Eric W. Dolan
Eric W. Dolan tracks how new research reshapes what health, mind, and behavior mean in everyday life. At PsyPost, he focuses on turning complex psychology and neuroscience papers into clear narratives about mental health, political attitudes, and the ways technology and relationships alter human wellbeing. His coverage is distinguished by close engagement with peer‑reviewed findings and a consistent effort to show how subtle shifts in data add up to broader changes in public health and social life.
He is the founder, publisher, and editor of PsyPost, a science news outlet dedicated to accurate, evidence‑based reporting on psychology and neuroscience. Over more than fifteen years in science journalism, he has built a large archive of study‑driven stories spanning clinical depression, adolescent substance use, political polarization, artificial intelligence, and gendered social behavior. His role at the masthead means he not only writes but also sets the editorial standard, with an emphasis on careful sourcing, methodological detail, and restrained interpretation.
Depression isn't just in the head
Dolan’s health coverage often starts where clinical symptoms meet biology. In his reporting on research linking depression to altered genetic activity in white blood cells, he pulls the focus away from purely psychological explanations and toward the immune system and molecular pathways that might underpin mood disorders.
Across similar work on dementia, menopause and long‑term neurological health, and stroke‑related brain damage, he highlights how physical systems and mental states are intertwined rather than treated as separate domains. He typically walks readers through what the scientists measured, how large and long‑running the study was, and what the main effect sizes look like, before turning to what the findings could mean for diagnosis or treatment.
His mental health pieces tend to stay close to clinical relevance without slipping into lifestyle advice.
When he covers studies on loneliness and social isolation, he focuses on long‑term outcomes like persistent psychological distress rather than short‑term mood. In work on autism, he zeroes in on how better measurement and classification can change the way clinicians understand developmental differences. The through‑line is that mental health research is presented as a moving target defined by new data and refined concepts, not by simplistic labels.
The hidden psychology of American politics
A major strand of Dolan’s archive examines the psychological underpinnings of American political life. In his feature on nine recent studies that reveal the hidden psychology of American politics, he organizes diverse findings on partisan identity, moral hierarchies, demographic realignment, and online behavior into a coherent picture of how voters’ minds are changing. He returns to this territory in regular coverage of political psychology, writing about support for political violence, the rise of angry congressional tweets, and the shifting importance of education versus race in structuring ideological divides.
His reporting on Christian nationalism and antisemitism shows how he treats religion and prejudice as measurable attitudes rather than abstract controversies. In work on lower cognitive ability and stronger Christian nationalist views, he focuses on how researchers quantified cognition, how they controlled for education, and what that means for interpreting ideological trends. In coverage of left‑wing justifications that shield antisemitism from liberal disapproval, he unpacks how specific framings around human rights or criticism of Israel change social evaluations of prejudice.
This political psychology beat is marked by a willingness to sit inside uncomfortable findings while keeping the emphasis on data, study design, and incremental shifts in public opinion.
Teen cannabis use and cognitive development
Dolan also devotes substantial attention to adolescent health and development. In his reporting on teen cannabis use and flattened cognitive development, he follows a large U.S. cohort over time and explains how early substance use alters trajectories in processing speed, memory, and visuospatial skills as teens age. He contextualizes these findings alongside work on teen sleep patterns tracked via wearable devices and their links to emotional regulation, as well as structural brain differences associated with heavy video gaming and patterns of in‑game spending.
Parenting and early‑life environments recur as themes. He covers studies on intensive parenting attitudes and their surprising relationship to birth rates, and on early‑life sugar restriction and its ties to mental health in adulthood. Across these pieces, he pays attention to longitudinal designs and sample sizes, making clear whether findings come from short experiments or multi‑year follow‑ups.
The distinctive feature of this strand of his work is how it treats adolescent health as a system shaped by family norms, technology use, sleep, and substances, rather than isolating any single factor.
AI, learning, and mental health tools
Another recurring focus is the psychological impact of artificial intelligence and digital technology. In his coverage of a review on cognitive offloading and AI, Dolan examines whether delegating mental tasks to algorithms erodes specific skills or simply shifts how people use their cognitive resources. He situates that work alongside experimental studies on generative AI’s effects on high school mathematics learning, drawing out practical implications for education and study habits without overstating the threat.
He extends this line of inquiry to mental health tools, reporting on research that treats AI chatbots as psychotherapy clients and documents the elaborate narratives of trauma and punishment those models generate. In those pieces, he emphasizes the risks for users who might take chatbot self‑descriptions at face value, and the psychological dynamics of interacting with systems that simulate distress. More broadly, he covers how textbooks and public communications misrepresent famous psychology experiments, reinforcing his interest in how scientific information reaches the public and shapes expectations.
Taken together, this body of work shows a journalist who views AI, media, and educational materials as part of the psychological environment, and who writes about their health and cognitive consequences with the same empirical discipline he applies to clinical studies.
4 more health journalists.
Aislinn Antrim
Aislinn Antrim is an associate editorial director at Pharmacy Times and a journalist who connects clinical advances, regulation, and the changing role of pharmacists. She writes pharmacy-centered health coverage on chronic disease therapeutics, specialty and oncology care, workforce pressures, and advocacy. Her reporting explains FDA actions, policy shifts, drug pipelines, and the real-world effects of new evidence on patient care and pharmacy practice. She often uses interviews and expert conversations to show how pharmacists improve adherence, manage side effects, navigate access and benefits, and coordinate care with prescribers. She also covers burnout, staffing strain, and the future of pharmacy practice, with an eye on how policy and economics shape work at the dispenser.
Alex Cabrero
Alex Cabrero is an Emmy award-winning KSL TV reporter who covers where health, safety and community life meet, always focused on how decisions and events affect everyday people. He has been with KSL since 2004, bringing long experience in breaking news, public service coverage and human-centered features. His beat includes public health, emergency response, technology, local infrastructure, environment and science, framed through community well-being and resilience. He reports on issues like mental health initiatives, law enforcement staffing, environmental hazards, rescues, wildfire detection tools, land-use fights and scientific discoveries, making technical and policy details clear for a general audience. He also produces many positive, everyday-life features on families, veterans, farmers, sports and local traditions. His style is direct and conversational, often built around a central person or family whose experience carries the story across TV, digital and social platforms.
Alexandra Frost
Alexandra Frost is a freelance journalist and content marketing writer who turns expert-backed health and family guidance into clear, practical service stories. She covers consumer health, wellness, nutrition, preventive care, medical research, parenting, kids’ mental health, education, products, and lifestyle. Her reporting explains concerns such as inflammation, urinary symptoms, fiber, lung cancer screening, pain treatment, mobility, family dynamics, children’s technology use, and school readiness. She profiles clinicians and scientists, connects research to everyday decisions, and focuses on what readers should watch for, ask, or change. Frost currently writes across multiple outlets, including Good Housekeeping, Cincinnati Magazine, Wirecutter, Popular Science, Success, Healthline, Parents, Women’s Health, Reader’s Digest, Today’s Parent, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, TIME, Consumer Reports, Business Insider, and National Geographic. She also works as a freelance editor, media consultant, and content strategist.
Alexandra Pattillo
Alexandra Pattillo is a freelance journalist who pairs rigorous health and science reporting with intimate accounts of patients’ lives. She covers health, science and wellness for the BBC and other major outlets, including National Geographic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Outside, CNN and Inverse. Her beat includes eating disorders, women’s health, perinatal mental health, brain health, youth sports, concussion, long-term Covid symptoms, attention, habits and behavioral science. She reports on emerging treatments such as psychedelic-assisted therapy for anorexia, testing evidence, safety and relapse risk. She explains complex research in plain language and examines how it shapes everyday choices. Her reporting uses in-depth interviews with patients, families, clinicians, researchers and coaches. Through the BBC’s Health Gap column, she also covers stigma, unequal access to care and gaps between lived experience and standard medical pathways.