studies & articles
The Blog
One of the many pleasures of being a professor was feeling the need to stay on top of the research in psychology. When I first learned about the half-life of knowledge, the literature typically said it was 3-5 years in technical fields. As a retired professor, I am still a member of the American Psychological Association and subscribe to a service that delivers abstracts and open-source articles from a large number of journals. As an alumna of Harvard, I also get information from them and I have the time to peruse multiple sources. This is a pleasure most professionals don’t have, especially if they value
work-life balance.
I still love research and, when I was asked to write the blog, I enthusiastically agreed. I try to select articles based on their relevance to practitioners, but also to capture both emerging themes and important corrections. I am hopeful that, moving forward, we will have ways to enable readers to easily engage in conversations with me and each other.
-Dr. Karen Nelson
Two studies of shyness
Today, I offer two studies of shyness that seem to me to have quite similar implications. First, Bekkhus, McVarnock, Coplan, Ulset & Kraft (2023) published “Developmental Changes in the Structure of Shyness and Internalizing Symptoms from Early to Middle Childhood: A network analysis” in Child Development. Here’s the abstract:
Consequences of COVID
Increasingly, COVID research has focused on specific challenges. Here, I present information about four studies of its effects. First, we look at effects of COVID during the early years of the pandemic. First, Delagneau, Twilhaar, Testa, van Veen & Anderson (2022) published “Association Between Prenatal Maternal Anxiety and/or Stress and Offspring's Cognitive Functioning: A meta-analysis” in Child Development. Here are edited parts of the article:
Differential responses to COVID
I am presenting three more studies related to the COVID-19 pandemic. First, Howell et al (2022) published “The Role of Uncertainty, Worry, and Control in well-being: Evidence from the COVID-19 outbreak and pandemic in U.S. and China” in Emotion. Here’s the abstract:
Mental Health Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Several recent studies focus on adverse impacts of the pandemic on particular subpopulations. In the first, Mitchell, Banyard, Ybarra & Dunsiger (2022) published “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic for Youth with a History of Exposure to Self-directed Violence” in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy.