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
Emotion and PTSD
Today, we’re looking at two studies of emotion processing in PTSD. First, Zhan, Zhang, Gong & Geng (2023) published “Clinical Correlates of Irritability, Anger, Hostility, and Aggression in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. The edited abstract and impact statement are as follows:
Mom’s gut biome
Here, I present two studies of the gut biome. First, Eisenstadt published “How a Mother’s Microbiome Helps Shape Her Baby’s Development” on the Broad Institute (2022) on the Broad Institute website, citing Vatanen, Jabbar et al.
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:
New treatments for borderline personality disorder
I have written twice before about research pertaining to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).. Here, I want to summarize two recent studies on treatment. First, Keefe et al. (2022) published “Reflective Functioning and Its Potential to Moderate the Efficacy of Manualized Psychodynamic Therapies Versus Other Treatments for Borderline Personality Disorder” in Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.