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

Four studies of emotion processing

First, Flechsenhar, Seitz, Bertsch & Herpertz (2022) published “The Association Between Psychopathology, Childhood Trauma, and Emotion Processing” in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. I was drawn to this study because of its mention of transdiagnostic psychopathologies. The idea seems to be that, because the DSM often yields poor diagnostic accuracy, it may be wiser to use core constructs that relate to multiple diagnoses. Here’s the slightly edited abstract:

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Karen Nelson Karen Nelson

The Adverse Life Events Inventory for Children 

Meraj et al. (2022) published “Introducing the Adverse Life Events Inventory for Children (ALEIC): An examination of adverse experiences and related impacts in a large clinical sample of children and youth” in Traumatology. Here’s the abstract:

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Karen Nelson Karen Nelson

Play in Predictive Minds

Andersen, Kiverstein, Miller & Roepstorff (2022) published “Play in Predictive Minds: A cognitive theory of play” in Psychological Review.

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