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
Childhood maltreatment and adult chronic health conditions
Fitzgerald (2023) published “Serial Indirect Effects from Childhood Maltreatment to Adult Chronic Health Conditions Through Contemporary Family Relationships and Mental Health Problems: Inquiry into sleep disturbances and stress” in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. As usual, I have edited the abstract with some information in bold:
Parental burnout, emotion suppression, and sleep
I am presenting abstracts of two studies related to exhaustion and sleep. In the first, Blanchard, Hoebeke & Heeren (2023) published “Parental Burnout Features and the Family Context: A temporal network approach in mothers” in Journal of Family Psychology. Here’s the abstract with some information in bold:
Sleep and depression – three studies
I have written about sleep before. Here, I present three studies all relating to effects of sleep problems on adolescents and each using a different methodology. In the first, Hoyniak, Whalen, Hennefield, Tillman, Barch & Luby (2022) published “Early Childhood Sleep Problems Predict Increased Risk for the Later Development of Suicidal Thoughts” in Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. They begin by noting that, “Suicidal thoughts and behaviors in youth are an escalating and immediate public health concern.” Here’s more from the abstract:
Parents are wrong about teenage sleep and health
The Harvard Gazette published “Parents Are So Wrong About Teenage Sleep and Health” on September 28, 2022. They summarize results of a survey conducted by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Primary care providers’ practices regarding patient sleep: Impact of integrated behavioral health
Golden, Cosottile, Meadows, Parikh & O'Dell (2022) published “Primary Care Providers’ Practices Regarding Patient Sleep: Impact of integrated behavioral health” in Families, Systems, & Health. I have written before about sleep and about interdisciplinary teams; this work combines the two. Here’s the abstract:
Bidirectional associations between nightly sleep and daily happiness and negative mood in adolescents
Kouros, Keller, Martin-Pinon & El-Sheikh (2022) published “Bidirectional Associations Between Nightly Sleep and Daily Happiness and Negative Mood in Adolescents” in Child Development. I have written about sleep before, but like this study because it uses both sleep diaries and actigraphy with a relatively diverse sample. Here’s the abstract: