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American Psychological Association's Annual Convention, August 7-10, 2003, Toronto Canada

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According to a new study, children with music training had significantly better verbal memory than their counterparts without such training. Plus, the longer the training, the better the verbal memory.

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Children who witness their parents using violence against each other and who regularly receive excessive punishment are at increased risk of being involved in an abusive relationship as an adult, according to a 20-year study that followed children into adult romantic relationships.

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Undertaking complex mental tasks can reduce a driver's ability to detect visual targets by as much as 30 percent. New research on driving in real traffic confirms that mental workload can interfere with the capacity to detect visual targets, discriminate among them, and select a response.

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Children of divorced parents who are separated from one parent due to the custodial or non-custodial parent moving beyond an hour's drive from the other parent are significantly less well off on many child mental and physical health measures compared to those children whose parents don't relocate after divorce, according to new research.

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Early reading tests are fine for detecting problems in the primary grades, but these tests don't always identify students who later develop reading difficulties in the fourth and fifth grade, say researchers who examined the phenomena of late-emerging reading disabilities.

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Psychologists will be looking at new ways to combat stress, understand the differences in brain structure to help people learn and overcome addictions and ways to improve student learning during the 111th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

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Researchers reviewing several studies on autobiographical memory and happiness have found that human memory is biased toward happiness and that mild depression can disrupt this bias for good over bad.

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Here's good news about aging: When it comes to remembering emotional images, we tend -- as we get older -- to do what the song said, and "accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative."

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Children's perceptions of occupational status and their own vocational interests are affected by the racial make-up of the workforce, according to a new study involving first and six grade African American children.

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It is well-known that adults who respond to life events with anger are more at risk for developing cardiovascular disease than those who do not. According to researchers, children and adolescents with similar hostile responses are also putting themselves at increased risk of developing metabolic syndrome --a precursor to adult heart disease.

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Do peoples' personalities change after 30? They can, according to researchers who examined 132,515 adults age 21-60 on the personality traits known as the "Big Five": conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extraversion.

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Songs with violent lyrics increase aggression related thoughts and emotions and this effect is directly related to the violence in the lyrics, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association.

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When crime eyewitnesses are given feedback about who they picked in a suspect line-up, even 48 hours after that line-up, the feedback has been found to strongly influence their confidence in their identification and their memories of the event, according to a new study.

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When adolescents perceive religion as important in their lives, it may lower rates of cigarette smoking, heavy drinking and marijuana use, according to a study that tracked urban adolescents from middle school through high school.

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Two styles of leadership -- rewarding performance and building identification for the mission -- used in combination are good predictors of simulated Army platoon unit performances during times of high stress and uncertainty, according to a study on leadership styles and performance.

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Age-related changes in the brain -- the appearance, starting around age 60, of "white-matter lesions" among the brain's message-carrying axons -- significantly affect cognitive function in old age.

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In a large longitudinal study that sheds new light on the association between marital status and happiness, researchers have found that people get a boost in life satisfaction from marriage.

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Children's viewing of violent TV shows, their identification with aggressive same-sex TV characters, and their perceptions that TV violence is realistic are all linked to later aggression as young adults, for both males and females, according to a 15-year study.

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Research shows that teenagers who commit violent acts such as homicide or assaults often showed signs of aggressive behaviors while in elementary school.

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College students frequently have more serious mental health problems today than they did over a decade ago, including depression, sexual assault and thoughts of suicide, according to a study involving 13,257 students seeking help at a counseling center over a 13-year period.

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Five social scientists from psychology, economics, demography, anthropology and geography will discuss the topic of refugees to demonstrate to high school students how each discipline contributes to solving important human problems.

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A new study reports on links among pre-term birth, risk for birth hypoxia and cognitive problems, and reveals how the risk threshold for brain damage in preterm babies could be lower than thought.

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Both sides of the brain play a role in processing emotional communication, with the right side stepping in when we focus not on the "what" of an emotional message but rather on how it feels.

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Psychologists have developed a new tool to assess aspects of young children's suggestibility which may prove useful in legal investigations

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While yelling at and using other non-physical intimidation toward subordinates may motivate employees to get their work done on time, the company may suffer financially in the long run, according to a new study.

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Stress reactions are known consequences for those handling the dead after a disaster. But, in a new study, posttraumatic stress and depressive symptoms were surprisingly nonexistent after two years for those individuals working with deceased victims after the Oklahoma terrorist bombing. This was true even for those dealing with people who they knew that were killed.

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Family routines and rituals are important to the health and well-being of today's families trying to meet the busy demands of juggling work and home, according to a review of the research over the past 50 years.

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The American Psychological Association and the Behavioral Science Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released a report today on the potential culprits of terrorism and strategies derived from simulated scenarios that could prevent future acts of terrorism.

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Hostility may predict heart disease more often than traditional coronary heart disease risk factors like high cholesterol, cigarette smoking and weight, according to research.

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On average, pre-term infants are markedly slower at processing information than full-term infants. New research shows this deficit in processing speed is already present in the first year of life and the gap in performance does not narrow with age.

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Chronic stress not only makes people more vulnerable to catching illnesses but can also impair their immune system's ability to respond to its own anti-inflammatory signals that are triggered by certain hormones, say researchers, possibly altering the course of an inflammatory disease.

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Postmenopausal women with Alzheimer's disease who undergo long-term estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) may make their memory loss worse, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Arizona.

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Conference hopes to establish a practical framework for abuse liability assessment that will enable pharmaceutical developers and the National Institutes of Health to meet regulatory requirements. The conference will help participants identify research needs and priorities in the area of central nervous system drug abuse liability.

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Schizophrenia may not be one single disease but rather an array of disorders whose psychiatric and cognitive symptoms vary according to which part of the brain is affected and to what degree.

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Simple, systematic memory training can help some people with early-stage Alzheimer's disease, according to new research.

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Neuropsychologists have mapped different aspects of attention to different parts of the brain's frontal lobes. In particular, problems in screening out irrelevant information seem to be based in the frontal lobes' right side. This research joins mounting scientific evidence that attention is a complex, multi-faceted brain-based process.

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Job loss and its related financial strain put people at elevated risk for emotional and physical problems, according to researchers studying the consequences of being unemployed.

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New research raises questions about the relative value of tests used to pick the right person for the job. A study by psychologists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Yale University suggests that job or task content, not complexity, may be the key to predicting how different people will perform.

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A new study by psychologists at the University of Toronto has determined that the best predictor of future Alzheimer's type dementia is a verbal memory test.

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New research shows a "real world" group stress management program can result in significant benefits for those with type 2 diabetes by improving glucose metabolism, thus reducing blood sugar levels.

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Young people who feel socially isolated may turn to drug use to cope with their loneliness and ecstasy may be the drug of choice to fulfill their needs.

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Cardiac disease is a serious health risk for both men and women in the U.S., but the effects of the illness on quality of life factors is more detrimental for women than it is for men, according to a new study.

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Using national data from a sample of 20,747 adolescents, researchers from Brown University's Medical School examined which interpersonal, familial and peer influences made it more likely for adolescents to experiment and/or become regular smokers.

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Even if we are not aware of them, negative thoughts about aging that we pick up from society may be cutting years off our lives, according to a study which found people with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived 7.5 years longer.

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North Carolina neuropsychologists believe they have gathered reliable evidence linking cardiopulmonary bypass surgery to impaired memory and attention. Claims about this relationship have been made before, but the current team used statistical methods that they consider to be more sound, less biased and less likely to over-estimate occurrence than those used in previous research.

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New studies reveal that a learned compensatory response can trigger "drug tolerance," a physiological process central to addiction. Drug tolerance makes people need more and more drug to get the same effect, whether pain relief or a "high."

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In a large-scale meta-analysis of 88 studies, a psychologist looked at both positive and negative behaviors in children that were associated with corporal punishment.

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The evidence continues to mount that a wide variety of behavioral interventions are having a major influence in producing useful changes in the risk, management and outcome of many diseases and health problems, according to a 10-year review.

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In the first published study to examine the effect of televised sex on memory for commercial messages, researchers have found that viewers of programs with sexually explicit or violent content were less likely to remember commercials.