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
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:
Making Schools a Welcoming Place for Immigrant Students
Ross (2023) published “Making Schools a Welcoming Place for Immigrant Students: How educators can help newcomers in the classroom” in Harvard Graduate School of Education’s (HGSE) Usable Knowledge. I am presenting the article with minimal editing because it is very important and offers helpful links to other resources:
Four studies of trauma effects
Here, I present four recent studies related to trauma. First, Truss, Liao Siling, Phillips, Eastwood & Bendall (2022) published “Barriers to Young People Seeking Help for Trauma: A qualitative analysis of Internet forums” in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Here’s a slightly edited transcript:
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:
Complex posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms
Gallagher, Moreland, Watters & Yalch (2022) published “Relative Effects of Childhood Trauma, Intimate Partner Violence, and Other Traumatic Life Events on Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms” in Traumatology. Here’s the abstract: