Volume 2 Issue 3, March 2024

Combining accelerometry, electronic diaries and neuroimaging, we found that physical activity is reproducibly linked to better wellbeing in people lacking social contact in everyday life, especially in people at neural and psychological risk of affective disorders.

In this Perspective, Kühn and Gallinat present the role for environmental neuroscience in examining mental health and discuss how urban and natural environments can have detrimental or beneficial effects on mental health.

In this Perspective the authors provide recommendations for researchers conducting school-based mental health research to minimize potential harm in designing and delivering interventions.

Authors analyze the associations of emergency admissions related to mental health disorders with short-term temperature changes before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing evidence for increased risks for depression-related visits associated with elevated temperatures during the pandemic.

The authors interrogate patterns of symptom-linked resting-state functional connectivity measured with electroencephalography with machine learning techniques to identify two dimensions associated with specific regions, the left angular gyrus and the right middle temporal gyrus and social and communication deficits, and the right inferior parietal lobe with restricted and repetitive disorders, which may serve as biomarkers in autism.

Neurocognitive impairment in youth with ADHD, anorexia, first onset psychosis and functional neurological disorder is transdiagnostic and can be detected as early as childhood or adolescence.

In this paper, the authors present findings demonstrating that variations of the MET gene are associated with specific structural differences in key language regions in individuals with schizophrenia.

Using a longitudinal dataset, the authors investigated the effects of maternal positive mental health during pregnancy on offspring’s structural brain morphology and functional brain connectivity.

The authors demonstrate in a cohort of 10,000 young people that peer bullying in childhood predicted poorer mental health in late adolescence, which was partially mediated by the development of interpersonal distrust in mid-adolescence. Findings are interpreted through the lens of Social Safety Theory and suggest a role for individual and school-based interventions.

Physical activity has the potential to combat the negative mental health effects of social isolation. Its benefit is particularly high in people at increased neural and psychological risk for affective disorders.