Unfinished Business Erodes Life’s Meaning, But Adaptive Thinking Fights Back, Study of Peruvian Students Finds

Almost everyone carries some version of it: the apology never delivered, the conversation avoided for years, the goal quietly abandoned without closure. Psychologists call this cluster of unresolved experiences “unfinished business,” a concept rooted in Gestalt therapy that describes lingering emotional residue from past events that were never fully processed or resolved. A new study from the Peruvian Amazon suggests that these unresolved experiences are meaningfully linked to how much purpose and significance young adults perceive in their lives—and, intriguingly, that the mind’s own coping machinery may partially cushion the blow.

The research, published in the journal Discover Psychology, was conducted by a team at the Escuela de Psicología of the Universidad Peruana Unión in Tarapoto, Peru. Lead author Alexandra Asto-Janampa and colleagues, including corresponding author Calixto Tapullima-Mori, set out to answer a question that had not previously been examined empirically: if unfinished business is associated with a diminished sense of meaning in life, what regulatory mechanisms might explain part of that association? Their focus fell on cognitive emotion regulation strategies, the conscious mental tactics people deploy to manage the emotional impact of stressful or negative events.

Cognitive emotion regulation strategies are typically divided into two broad families. Adaptive strategies include putting situations into perspective, positive reappraisal, positive refocusing, refocusing on planning, and acceptance—mental moves that reframe or reorganize a stressful experience in ways that tend to protect psychological well-being. Maladaptive strategies, by contrast, include self-blame, other-blame, rumination or focusing on thoughts and feelings, and catastrophizing, all of which are generally associated with poorer emotional outcomes. The Peruvian team wanted to know which of these two families, if either, acts as the hidden pathway connecting unresolved past experiences to a person’s sense of meaning.

To investigate, the researchers carried out a cross-sectional explanatory study with an associative strategy, recruiting 617 university students in the San Martín Region of the Peruvian Amazon. Participants had a mean age of 22.1 years with a standard deviation of 3.6, and 54.0 percent were women. Recruitment used convenience sampling with a snowball component, in which initial participants helped identify others eligible for the study. The study received ethics approval from the Research Ethics Committee of the Universidad Peruana Unión under Resolution No. 0421-T-2025/UPeU-FCS-CF and was conducted in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained electronically before questionnaires were administered, participation was voluntary, anonymous and unremunerated, and all participants were of legal age.

On the analytical side, the team used structural equation modeling with a maximum likelihood robust estimator, a technique that allows researchers to test networks of relationships among latent psychological constructs while guarding against deviations from normality in the data. To probe indirect pathways, they ran mediation analyses built on 5,000 bias-corrected bootstrap resamples, a resampling procedure that generates confidence intervals for indirect effects without relying on assumptions that those effects follow a normal distribution. An indirect effect is considered statistically significant when its 95 percent confidence interval does not cross zero. Both of the structural models tested in the study showed acceptable fit to the data.

The headline finding concerns the adaptive strategies, and it is anything but straightforward. Students who reported more unfinished business also reported greater use of adaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies, and those strategies in turn were positively associated with meaning in life. The indirect pathway through adaptive strategies was positive and significant, with a standardized coefficient of 0.087 and a 95 percent confidence interval running from 0.055 to 0.126. Yet the direct association between unfinished business and meaning in life was negative, at −0.202, and the total association was also negative, at −0.115. In other words, the indirect effect and the direct effect pointed in opposite directions.

That sign reversal is what methodologists call an inconsistent mediation, or a suppression pattern, and the authors are careful to stress that it is not the ordinary partial mediation familiar from most psychology papers. In a classic partial mediation, the indirect pathway carries the same sign as the direct effect and simply accounts for a portion of it. Here, the adaptive strategies appear to work against the direct negative association, offsetting part of the damage that unfinished business does to perceived meaning. The total effect of −0.115 is smaller in magnitude than the direct effect of −0.202 precisely because the positive indirect effect of 0.087 is subtracting from it. The practical implication is striking: without the mobilization of adaptive regulation, the association between unresolved experiences and diminished meaning would have been substantially stronger.

The story for maladaptive strategies is different. The indirect association through the maladaptive family was small and not statistically significant, with a coefficient of 0.026 and a 95 percent confidence interval spanning from −0.027 to 0.078, a range that includes zero. Whatever role rumination, self-blame, or catastrophizing play in the lives of these students, the data did not support the idea that they form a measurable bridge between unfinished business and meaning in life. The suppression effect, in this sample, belongs entirely to the adaptive side of the regulatory ledger.

The authors interpret this pattern as suggesting that adaptive cognitive emotion regulation may operate as a compensatory resource, one that is mobilized in response to unresolved experiences rather than being a simple conduit through which those experiences exert their influence. On this reading, encountering unfinished business does not merely erode meaning; it also triggers a regulatory response. Students who respond by reappraising, accepting, planning, and putting things into perspective recover part of the ground that unresolved experiences would otherwise claim. Those who lack or fail to deploy such strategies may bear the full weight of the direct negative association. The finding resonates with a broader theme in emotion science: regulation is not only a trait-like capacity but also a dynamic process recruited by adversity itself.

As with any cross-sectional study, the design captures associations at a single point in time, so the direction of the pathways cannot be established with certainty, and the convenience sampling with a snowball component means the sample may not represent all young adults in the region. Still, the study is the first to examine these regulatory mechanisms empirically in this population, and its suppression finding carries a genuinely hopeful message for university communities in the Peruvian Amazon and beyond. Unfinished business, the data suggest, exacts a real toll on how much meaning students find in their lives, but the human capacity for adaptive cognitive regulation is not a bystander to that process—it is an active counterweight. Interventions that strengthen reappraisal, acceptance, and planning skills may help young adults convert unresolved past experiences from silent burdens into catalysts for reflection, closing a few of the open loops that otherwise keep meaning out of reach.

Subject of Research: Cognitive emotion regulation strategies as a suppressive mediator between unfinished business and meaning in life among Peruvian university students

Article Title: Cognitive emotion regulation strategies in the association between unfinished business and meaning in life among Peruvian university students: an inconsistent (suppression) mediation model

Article References: Asto-Janampa, A., Algarate-Rubio, P. N., Tafur-Becerra, Y. A., Mayta-Llanos, J., & Tapullima-Mori, C. (2026). Cognitive emotion regulation strategies in the association between unfinished business and meaning in life among Peruvian university students: an inconsistent (suppression) mediation model. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00890-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00890-6

Keywords: unfinished business, cognitive emotion regulation, meaning in life, suppression effect, mediation analysis, university students, Peruvian Amazon, structural equation modeling, adaptive strategies, maladaptive strategies, psychology, San Martín Region