People with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, report that the severity of their symptoms was reduced by about half within four hours of smoking cannabis, according to a Washington State University study.

“The results overall indicate that cannabis may have some beneficial short-term but not really long-term effects on obsessive-compulsive disorder,” said Carrie Cuttler, the study’s corresponding author and WSU assistant professor of psychology. “To me, the CBD findings are really promising because it is not intoxicating. This is an area of research that would really benefit from clinical trials looking at changes in compulsions, intrusions and anxiety with pure CBD.”

However, Cuttler said this analysis of user-provided information via the Strainprint app was especially valuable because it provides a large data set and the participants were using market cannabis in their home environment, as opposed to federally grown cannabis in a lab which may affect their responses. Strainprint’s app is intended to help users determine which types of cannabis work the best for them, but the company provided the WSU researchers free access to users’ anonymized data for research purposes.

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A study conducted at 19 universities found that a brief social belonging exercise, administered online before students arrive on campus, boosts the performance and persistence of students in STEM disciplines – science, technology, engineering and math – who speak English as a second language.

The study was conducted by Elizabeth Canning, assistant professor of psychology at Washington State University, and colleagues in the U.S. and Canada,

Published this week in the journal Science Advances, the study demonstrates that the exercise increases ESL students’ perception that a sense of belonging on campus will grow over time. It also increases the number of STEM credits ESL students successfully completed, as well as their STEM GPAs.

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The Washington State University Psychology Clinic is offering free video-based therapy services for adults, children and adolescents through the end of September.

After the end of September, the cost of services will operate on a sliding fee scale based on income. Prospective patients must be located in the state of Washington. Services are not limited to WSU affiliated students, faculty and staff.

The Psychology Clinic is operated by the WSU Department of Psychology, a program accredited by the American Psychological Association. It is a nonprofit professional training clinic for doctoral students in clinical psychology. Under direct supervision of licensed clinical psychologists, the doctoral students provide assessment and therapy services for adults, children, and adolescents.

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Social media addicted teenagers are not the only people who experience the Fear of Missing Out also known as FoMO.

“FoMO is not an adolescent or young adult problem, necessarily. It’s really about individual differences, irrespective of age,” said Chris Barry, a WSU psychology professor and the lead author on the study.“We expected FoMO to be higher in younger age groups, particularly because of the tremendous amount of social development happening at those times, but that’s not what we found.”

“We’re not all equally prone to the Fear of Missing Out, but for those who are, social media can exacerbate it,” said Barry. “Social media allows you to witness what other people are doing and what’s going on in their lives. If there’s already concern about missing out, then there will be distress at seeing that on social media.”

For people experiencing this kind of distress, Barry suggested that it may be good to reduce social media use or cut it off altogether for a period of time.

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