Background Music Can Impair Performance, Cites New Study
For decades research has shown that listening to music alleviates anxiety and depression, enhances mood, and can increase cognitive functioning, such as spatial awareness. However, until now, research has not addressed how we listen to music...

People With Severe Depression 'Find It Harder To Judge Facial Expressions'
New research shows people with severe depression find it harder to interpret facial expressions than healthy people - particularly expressions of disgust. The study, published in the August issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, was carried out by researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand...

Could A Diagnostic Blood Test Be Created For Depression?
Psychiatry, unlike many other areas of medicine, lacks diagnostic blood tests. Blood tests have been extremely useful in helping doctors make medical diagnoses and aiding them in treatment options for conditions and diseases in most medical fields...

Discovery Of Genetic Link To Children's Emotional Problems Precipitated By Bullying
Bullying victimization is common among children of school age, although its consequences are often anything but benign. The recent death of a Massachusetts teen by suicide prompted state lawmakers to pass one of the most far-reaching anti-bullying laws within the U.S...

A Blood Test For Depression?
Blood tests have been extremely important tools aiding doctors in making medical diagnoses and in guiding the treatment of many diseases. However, psychiatry is one area of medicine where there are few diagnostic blood tests. New scientific fields may someday generate blood tests that can be used for these purposes...

New Links Between Cholesterol And Depression In The Elderly
Most people know that high cholesterol levels place them at increased risk for heart disease and stroke. Prior research has shown that particular types of strokes contribute to one's risk for depression, and that abnormal blood lipid levels can increase the risk of depression in the elderly...

HCV Therapy Compromised When Depression Overlooked In Patients With Hepatitis C
Researchers from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland (the NORDynamIC project group) have observed that depressive symptoms in patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection are commonly overlooked in routine clinical interviews, and that treatment-induced depression compromises the outcome of HCV therapy. A second U.S...

When You Feel Blue, Why Does Everything Look Gray ?
Regardless of culture, language, era, or individual artist, the arts consistently depict depression using darkness. Scientific findings now lend empirical support to this representation of depression that everything looks gray when you feel blue...

News From The American Academy Of Family Physicians, July/August 2010
American Academy of Family Physicians - Coca-Cola Alliance, Conflict of Interest or Ethical Relationship? In an essay addressing the recent controversy over the American Academy of Family Physicians accepting a large corporate donation from The Coca-Cola Company to fund patient education materials on obesity prevention, family physician and AAFP member Howard Brody, M.D., Ph.D...

The Neural Basis Of The Depressive Self
Depression, known to be a condition with impaired psychosocial functioning that severely impacts the quality of life of patients and families, is actually defined with specific clinical symptoms such as sadness, difficulty to experience pleasure, sleep problems etc., present for at least two weeks...

Researchers Discover Novel Therapeutic For Chronic Pain
Columbia scientists working to combat injury-related depression, substance abuse and suicide due to unremitting, persistent pain may have discovered a new way of treating that pain: a powerful analgesic dubbed N60 that leads to neither tolerance nor addiction. Pain is a perception in the brain triggered by signals sent along nerves in the peripheral nervous system...

Brooding Russians: Less Distressed Than Americans
Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy portrayed Russians as a brooding, complicated people, and ethnographers have confirmed that Russians tend to focus on dark feelings and memories more than Westerners do. But a new University of Michigan study finds that even though Russians tend to brood, they are less likely than Americans to feel as depressed as a result...

Increased Risk Of Cardiovascular Problems In Depressed Men With Erectile Dysfunction
A new study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine found that the presence of depressive symptoms in men with erectile dysfunction constitutes a risk factor for a major cardiovascular event. Erectile dysfunction and depressive mood are often associated, and both are associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and death...

Two Years Later: DIAMOND Program Continues To Get Nearly 50% Of Patients With Depression Into Remission Within Six Months
The DIAMOND program (Depression Improvement Across Minnesota, Offering a New Direction) continues to get at least five times as many patients into remission by six months than patients receiving typical primary care treatment, according to two-year findings reported by the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement...

Apathy And Depression Predict Progression From Mild Cognitive Impairment To Dementia
A new Mayo Clinic study found that apathy and depression significantly predict an individual's progression from mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a disorder of the brain that affects nerve cells involved in thinking abilities, to dementia, including Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia...