Research Theme Park: Anxiety

A ride through recent studies on anxiety, highlighting the playful and the practical. Why anxious people prefer to worry than relax. City parks lift mood, and a bike helmet changes the perception of risk. Anxious triggers are less distracting as we get older, and for a select group of patients metformin may reduce anxiety and depression.

Date Published: 11/25/19

Duration: 11 minutes, 59 seconds

Studies Referenced:

1. Hanjoo Kim et al. The paradox of relaxation training: Relaxation induced anxiety and mediation effects of negative contrast sensitivity in generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder. Journal of Affective Disorders, 2019 (link (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31450137))

2. Aaron J. Schwartz, et al. Visitors to urban greenspace have higher sentiment and lower negativity on Twitter. People and Nature, 2019 (link ( https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10045))

3. Barbara Schmidt et al.  Wearing a bike helmet leads to less cognitive control, revealed by lower frontal midline theta power and risk indifference. Psychophysiology 2019 (link (https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13458))

4. Briana Kennedy et al. Age differences in emotion-induced blindness: Positivity effects in early attention. Emotion, 2019 (link (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335129558_Age_differences_in_emotion-induced_blindness_Positivity_effects_in_early_attention))

5. Caroline Charpentier, Enhanced Risk Aversion, But Not Loss Aversion, in Unmedicated Pathological Anxiety. Biological Psychiatry, 2017 (link (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5466268/))

6. Juliane Zemdegs et al. Metformin promotes anxiolytic and antidepressant-like responses in insulin-resistant mice by decreasing circulating branched-chain amino acids. The Journal of Neuroscience, 2019 (link (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31160539))

7. Fenqin Chen. Risk factors for depression in elderly diabetic patients and the effect of metformin on the condition. BMC Public Health. 2019 (link (https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7392-y))

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