Washington: How happy you are may have something to do with who you know—and where you come from. Lijun Song, assistant professor of sociology, set out to discover whether knowing high-status people helped or harmed mental health, using depressive symptoms as a proxy. Her findings appeared in the recent issue of Social Science and Medicine.

Washington: For years social scientists have grappled with the question of why men receive far more media coverage than women, and now a new study reveals the answer.

Washington: Inadequate supervision by parents during early adolescence forecasts a host of behavior problems, including problem drinking. The risk of alcohol abuse arising from inadequate parental supervision is particularly high for girls who reach puberty early, according to a new study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University. 

Washington: Every 13 minutes of every day, on average, someone in the US and every four minutes one person in India commit suicide. Many of those deaths are preventable.

Ithaca: A blogger’s weight affects her or his credibility with readers seeking food advice, according to a Cornell study published in the journal Health Communication.

La Jolla: By measuring how worms move toward an appealing, food-like scent, researchers at the Salk Institute were able to predict whether the worms would be long-lived. The finding, published in the journal eLife, shows how nematodes (Caenorhabditis elegans) process information about the environment and how circuits in the brain change as an animal ages.