In one recording, a mom spanks her 3-year-old 11 times for fighting with his sister. In another, a mom slaps her son for turning the page of a book while she reads to him. In still another, a mom spanks her 5-year-old when he refuses to clean up his room after repeated warnings to do so. Those are examples of the corporal punishment captured by a study of 37 families in which mothers voluntarily recorded th ...

Mental illness of a family member destroys the family’s connection with the religious community, a new study by Baylor University psychologists has found, leading many affected families to leave the church and their faith behind. The study shows that while families with a member who has mental illness have less involvement in faith practices, they would like their congregation to provide assistance with tho ...

We are one step closer to deciphering why some stressed people indulge in chocolate, mashed potatoes, ice cream, and other high-calorie, high-fat comfort foods. UT Southwestern Medical Center-led findings, in a mouse study, suggest that ghrelin – the so-called “hunger hormone” – is involved in triggering this reaction to high stress situations. The results will appear online today and in a future print edit ...

An Emory University study suggests that the brain activity of teens, recorded while they are listening to new songs, may help predict the popularity of the songs. "We have scientifically demonstrated that you can, to some extent, use neuroimaging in a group of people to predict cultural popularity," says Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist and director of Emory's Center for Neuropolicy. The Journal of Consumer ...

A new study shows that being married boosts survival odds for both men and women with colon cancer at every stage of the disease. Married patients had a 14 percent lower risk of death according to researchers at Penn State's College of Medicine and Brigham Young University. That estimate is based on analysis of 127,753 patient records. ...

The quality of interactions among married couples is affected by wives' inability to fall asleep at night, but not by husbands' sleep problems, suggests new research that will be presented Monday, June 13, in Minneapolis, Minn., at SLEEP 2011, the 25th Anniversary Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC (APSS). ...

Just like everyone else, people with panic disorder have real stress in their lives. They get laid off and they fight with their spouses. How such stresses affect their panic symptoms has not been well understood, but a new study by researchers at Brown University presents the counterintuitive finding that certain kinds of stressful life events cause panic symptoms to increase gradually over succeeding mont ...

Women with urinary incontinence after giving birth are almost twice as likely to develop postpartum depression as those without incontinence, according to a new study led by Wendy Sword, a professor in McMaster University’s School of Nursing. The results appear online in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. ...

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have identified abnormal brain structures in the frontal lobe of cocaine users' brains which are linked to their compulsive cocaine-using behavior. The research was led by Dr. Ersche of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI) at the University of Cambridge. Their findings were published today, 21 June, in the journal Brain. ...

Picture a menacing drill sergeant, a gory slaughterhouse, a devastating scene of a natural disaster. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that viewing such emotion-laden images immediately after taking a test actually enhances people's retention of the tested material. The data the researchers gathered in recent studies are the first to show that negative arousal following successful ...