Depression

Children learn from their parents’ emotional expressions because one’s parents are the main source of social information, especially on an emotional level. Depression hinders the parents’ ability to express these emotions, in turn, hindering the child’s ability to identify and express emotions as they get older. Parents self-reported their everyday depressive symptoms and were placed into two depressive categories: high and low. By means of a story-telling paradigm, each parent read 2 stories to their child, one positively and one negatively valanced. This study looked at the parent-child dyadic interaction, as well as behavioral patterns of interactions in both children and parents. Parents’ depressive symptoms affected their ability to be expressive during emotionally valenced situations. Parent-child pairs also had less dyadic unity when depressive symptoms were prevalent. Depressive symptoms in the parent also led to the child expressing fewer relevant emotions and having lower comprehension of emotions. The findings suggest that depressive symptoms in the parents, even at a subclinical level, not only affect the parents’ emotional expressivity but also leads to weaker emotional processing skills in their preschoolers.

The purpose of this randomized control study was to examine the effects of the use of a mindfulness smartphone app on student self-reported levels of depression, anxiety, and stress, and serum levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). The sample included college students enrolled in courses at a university in South Florida. Forty-four students were randomly allocated to either the mindfulness app group (n = 22) or the control group (n = 22).
Participants in the mindfulness app group were instructed to complete a guided meditation on the app for 10 minutes per day for 5 weeks. Participants in the control group were offered the intervention after the 5-week protocol ended. A pretest-posttest design was used to investigate the effects of the mindfulness app intervention on self-reported levels of depression, anxiety, and stress, in addition to serum level BDNF.

The challenges inherent in pursuing a medical education can leave many students at risk of experiencing stress and burnout. Premedical and medical students have been found to experience high levels of stress, anxiety, and depression (Fang et al., 2010; Niemi & Vainiomaki, 2006; Vitaliano, Russo, Carr, & Heerwagen, 1984). The sources of stress for premedical and medical students include academic obligations, the financial burden of paying for medical school, and family relationships. If excessive stress is left untreated it can result in negative health risks such as depression, anxiety, suicide ideation, and other physiological distress disorders.
There are proven ways to reduce the stress levels of students, including eating well, exercise, and peer support. Mindfulness meditation is also known to be a useful method for lowering perceived stress and improve academic performance. This study investigated how participation in a 7-week mindfulness meditation intervention impacts the perceived stress, depression, and anxiety levels of premedical and medical students. Self-regulation theory (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; McClelland et al., 2018) was used as the theoretical framework for this study to indirectly discover if mindfulness meditation is a practice that can improve students’ ability to calm themselves when facing high stress situations and to focus their thoughts on a goal.

Depression is associated with higher severity of memory disorders and has been
shown to predict lower levels of cognitive functioning in those diagnosed with Mild
Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or dementia. Yet, little is known about this association
cross-culturally, particularly between Hispanics and European Americans.
This study demonstrates that although levels of depression differed significantly
across diagnostic group, Hispanics and European Americans were similar in levels of
depression at each diagnosis. However, only for the European American group did
depression levels predict lower scores in confrontational naming and semantic memory.
Additionally, exploratory analyses of the entire sample demonstrated that lower
depression predicted less likelihood of MCI or dementia diagnoses. This could indicate
that there is a need for intervention and treatment of depression, in particular for later
stages of MCI and dementia, that should be culturally catered to individual ethnicities.