A video game Dartmouth researchers designed where teenagers learn to healthily deal with depression reduced depressive symptoms to a level that matched or doubled the effects of general school-based programs, according to a new study. The clinical trial involving 532 high school students also showed that teens who played the game reported more positive attitudes toward seeking help. The findings suggest that the growing sector of behavioral health video games may be a highly effective tool for treating and preventing depression in adolescents.

Ryonosuke Akimoto, a graduate student at The University of Tokyo (who conducted this research at Aoyama Gakuin University), and Associate Professor Yuji Ogihara at Aoyama Gakuin University have revealed that the extraversion of Japanese people declined from 2010 to 2021 (Figure 1).

In Japanese media and social commentary, it has frequently been pointed out that Japanese people are becoming more "inward-looking." However, the extent to which it reflects an actual psychological shift in personality traits among the Japanese population has not been adequately examined. Therefore, an empirical examination was required.

In this study, we comprehensively collected previous research that measured the extraversion of Japanese participants. We statistically controlled for attributes such as participants' age and gender, and analyzed the trends over a 12-year period.

As a result, it became clear that the extraversion of Japanese people has consistently declined in recent years. This downward trend occurred equally in both men and women, and the extent of change was similar between them. Furthermore, we conducted an analysis limited to data up to 2019 to account for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis also confirmed a similar decline. These findings provide empirical evidence for the long-standing discourse of an "inward-looking" trend among Japanese people.

New research finds that hope has two distinct sides—and only one consistently motivates climate action. Across three studies in Israel and the United States, researchers found that a strong wish for environmental change was a more powerful predictor of sustainable behavior than optimism that change will actually occur.