According to the National Institute of Mental Health, social anxiety disorder affects approximately 15 million American adults and is the third most common mental disorder in the United States, after depression and alcohol dependence.

The essential feature of the disorder is the fear of being evaluated by others, with the expectation that such an assessment will be negative and embarrassing. It tends to run a chronic and unremitting course and often leads to the development of alcoholism and depression. The disorder most often surfaces in adolescence or early adulthood, but it can occur at any time, including childhood.

Using single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), researchers in The Netherlands were able to detect biochemical differences in the brains of individuals with generalized social anxiety disorder (also known as social phobia), providing evidence of a long-suspected biological cause for the dysfunction.

Older adults with low blood levels of vitamin D and high blood levels of a hormone secreted by the parathyroid glands may have a higher risk of depression, according to a report in Archives of General Psychiatry.

About 13 percent of older individuals have symptoms of depression, and other researchers have speculated that vitamin D may be linked to depression and other psychiatric illnesses, according to background information in the article.

“Underlying causes of vitamin D deficiency such as less sun exposure as a result of decreased outdoor activity, different housing or clothing habits and decreased vitamin intake may be secondary to depression, but depression may also be the consequence of poor vitamin D status,” the authors write. “Moreover, poor vitamin D status causes an increase in serum parathyroid hormone levels.” Overactive parathyroid glands are frequently accompanied by symptoms of depression that disappear after treatment of the condition.

Parents of children with autism were roughly twice as likely to have been hospitalized for a mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, than parents of other children, according to an analysis of Swedish birth and hospital records by a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researcher and colleagues in the U.S. and Europe.

It's legal, it's gaining popularity among teenagers and young adults and it's one of the most potent hallucinogens around.

Brain-imaging studies performed in animals at Brookhaven National Laboratory have provided researchers with clues about why this increasingly popular recreational drug that causes hallucinations and motor-function impairment in humans is abused. Using trace amounts of Salvia divinorum – also known as “salvia,” a Mexican mint plant that can be smoked in the form of dried leaves or serum – Brookhaven scientists found that the drug’s behavior in the brains of primates mimics the extremely fast and brief “high” observed in humans.

Numerous states have placed controls on salvia or salvinorin A – the plant’s active component – and others, including New York, are considering restrictions.

“This is probably one of the most potent hallucinogens known,” said Brookhaven chemist Jacob Hooker, the lead author of the study, which is the first to look at how the drug travels through the brain. “It’s really important that we study drugs like salvia and how they affect the brain in order to understand why they are abused and to investigate their medicinal relevance, both of which can inform policy makers.”

Are you exhausted? Do you have pain all over but can’t figure out what’s wrong? If so, you may be suffering from fibromyalgia, a chronic condition that causes exhaustion, sleep disturbances and diffuse pain in your muscles, tendons, and ligaments.

Fibromyalgia patients experience a range of symptoms of varying intensities that increase and decrease over time and often resemble other conditions. For years, because of their complex nature and a lack of research on the condition, many doctors misdiagnosed fibromyalgia symptoms or dismissed them as being in the patient’s head. Even today, it is estimated to take an average of five years for a fibromyalgia patient to get an accurate diagnosis.

There is no laboratory test available to diagnose fibromyalgia. Doctors must rely on patient histories, self-reported symptoms, a physical examination and an accurate manual tender point examination.

True agoraphobia is an invalidating disease but a paper by Giovanni A. Fava and associates of the University of Bologna, published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, questions the excessive emphasis on panic which has been attributed in the past decade and the role of pharmaceutical industry in this attribution.

In studying the phenomenology of panic attacks, Argyle and Roth noticed that truly spontaneous attacks, not preceded by anxiety-provoking cognitions, were uncommon.

Patients meeting positive criteria for panic disorder suffered from the whole range of anxiety disorders, and a unique relationship with agoraphobia was not seen. Indeed, other diagnoses (particularly social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder) frequently predated the onset of panic. This was true also for agoraphobia.

In mice, child neglect is a product of both nature and nurture, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison describe a strain of mice that exhibit unusually high rates of maternal neglect, with approximately one out of every five females failing to care for her offspring. By comparing the good mothers to their less attentive relatives, the group has found that negligent parenting seems to have both genetic and non-genetic influences, and may be linked to dysregulation of the brain signaling chemical dopamine.

As a possible model for human child neglect, these mice offer a valuable opportunity to investigate the biological and behavioral bases of naturally occurring maternal neglect, say UW-Madison zoology professor Stephen Gammie, who led the study, and co-author psychology professor Anthony Auger.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder(ADHD) is a behavioral disorder, usually first diagnosed in childhood, that is characterized by inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity.

Children with ADHD appear likely to experience sleep problems, according to a report in the April issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Sleep problems in these children may be associated with poorer child psychosocial quality of life, child daily functioning, caregiver mental health and family functioning.

Cocaine addicts often suffer a downward emotional spiral that is a key to their craving and chronic relapse. While researchers have developed animal models of the reward of cocaine, they have not been able to model this emotional impact until now.

Regina Carelli and colleagues report experiments with rats in which they have mimicked the negative affect of cocaine addiction and even how it drives greater cocaine use. They said their animal model could enable better understanding of the emotional motivations of cocaine addiction and how to ameliorate them.

The U.S. legal system has long assumed that all testimony is not equally credible, that some witnesses are more reliable than others. In tough cases with child witnesses, it assumes adult witnesses to be more reliable. But what if the legal system had it wrong?

Researchers Valerie Reyna, human development professor, and Chuck Brainerd, human development and law school professor-- both from Cornell University -- argue that like the two-headed Roman god Janus, memory is of two minds -- that is, memories are captured and recorded separately and differently in two distinct parts of the mind.