Violence against teachers, musical connections, and more research

A number of studies have examined the prevalence, predictors, and consequences of violence against teachers. What do teachers themselves think is working or not working to improve the situation? According to a study in School Psychology, teachers say suspending or expelling students is the least effective way of addressing student violence against educators. Researchers conducted an online survey in 2020 and 2021 of 4,471 pre-K to high school teachers in the United States. Teachers reported on their school’s use and effectiveness of 21 common safety measures, broken down into four categories: exclusionary discipline (e.g., student suspension and expulsion), prevention (e.g., engaging students), school hardening (e.g., use of metal detectors), and crisis intervention (e.g., using physical restraint during violent episodes). Teachers also reported how often they experienced 13 different types of violence from students in the past year, including verbal attacks, threats, and physical and property violence. Teachers rated prevention as the most effective strategy, followed by crisis intervention, school hardening, and exclusionary practices. The use of exclusionary practices was associated with the most reports of violence against teachers, followed by crisis intervention. Prevention practices and school hardening had no association with teachers’ reports of violence.
DOI: 10.1037/spq0000576opens in new window

According to research in Translational Issues in Psychological Science, athletes with underlying mood disturbances and athletes who recently sustained concussions performed comparably on neurocognitive tests. Researchers examined data from 119 college athletes in the United States with baseline depression and/or anxiety or postconcussion healthy mood, based on affective symptomatology and injury status. The researchers found no differences in neurocognitive performance between groups. Compared with the postconcussion group, the baseline depression/anxiety group reported more neurocognitive impairment symptoms and higher postconcussion symptom scale scores despite not experiencing a recent concussion. The researchers suggested having an accurate baseline, as well as a better understanding of ways in which depression and anxiety may influence neuropsychological testing and symptom reporting, can help inform return-to-learn and return-to-play decisions and may prevent athletes from being withheld from activity unnecessarily.
DOI: 10.1037/tps0000344opens in new window

Research in Psychological Bulletin suggests that losing sleep can increase anxiety, degrade mood, and undermine emotional functioning. Researchers analyzed data from 154 sleep studies with 5,715 total participants. In each study, researchers disrupted participants’ sleep for one or more nights. Participants were kept awake for extended periods, slept less than usual, or were awakened periodically throughout the night. Following sleep manipulation, researchers measured at least one emotion-related variable, such as participants’ self-reported mood, their response to emotional stimuli, and depression and anxiety symptoms. The current study’s researchers found that all three types of sleep loss resulted in fewer positive emotions, including joy, happiness, and contentment, as well as increased anxiety symptoms such as a rapid heart rate and increased worrying. Findings for symptoms of depression were smaller and less consistent. The findings were also more mixed for negative emotions such as sadness, worry, and stress.
DOI: 10.1037/bul0000410opens in new window

Working in remote teams can stifle innovation, according to a study in Nature that suggests that in-person collaborators make more “disruptive,” or breakthrough, discoveries. Researchers analyzed 20,134,803 papers published by 22,566,650 scientists across 3,562 cities between 1960 and 2020, and 4,060,564 patents filed by 2,732,326 inventors across 87,937 cities between 1976 and 2020. They looked at the affiliations and geographic range of authors and patent contributors. They also used a form of citation analysis called the “D score” to assess publications according to how disruptive they were. They found that while remote teams can benefit from greater collective knowledge, far-flung teams don’t integrate fully and are less likely to engage in conceptual tasks. This characteristic makes them better suited to make incremental, rather than disruptive, progress.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06767-1opens in new window

When making music as a group, people who synchronize their musical rhythm with others feel a stronger sense of social connection, suggests research in Psychology of Music. Researchers grouped 49 university students, ages 18 to 25, in the United Kingdom into duos and trios and asked them to play percussion sounds on MIDI keyboards for 10 minutes without talking or looking at each other. Every minute, the participants rated their connection with other group members. Participants who engaged in longer periods of spontaneous synchronization during the music-making session, as indicated by the researchers’ subjective assessments and a machine-learning algorithm, reported greater average connectedness with their group during the task. The researchers did not find a significant change in happiness levels after the music-making session.
DOI: 10.1177/03057356231207049opens in new window

Infants primarily learn language through rhythm—the rise and fall of tone—rather than individual sounds, suggests research in Nature Communications. Researchers recorded patterns of electrical brain activity in 50 infants in the United Kingdom at 4, 7, and 11 months old as they watched a video of a primary school teacher singing 18 nursery rhymes to an infant. The infants’ low-frequency brainwave activity was fed through an algorithm, producing a readout of the encoded phonological information. The researchers found that phonetic information—individual speech sounds—wasn’t successfully encoded until 7 months old and was still sparse at 11 months old when babies began to say their first words. The researchers claim this timeline is too late to form the foundation of language.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43490-xopens in new window

According to a study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, lower cognitive skills result in unrealistic expectations and, consequently, poor decision-making, particularly in financial matters. A researcher analyzed survey data from a nationally representative sample of 36,312 adults in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland between 2009 and 2021. The survey assessed cognitive skills—such as memory, word recall, verbal fluency, math ability, and abstract thought—and initial expectations about financial well-being in 2009 and actual financial outcomes in 2021. The findings indicate that those with the highest cognitive ability were able to predict realistic financial outcomes more accurately compared with those with the lowest cognitive ability.
DOI: 10.1177/01461672231209400opens in new window

After generally declining for decades, suicide rates among adolescents in the United States accelerated from 2011 to 2018, possibly because of consequences of the nation’s illicit opioid crisis, according to a study in Demography. An analysis of census data from 1980 to 2020 indicated 48,063 suicides among children ages 10 to 17. While suicide rates declined between 1980 and 2010, rates started rising in 2011, with the biggest uptick in cases occurring in states that mandated a reformulation of opioid medications such as prescription OxyContin into abuse-proof pills. This reformulation drove many opioid users to illicit forms such as heroin and fentanyl. Drug overdoses among children ages 10 to 17 were stable between 2011 and 2020, suggesting that changes in living conditions and parental neglect, which also spiked in states experiencing reformulation, were behind the surge in suicides, not a rise in adolescent drug abuse. An additional analysis suggests that the reformulation of OxyContin may explain 49% of the rise in child suicides from 2011 to 2020. The effects of reformulation on child suicides disproportionately affected White children and Asian American and Pacific Islander children.
DOI: 10.1215/00703370-11077660opens in new window

An analysis of more than 1 million people’s genomes published in Nature Genetics has identified stretches of DNA that could be linked to cannabis addiction, which affects around a third of people who use the drug. Researchers conducted a genome-wide association study on 1,054,365 individuals in the United States from multiple ethnic groups, a first for a genetic study looking at cannabis use. They identified hundreds of risk variants located in 22 chromosomal locations significantly associated with cannabis use disorder. Some of these chromosomal locations were unique to specific ethnic groups. Overlapping regions of the genome were also found to be related to other health conditions, such as lung cancer and schizophrenia. In addition, the researchers saw a bidirectional link between excessive cannabis use and schizophrenia, meaning that the two conditions can influence each other. They also found evidence that chronic pain might act as a driving factor for cannabis use disorder.
DOI: 10.1038/s41588-023-01563-zopens in new window

According to a study in JAMA Psychiatry, hypochondriacs face a significantly higher risk of death, particularly suicide, compared with individuals without the condition. Researchers analyzing national registries of people living in Sweden between 1997 and 2020 identified 4,129 individuals with hypochondriasis, or health anxiety disorder, and 41,290 demographically matched individuals without the condition. The researchers found that individuals with hypochondriasis had an 84% higher risk of dying from any cause compared with those without the disorder. This increased risk extended to both natural causes, such as diseases of the circulatory system (1.60-fold increased risk), and unnatural causes (2.4-fold increased risk), particularly suicide (4.1-fold increased risk). The study also found that individuals with hypochondriasis tended to die at a younger age (average 70 years) compared with those without the condition (average 75 years).
DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2023.4744opens in new window

Research in Nature Neuroscience suggests that traumatic memories are represented profoundly differently from sad memories in the brains of people with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Researchers conducted brain scans of 28 people with PTSD in the United States while they listened to recorded narrations of their own memories, which were neutral, simply sad, or traumatic. They found that the hippocampus, part of the brain that organizes and contextualizes memories, was highly activated when participants listened to neutral and sad memories, such as the death of a family member. When the participants listened to their traumatic memories, such as sexual assaults and school shootings, the hippocampus was not involved. Instead, these memories engaged the posterior cingulate cortex, a brain region involved in introspection and daydreaming. The researchers suggest that their findings point to the efficacy of treatments involving revisiting traumatic memories: Reliving the memories helps organize and consolidate them into the hippocampus so they can live there as memories and not intrude on the present experience.
DOI: 10.1038/s41593-023-01483-5opens in new window

A study in Science Advances provides evidence that dopamine levels can encode both reward and punishment via independent pathways in the human brain. Researchers used a carbon-fiber electrode inserted into the brain, paired with machine learning, to detect and measure real-time dopamine levels in the brain’s striatum—a region important for cognition, decision-making, and coordinated movements—in three patients undergoing deep brain stimulation to treat essential tremor. The measurements were acquired while the patients played a simple video game featuring rewards and punishments. The researchers found that dopamine not only plays a role in signaling both positive and negative experiences in the brain, but it seems to do so in a way that optimizes learning. They also identified independent pathways in the brain that engage the dopamine system differently for rewarding versus punishing experiences and that operate on independent timescales. The researchers hope their findings illuminate how the dopamine system functions in humans with psychiatric and neurological disorders.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adi4927opens in new window

Despite previously observed reductions in neural docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) concentration among preterm babies and studies showing increased IQ with DHA supplementation, a study in JAMA Pediatrics indicates that supplementing infants born at less than 29 weeks’ gestation with the chemical has no impact on behavioral functioning later in life. Researchers randomized 731 infants born in Australia before 29 weeks to receive either daily 60 mg/kg doses of DHA or a soy-oil emulsion from within the first 3 days of feeding until 36 weeks postmenstrual age or discharge home, whichever occurred first. Researchers then followed up with the children 5 years later using parent-reported surveys. They found no improvement in behavioral functioning or health for the children who received DHA.
DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.4924opens in new window

The co-occurrence of abuse and poor physical and mental health is higher than previously thought, according to research in Nature Medicine. Researchers performed a meta-analysis on 229 studies that investigated intimate partner violence and childhood sexual abuse and their associated health effects. They discovered that exposure to intimate partner violence had an association with an increased risk of major depressive disorders (63%) and an increased risk of maternal abortion and miscarriage (35%). Childhood sexual abuse was shown to be associated with an increased risk of alcohol use and an increased risk of self-harm (45% and 35%, respectively). Associations between intimate partner violence and childhood sexual abuse and other health outcomes such as asthma, Type 2 diabetes, and sexually transmitted infections were also identified. The researchers state that these health impacts, which are observational and not evidence of causality, are larger in magnitude and more extensive than previously reported.
DOI: 10.1038/s41591-023-02629-5opens in new window

According to a study in The Lancet Psychiatry, more than half of all teenagers, young adults, and adults who received attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medication had stopped taking it within the first year. Researchers analyzed prescription data from more than 1.2 million patients who started ADHD medication in Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States. They found that within 1 year of initiation, 35% of children (under 12 years), 53% of adolescents (12 to 17 years), 61% of young adults (18 to 24 years), and 52% of adults (25 years and older) discontinued their treatment. The highest rate of discontinuation was seen in 18- and 19-year-olds. At the 5-year follow-up, only 50% to 60% of children and 30% to 40% of adolescents and adults had continued taking their medication. Patterns were similar across countries and genders.
DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(23)00332-2opens in new window

According to research in Nature Human Behaviour, the replication crisis in experimental psychology can be solved by using rigorous and careful experimental conditions. Four research groups tested the prospective replicability of 16 novel experimental findings using rigorous, gold-standard practices: self-confirmatory tests, large sample sizes, preregistration, and methodological transparency. In addition, all labs agreed to publish the initial confirmation studies regardless of their outcome. This removed the all-too-common bias of only publishing and replicating positive outcomes. Working under these conditions, the research groups produced results that were replicable 86% of the time, which was much higher than expected based on the sizes of the samples and the observed effects.
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01749-9opens in new window