Mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety disorders affect millions of people worldwide, yet the underlying mechanisms are often difficult to study. There is a lack of model systems that adequately capture the complexity of human cognitive and affective processes, such as language or reasoning. An interdisciplinary research team from medicine, psychology, and computer science at the Else Kröner Fresenius Center (EKFZ) for Digital Health at TU Dresden has now shown that large language models (LLMs) can reproduce patterns of human emotions such as anxiety, sadness, or stress. In addition, they exhibit cognitive biases and can be specifically regulated using mindfulness-based strategies. This could establish AI models as a new, complementary method for basic psychological and psychotherapy research. The results were published in The Lancet Digital Health.

Climate change will profoundly alter the dynamics of sea and land breezes in the Barcelona metropolitan area, trapping larger amounts of air pollutants over coastal areas and increasing health risks for millions of people. This is the conclusion of a study conducted by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain, which produced high-resolution projections of future sea and land breeze behaviour and air quality under climate change scenarios for 2050 and 2100.