A zebrafish experiment found that one 1-hour ayahuasca exposure reversed several effects of 14 days of unpredictable chronic stress: impaired sociability, anxiety-like behavior, stress-related hyperlocomotion, elevated cortisol, and reduced whole-brain BDNF.1 The result is mechanistic animal evidence, not a clinical trial of ayahuasca for human depression or anxiety. Research Highlights 14 days of chronic stress …
A 2026 qualitative study of 71 UK National Health Service workers argued that a shift into “war-mode” leadership during an atypical crisis could push moral stress, distress, conflict, and suffering toward moral injury.1 Moral-injury endpoint: moral injury was the severe endpoint, while unresolved lower-consequence moral phenomena may become the pathway to it. Research Highlights 71 …
A 2026 adolescent depression study used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to test whether childhood trauma leaves a measurable network signature in the depressed teen brain. The researchers found disrupted default-mode network hubs in teenagers with major depressive disorder and childhood trauma, and baseline functional-connectome patterns predicted treatment response with 82% accuracy.1 Research Highlights Large …
A 2026 study of 250 mothers of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs) found that family burden was strongly tied to lower social support, lower family quality of life, and lower happiness. In the structural model, the burden-happiness link was explained by perceived support and family quality of life rather than a direct burden-to-happiness …
A 2026 mouse circuit study found that restraint stress progressively reduced medial prefrontal social coding: mPFC excitatory-neuron transient rates fell to roughly 70-80% of baseline after acute stress and nearly 50% after chronic stress, while suppressing either basolateral-amygdala input or hypothalamic oxytocin input restored social discrimination and behavior.1 The result is a circuit-specific oxytocin finding, …
A 2026 rat study found that foot-shock stress transiently reduced food-cue approach during the first 2 conditioned-stimulus trials (t = 2.807; P < 0.05), and inhibiting the nucleus of the solitary tract weakened that stress effect.1 The useful finding is selective: stress used an NTS-linked route to dampen cue-evoked VTA dopamine, while outcome-specific satiety reduced ...
A 2026 pilot trial tested a classroom program for children's climate anxiety: art projects plus guided discussion were supposed to help students express climate emotions and build coping skills. The intervention did not work better than waitlist control, but it also did not make children more anxious. Research Highlights The intervention failed to separate: 46 …