Reading and Well-being Study

 

"Drawing on subjective surveys and objective studies using longitudinal, neuroimaging, and behavioral methods, we highlight converging findings that link reading engagement with improved brain and mental health, better cognitive performance, and reduced risk of cognitive decline. Survey data in adults suggested that reading was associated with reduced stress, greater empathy, enhanced well-being, and decreased loneliness. Longitudinal cohort studies further indicate that cognitively stimulating activities, particularly reading, are associated with a lower risk of dementia and slower cognitive decline, even among individuals with lower educational attainment. In childhood and adolescence, early reading for pleasure has been linked to better attention, memory, executive function, academic achievement, and fewer mental health problems. Neuroimaging findings suggest that reading is associated with structural and functional differences in brain regions supporting executive control, emotional regulation, and social cognition." (abstract extract).

Sahakian, B. J., Perrin, V., & Langley, C. (2026). Reading and associations with brain health, cognition, well-being, and mental health. Psychological Medicine, 56, e262. doi:10.1017/S0033291726105625

Social media use impact on preteens study

 

A recent study found that preteens who use social media more frequently perform worse on reading, vocabulary and memory tests than those who use it less. The study, which used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, found that even low levels of social media use can negatively affect cognitive abilities.

Nagata JM, Wong JH, Kim KE, et al. Social Media Use Trajectories and Cognitive Performance in Adolescents. Journal of the American Medical Association.. doi:10.1001/jama.2025.16613

Global Cognition and Movement in Youth

A new study on children across the U.S., published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, finds that when they spend more than two hours on screens every day, they tend to perform more poorly on tests of cognition. Meeting the 24-hour movement recommendations was associated with superior global cognition. These findings highlight the importance of limiting recreational screen time and encouraging healthy sleep to improve cognition in children.

Walsh, J. J., Barners, J. D., Cameron, J. D., Goldfield, G. S., Chaput, J., Gunnell, K. E., Ledoux, A., Zemek, R. L., & Tremblay, M. S. (2018). Associations between 24 hour movement behaviours and global cognition in US children: A cross-sectional observational study. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 2(11), 783-791. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2352-4642(18)30278-5

Emotions and Cognitive Functioning

This column by the Hechinger Report examined both current and past research on the topic of the relationship between affect and cognition. Potential implications in the classroom are covered, including deficits and advantages to classroom learning dependent on students’ moods.

1.) Emotions such as feeling sad or happy may affect how students learn, asserts researcher Caitlin Mills, who co-authored a recent study on the topic. This study found that watching something aimed at inducing feelings of sadness yielded better reading comprehension than watching something intended to make viewers feel happy. In this study, the most significant finding was that the sad group outperformed the happy group on deep-reasoning questions.

Mills, C., Wu, J., & D’Mello, S. (2017). Being sad is not always bad: The influence of affect on expository text comprehension. Dicsourse Processes, 20(1). https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2017.1381059

2.) This study, which examined the relationship between mood and global versus local visual processing, found that individuals in sad moods were less likely than those in happier moods to use an accessible global concept to guide attempts to reproduce a drawing from memory. Individuals in sad moods were less likely than those in happier moods to classify figures on the basis of global features.

Gasper, K. & Clore, G. L. (2002). Attending to the big picture: Mood and global versus local processing of visual information. Psychological Science, 13(1), 34-40. httpsL//dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00406

3.) This paper, which examined the relationship between feeling and thinking as well as between affect and cognition, reviewed the traditional and current psychological theories linking affect to social thinking and behavior. The results found that negative affect promotes a more accommodative, vigilant, and externally focused thinking strategy. The important of these findings is evident through enhancing research on affect-cognition theories. The practical implications of negative affect promoting improved social thinking and performance in a number of fields is examined.

Forgas, J. P. (2017). Can sadness be good for you? Australian Psychol, 52(1), 3–13. doi:10.1111/ap.12232. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ap.12232