A 20-minute evening back massage may help relieve pain and reduce anxiety following major surgery when given in addition to pain medications, according to a report in the December issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Turns out there might be some truth to the popular wisdom that plump babies are happy babies. A landmark public health study has found that people who had a low birth weight are more likely to experience depression and anxiety later in life.

Just in time for Halloween, researchers are releasing new data that show darkness increases the impact of social stress, in an article scheduled for publication in the November 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry. As children and adults alike gear up for the anticipation and excitement of this “spooky” holiday, this study lends a further understanding to our inherent fear of the dark.

Your height in adult life significantly affects your quality of life, with short people reporting worse physical and mental health than people of normal height. This large, peer reviewed study, which appears in Clinical Endocrinology, shows that adult height is linked to how good a person thinks their health is. Short people judge their state of health to be significantly lower than their normal height peers do.

A new study finds that young girls and women are more likely to believe that negative past events predict future events, compared to boys and men. And that, according to researchers, may help explain why females have more frequent and intense worries, perceive more risk, have greater intolerance for uncertainty, and experience higher rates of anxiety than males.

When a child is distressed, anxious, or angry, mom and dad don’t have to respond in the same way. A new study finds that when both parents are supportive, they may shield the child from handling negative emotions.

When a young child experiences negative emotions—anger, anxiety, or distress—can his parents respond in a way that fosters the child’s emotional development?

The conception and birth of a child are emotional events that influence the dreams of most new mothers. In a surprisingly high number of cases, this influence reflects negative aspects of maternal responsibility, depicting the new infant in dreamed situations of danger and provoking anxiety in the mother that often spills over into wakefulness.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a highly prestigious Career Development Award to Naomi Marmorstein, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers-Camden, who will use the $649,503 grant to further her intensive research on how children’s anxiety and depression may be associated with substance abuse throughout adulthood.

A new study suggests that women with chronic issues with their body-image are more likely to benefit from an exercise class where the instructor emphasizes the health benefits of the workout over improved appearance, even if those women chose the class in hopes of improving their physique.

A literature review published in the August issue of the Journal of Periodontology (JOP) saw a strong relationship between stress and periodontal diseases; 57% of the studies included in the review showed a positive relationship between periodontal diseases and psychological factors such as stress, distress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

The discovery of a novel molecular switch that powerfully modulates nerve cell activity offers the potential for new mood disorder and epilepsy treatments, University of California, Irvine researchers report.