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Rates of suicide among middle-aged Americans have risen significantly in the past 10 years, causing concern that a generation of baby boomers who have dealt with a lifetime of economic worry, as well as easy access to prescription pills, may be more susceptible to harming themselves. The finding came from the CDC's journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report...

A UCLA-led study of adolescents receiving treatment for methamphetamine dependence has found that girls are more likely to continue using the drug during treatment than boys, suggesting that new approaches are needed for treating meth abuse among teen girls...

We each vary in how much we use first-person singular pronouns (I, Me, Myself) in our speech and writing, and how much we use first-person plural pronouns (We, Us, Ourselves). Researchers say it's a kind of habit and not something we usually have much control over. Now a study conducted in Germany claims that people who are more prolific users of "I" and "Me" tend to have more interpersonal problems and to experience more depression. "Using first-person singular pronouns highlights the self as a distinct entity," say the researchers led by Johannes Zimmermann, "whereas using first-person plural pronouns emphasises its embeddedness into social relationships."

Zimmermann and his colleagues counted pronoun use in transcripts recorded from 118 people who'd completed a 60 to 90-minute psychotherapeutic interview taking in topics including their past, their relationships and self-perception. This was an exploratory study and, knowing that these kind of interviews increase first-person singular pronoun use, the researchers thought this would be a good place to start.

The sample was made up of 99 patients at a psychotherapy clinic and 19 "healthy" controls (across both there were 103 women). The patients had problems ranging from anxiety to eating disorder. All the participants also filled out in-depth questionnaires that asked them about depression and their interpersonal behaviour.

Frequent use of first-person singular pronouns went hand in hand with higher depression scores and with interpersonal distress characterised by what the researchers called an "intrusive style", including inappropriate self-disclosure, attention seeking, and an inability to spend time alone. "First-person singular pronoun use may be part of a ... strategy that pulls for friendly-submissive attention from others," the researchers said. A "tendency to seek attention from others rather than self-focused attention."

In contrast, greater use of first-person plural pronouns was associated with lower depression scores and lower interpersonal distress. To the researchers' surprise, this was characterised by a "cold" interpersonal style. However, they think this is a "functional" kind of coldness - the ability to help others with their needs while also remaining appropriately detached for self-protection.

These are interesting findings that build on an established evidence base relating to pronoun use - for instance, past research has linked greater use of first-person singular pronouns with more marital dissatisfaction and social anxiety. However, the study has some obvious limitations, most notably its clinical sample, which limits the ability to say if the same findings would apply to the general population, and its reliance on participants' own descriptions of their interpersonal style. It's also important to note that there's no evidence here of a causal link - Zimmermann's team aren't saying that greater use of "I" and "Me" causes interpersonal problems. More likely, this way of speaking probably reflects how people see themselves and habitually relate to others.

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Zimmermann, J., Wolf, M., Bock, A., Peham, D., and Benecke, C. (2013). The way we refer to ourselves reflects how we relate to others: Associations between first-person pronoun use and interpersonal problems. Journal of Research in Personality, 47 (3), 218-225 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2013.01.008

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

When we adults are confronted by a bridge, we're concerned not just by its width and sturdiness, but also by the height of the drop beneath. If there's a deep canyon, we'd usually rather the bridge was mighty strong and wide. If there's but a short drop, we'll happily jaunt along the narrowest, flimsiest of crossings - after all, it won't matter much if we fall.

Infants - those aged 11 to 14 months - are different. They don't want to fall, so they're wary of narrow bridges. But the height of the drop makes no difference to them at all. "We found clear evidence that infants are averse to falling from a height," said the researchers Kari Kretch and Karen Adolph, "but no evidence of adult-like anxiety that increases with drop-off height."

Kretch and Adolph challenged 37 14-month-olds to walk across a bridge of varying widths spanning a 76cm gap between two surfaces. The drop beneath the bridge was either large (71cm - nearly the infants' standing height) or short (17cm - roughly knee-high to the infants). An experimenter was on-hand to prevent any falls.

When faced with a more narrow crossing, the toddlers were more cautious as you'd expect - they hesitated, felt their way, and proceeded more slowly. Too narrow and they'd even refuse to go ahead. Crucially, however, their crossing behaviour didn't vary according to the height of the drop. A similar result was found when the study was repeated with 11-month-olds who were still crawling.

It's not that the walkers and crawlers couldn't perceive the difference in the height of the drops. When they refused to cross a very narrow bridge, they'd climb down into the small drop, but not the big drop.

At first, these new results might appear to contradict Gibson and Walk's classic "visual cliff" experiments conducted in the 1960s, in which babies refused to crawl onto a glass surface that had the appearance of  a cliff edge. However, the visual cliff studies, and other research since, didn't disentangle risk of falling from the issue of fall height and the likelihood of injury. The researchers point out their new results aren't as surprising as they might seem. Toddlers are effectively averse to all dangers of falling, whether down a short or big drop. Unlike adults, they don't calibrate according to the relative risk.

"How would infants know that the longer an object (or baby) falls, the harder it hits the ground?" asked Kretch and Adolph. "Certainly by adulthood, we understand this intuitively. An open question is how and when this understanding develops." They acknowledged it would be useful for future research to explore a broader range of heights, to see if there's any level at which toddlers do register a greater danger.

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Kretch, K., and Adolph, K. (2013). No bridge too high: Infants decide whether to cross based on the probability of falling not the severity of the potential fall. Developmental Science, 16 (3), 336-351 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12045

--Further reading--
Toddlers don't take the risk of entrapment seriously.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

A pile of dirty dishes looms in the kitchen. It's your spouse's night to wash, but you know he or she has had a long day so you grab a sponge and step up to the plate. It's just one of the minor daily sacrifices you make in the name of love...

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego Department of Pediatrics and Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego, a research affiliate of UC San Diego School of Medicine, have found a link between multivitamin use and alcohol consumption before pregnancy, uncovering a need for education about the importance of vitamin supplementation, particularly among women who drink ...

A greater percentage of people with psychological problems or who have suffered from domestic violence undergo cosmetic surgery compared to the rest of the population. A team from the Institute of Education, UK, suggests that in some cases, patients' psychological conditions could get worse rather than better following cosmetic surgery...

The first article in a landmark series to help health care workers and providers, donors, and decision makers understand the importance of including mental health care in global health programs is being published in this week's PLOS Medicine...

New research from experts within the University of Minnesota School of Nursing has found teen girls at high risk for pregnancy reported being significantly less likely to participate in social bullying after participating in an 18-month preventive intervention program...

Subfertile women who conceive through assisted reproduction are more likely to experience a greater traumatic impact following early pregnancy loss compared with women who conceive naturally, suggests a new study published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology...

The first article in a landmark series to help health care workers and providers, donors, and decision makers understand the importance of including mental health care in global health programs is being published in this week's PLOS Medicine...

JAMA Psychiatry Study Highlights Rosa M. Crum, M.D., M.H.S., of the Johns Hopkins Health Institutions, Baltimore, Md., and colleagues examined whether self-medicating mood symptoms is associated with the increased probability of the onset and persistence of alcohol dependence. The study included a nationally representative sample of the U.S...

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

The psychology of crime (Journal of Criminal Justice).

Hypnosis (Cortex).

Authoritarianism in societal context: The role of threat (International Journal of Psychology).

Contemporary Issues in Forensic Psychology in Australia (Australian Psychologist).

The vegetative state (Neuroethics).

Toward an interdisciplinary neuroaesthetics (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts).

Methodological Issues in Measuring and Interpreting the Predictive Validity of Violence Risk Assessments (Behavioural Science and Law).

Disgust (Psychological Bulletin, special section).

Serial and Parallel Processing in Reading (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology).

Green criminology (Crime, Law and Social Change).

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Patients who have suffered from domestic violence, or who have underlying psychological issues, are more likely to undergo cosmetic surgery. Their conditions may also actually worsen rather than improve following surgery...

Body dysmorphic disorder is a disabling but often misunderstood psychiatric condition in which people perceive themselves to be disfigured and ugly, even though they look normal to others. New research at UCLA shows that these individuals have abnormalities in the underlying connections in their brains. Dr...

The BPS Research Digest makes its radio debut tonight on BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind programme.  Tune in at 9pm (BST) to hear the Digest editor Christian Jarrett chat with presenter Claudia Hammond about some of the psychology and neuroscience studies reported in recent weeks here at the Digest.

The studies mentioned are: 
Female political role models have an empowering effect on women How children learn scientific thinking from their parents Smiling fighters are more likely to lose
Also on the programme, Claudia talks to neuroscientist Kris de Meyer who spent six weeks interviewing followers of evangelical Christian broadcaster, Harold Camping, as they waited for May 21st, 2011, the date the earth was supposed to end. Also, is bad news bad for your mental health ? Rolf Dobelli, author of The Art of Thinking, believes so, and he's given up on the habit. Claudia talks to Rolf and Dr Pam Ramsden who discuss what we know about news consumption and mental wellbeing.
-- All in the Mind, BBC Radio 4, Tues 30 April, 9pm

update: this competition is now closed and the winners have been contacted. Thanks for your entries. We have five copies to give away of Occupational Psychology: An Applied Approach by Gail Steptoe-Warren, kindly donated to us by the publishers Pearson.
From the publishers: "Occupational Psychology: An Applied Approach introduces students to the essential theories in this area, from motivation and wellbeing to group roles and individual differences. The book explores the impact of every topic from the perspective of the individual, management, and the organisation as a whole, encouraging the reader to consider the consultancy process at each stage." For your chance to win the book, simply post a brief answer to this question set by Pearson - "How do you think an occupational psychologist can have the most impact on a workplace?" Five winners will be picked at close of play on Friday 26 April. Please remember to leave an email address for us to contact you.

For inspiration, remember you can read about new occupational psychology research here on the main Research Digest and over at our sibling blog the Occupational Digest. Good luck.

Research announced last week at the International Liver CongressTM 2013 has revealed the deadly impact that alcohol and body weight have on liver disease. Women should forgo the wine and doughnuts after a new study found the harmful combination of high alcohol intake and high body mass index (BMI) causes an increased risk of chronic liver disease...

School violence is a very important social issue world-wide. It poses a significant threat to the health, achievement, and well-being of students...

Thanks to a rare bacteria that grows only on rocks in the Swiss Alps, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and the Pasteur Institute in France have been the first to identify how alcohol might affect key brain proteins. It's a major step on the road to eventually developing drugs that could disrupt the interaction between alcohol and the brain...