15. Estimates of work burnout were obtained from 595 parents of these adolescents. The results showed that experiences of burnout were shared in families. “Experiences of burnout were shared most particularly between adolescents and parents of the same gender, i.e. between daughters and mothers and between sons and fathers. [continue reading…]
