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

Karen Nelson Karen Nelson

The development of callous-unemotional traits

Robertson et al. (2023) published “The Bidirectional Effects of Antisocial Behavior, Anxiety, and Trauma Exposure: Implications for our understanding of the development of callous–unemotional traits” in Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. I want to begin by differentiating primary from secondary variants of callous-unemotional traits; while people with primary variants have callous-unemotional traits and low anxiety, those with secondary variants tend to have callous-unemotional traits, high anxiety, and histories of trauma. Here’s the edited abstract and impact statement with some information in bold:

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