Why Some College Students Feel Flat: Social Goals Shape Mood in Japanese Study

A quiet but consequential question in campus psychology is finally getting the attention it deserves: what do students’ social goals do to their daily moods? A new study of Japanese college students suggests that the answer depends on which combination of social goals a person carries — and that the most emotionally adaptive profile may not be the one researchers expected. The findings, published in Frontiers in Social Psychology, come from a team led by Sho Kashiwagi of Hijiyama University and Satoshi Horiuchi, also of Hijiyama University, working with Shuntaro Aoki of Fukushima Medical University and Yugo Kira of Kurume University.

Positive affect and negative affect — the twin engines of subjective well-being — matter enormously for college students. Positive affect refers to feelings of enthusiasm, activation, and alertness, while negative affect captures general subjective distress and unpleasant engagement. Decades of research have linked higher positive affect and lower negative affect to better physical health, stronger academic performance, and more successful campus lives. Crucially, the two are not simply opposites: they are partly independent of each other, meaning a person can be high on both, low on both, or any combination in between. That independence is exactly why the new study examined both simultaneously rather than treating mood as a single dial.

The researchers focused on social achievement goals — orientations toward social competence that describe what students are trying to accomplish in their social lives. Psychologists A. M. Ryan and S. S. Shim, who proposed the framework in 2006, distinguished three types. Social development goals center on genuinely improving social skills, deepening relationship quality, and building a richer social life. Social demonstration-approach goals center on displaying social competence and winning positive evaluations from others. Social demonstration-avoid goals center on avoiding situations that would expose one’s social competence as insufficient. Earlier studies had tied each of these goals separately to affect: social development goals correlated with higher positive affect, demonstration-avoid goals with higher negative affect, and demonstration-approach goals with elevated joy. But those studies used a variable-centered approach, examining one goal at a time while statistically holding the other two aside.

That limitation matters. People do not hold goals in isolation; they endorse multiple goals simultaneously, and the interplay among them may shape emotional outcomes in ways single-goal analyses cannot detect. The new study therefore adopted a person-centered approach, using cluster analysis to sort students into subgroups defined by their full goal profiles. No previous study had simultaneously examined positive and negative affect with this method among Japanese college students, and relatively few person-centered studies existed anywhere — one focused on Turkish adolescents aged 12 and 15, another on Korean high school students. The Japanese sample thus fills a real gap in the literature.

The team conducted an online survey in late June 2024 through a Japanese research panel, screening for current college enrollment. Valid responses came from 330 students with a mean age of 20.13 years, split evenly between 165 men and 165 women. Participants spanned all undergraduate years, from 25.5 percent freshmen to 29.7 percent seniors, with small numbers of fifth- and sixth-year students. Geographically, the largest share lived in the Kanto region around Tokyo (38.5 percent), followed by the Kinki region (21.8 percent), Chubu (13.6 percent), and Kyushu (10.0 percent), with smaller contingents from Chugoku, Tohoku, Hokkaido, and Shikoku. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committees of Hijiyama University and Hijiyama University Junior College in June 2024.

Participants completed the validated Japanese version of the Social Achievement Goals Questionnaire, a 12-item scale with three four-item subscales rated on a five-point scale, and the Japanese version of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), whose two eight-item subscales were rated on a six-point scale. Internal consistency was strong throughout: Cronbach’s alpha reached 0.74 for social development goals, 0.83 for demonstration-approach goals, and 0.71 for demonstration-avoid goals, while the PANAS subscales showed alphas of 0.91 for positive affect and 0.92 for negative affect. The researchers then applied Ward’s method of cluster analysis to standardized goal scores, using SPSS version 28 with a significance threshold of p < 0.05, and examined between-cluster differences in affect with one-way analyses of covariance controlling for sex.

Four clusters emerged. The first, containing 25 students, was labeled the low cluster because all three goal types scored low. The second, with 60 students, was the low social demonstration-approach goal cluster, in which social development goals were somewhat high, demonstration-approach goals were clearly low, and demonstration-avoid goals were average. The third, with 76 students, was the high cluster, scoring high on all three goals. The fourth and largest, with 169 students — just over half the sample — was the average cluster, with average levels of everything. Analyses of covariance confirmed the clusters differed robustly on each goal type, with effect sizes (partial eta squared) of 0.59 for social development goals, 0.55 for demonstration-approach goals, and 0.48 for demonstration-avoid goals. Two of these clusters — the average cluster and the low demonstration-approach cluster — had not appeared in comparable studies of Turkish and Korean students, suggesting that goal-profile distributions vary across populations.

The affective results were strikingly asymmetric. On positive affect, the low cluster scored far below everyone else: its adjusted mean of 17.66 fell roughly 8 to 10 points beneath the low demonstration-approach cluster (25.75), the high cluster (28.01), and the average cluster (26.06), with all three differences statistically significant at p < 0.001. On negative affect, however, the picture inverted. The low cluster again sat at the bottom — 17.88 versus 26.57 for the high cluster and 24.58 for the average cluster — but this time being low was the favorable position. The low demonstration-approach cluster (21.39) also scored significantly below the high cluster on negative affect. In short, students with weak social goals across the board reported the least enthusiasm but also the least distress, while students with strong goals reported high energy and high distress alike.

The authors offer a tentative explanation for the low cluster’s emotional flatness: these students may be less motivated to engage in social interactions with peers and therefore less likely to experience either kind of affect. That hypothesis, they note, requires empirical testing. The broader implication is that the most adaptive goal profile depends on how one defines emotional adjustment. If the criterion is high positive affect — the component most consistently tied to physical health and academic performance — then any combination of meaningful social goals beats having none. If the criterion is low negative affect, weak goals across the board look best. Because positive and negative affect are independent constructs, neither conclusion can stand alone; well-being research must weigh both.

Several caveats temper the findings. The participants were recruited through a commercial panel and do not constitute a representative sample of Japanese college students, so replication with larger and more diverse samples is needed. The study was also cross-sectional, meaning causality cannot be established: the researchers cannot rule out the possibility that a third variable explains the associations between goal clusters and affect, and experimental studies that manipulate social achievement goals would be required to test causal claims. The authors also acknowledge that the two novel clusters diverge from prior work and that understanding why populations differ in their goal profiles remains an open question. Even so, the study demonstrates the value of person-centered analysis for well-being science: by identifying typical goal combinations rather than isolating single goals, it reveals subgroups of students who may experience markedly different degrees of affective well-being, offering a more nuanced map of how social motivation and mood intertwine on campus.

Subject of Research: Social achievement goal profiles and their associations with positive and negative affect among Japanese college students

Article Title: Differences in positive and negative affect across social achievement goal clusters among Japanese college students

Article References: Kashiwagi, S., Horiuchi, S., Aoki, S., & Kira, Y. (2026). Differences in positive and negative affect across social achievement goal clusters among Japanese college students. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 4, Article 1674815. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2026.1674815

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2026.1674815

Keywords: social achievement goals, positive affect, negative affect, cluster analysis, college students, Japanese students, subjective well-being, PANAS, person-centered approach, social competence, emotional adjustment, campus psychology