A new conceptual analysis by Stefano Mastino and Claudio Mulatti of the University of Trento, published as an open-access article in Current Psychology, takes that question head-on. The authors note that recent years have seen growing empirical attempts to blend the two frameworks, particularly in sport psychology and physical activity promotion, and that prominent figures in both camps have gestured at convergence. Steven Hayes, ACT’s founder, has described euthymia — a state of stable positive mental health — as the balanced satisfaction of both SDT-defined needs and ACT yearnings. Richard Ryan, SDT’s co-founder, has highlighted alignment between ACT principles and SDT findings on autonomous motivation and self-regulation. But as Mastino and Mulatti point out, the theoretical relationship between the two central constructs has remained formally unspecified in the literature. Nobody had clarified whether yearnings and basic needs are equivalent, hierarchically related, or overlapping but distinct.

The paper first lays out what each framework actually claims. In ACT, yearnings are described as deep and universal human longings that orient behavior toward six core domains: belonging, feeling, coherence, orientation, meaning, and competence. These are not treated as pathological in themselves; suffering arises from rigid or avoidant attempts to respond to them. Each yearning is functionally paired with one of ACT’s six psychological flexibility processes. The yearning for belonging is addressed through self-as-context, which loosens attachment to a fixed self-image and opens space for genuine connection. The yearning to feel is met through acceptance, allowing emotions to be experienced openly rather than suppressed. Coherence is handled through cognitive defusion, relating to thoughts as mental events rather than literal truths. Orientation is grounded through present-moment awareness, meaning through values, and competence through committed action.

SDT, by contrast, operates with a far more formalized architecture. Ryan and Deci define basic psychological needs as conditions essential for growth, integrity, and well-being, analogous to biological nutrients — with the crucial difference that they motivate action even without deprivation and can never be fully saturated. The theory specifies explicit criteria a candidate need must meet: its satisfaction must be strongly tied to well-being and its frustration to distress; it must be clearly defined and linked to specific experiences; it must function as an explanatory concept supported by evidence; it must belong to the correct category of variables, acting as an antecedent rather than an outcome; and it must be universal across ages and cultures, with an evolutionary rationale. SDT also distinguishes needs as motivation, which energize behavior at the start of an action sequence, from needs as requirements, whose fulfillment registers as a boost in well-being at the action’s conclusion.

Armed with SDT’s six criteria, the authors then ran the ACT yearnings through a systematic structural comparison. The results are striking in places. On the first criterion — linkage to well-being — both frameworks connect core motivational directions to vitality, though through different explanatory routes: SDT says well-being depends directly on need satisfaction, while ACT emphasizes that psychological flexibility determines whether engaging with yearnings produces vitality or distress. On universality, both ground their constructs in evolutionary reasoning, but SDT embeds needs in a developmental model, whereas ACT does not formally specify that absent yearnings produce developmental failure. On the criterion of clear definition, SDT prescribes specific experiential qualities — autonomy, for instance, is satisfied when behavior feels volitional and self-endorsed — while ACT offers a regulatory rather than prescriptive model, insisting that it is flexible, context-sensitive engagement rather than any fixed behavior that fulfills a yearning.

The most consequential divergence appears on the criterion of empirical status. SDT needs have been operationalized, measured, and tested for decades, with a large literature linking need satisfaction and frustration to health outcomes. ACT yearnings, by contrast, have never been formally defined as distinct motivational constructs, systematically operationalized, or empirically validated in their own right. Research in ACT has overwhelmingly focused on the flexibility processes rather than on the yearnings themselves. The authors conclude that yearnings satisfy the explanatory intent of SDT’s criterion at a functional level while remaining far less empirically formalized. Notably, however, neither framework arranges its motivational constructs hierarchically: SDT rejects Maslow-style sequencing and insists the three needs are interdependent, and ACT likewise designates no yearning as more fundamental than the rest.

The item-by-item comparison then yields a clear map of convergence. The ACT yearning for belonging — the desire to feel recognized, protected, and part of a community — emerges as essentially equivalent to SDT’s need for relatedness, which encompasses being cared for, caring for others, and feeling valued within social groups. The two competence constructs, both rooted in the desire to act effectively and develop skills, substantially coincide; SDT’s version traces back to Robert White’s 1959 account of infant exploration and mastery, while ACT frames it through committed action guided by personal values. The alignment between SDT’s need for autonomy and ACT’s yearning for meaning is significant but only partial. Autonomy concerns how actions are experienced — voluntary and self-endorsed — whereas the yearning for meaning concerns the broader, consciously chosen direction of one’s life. Intriguingly, the authors argue that ACT’s meaning construct effectively integrates autonomy with a separate concept SDT calls “need for meaning,” which SDT deliberately excludes from its basic needs on empirical grounds: the evidence indicates meaning functions as an outcome of satisfying the three basic needs, not as a need in its own right.

Three yearnings resist translation altogether. The yearnings for orientation, coherence, and feeling have no direct conceptual counterpart among SDT’s three needs. But the authors propose an indirect bridge, and it runs through mindfulness. The flexibility processes paired with those yearnings — present-moment awareness, acceptance, and cognitive defusion, together with self-as-context — are core components of mindfulness as conceptualized in ACT. And the SDT literature already links mindfulness to need satisfaction: Steven Brown and Richard Ryan’s classic 2003 research found that mindfulness predicts autonomy, need satisfaction, and self-regulation, while later work showed autonomy mediates the relationship between mindfulness and well-being, and that mindfulness skills support competence in athletes and relatedness in romantic relationships. A doctoral study by Gazla cited in the paper stands out as the only work to date exploring the flexibility–needs connection in detail, reporting strong associations between psychological flexibility and satisfaction of autonomy and competence, more moderate links to relatedness, and mediation analyses suggesting need satisfaction helps explain how flexibility benefits mental health.

From this convergence, the authors advance an integrative proposal: psychological flexibility may function as a regulatory pathway through which engagement with core motivational criteria translates into adaptive functioning. In this reading, ACT processes most closely tied to meaning, competence, and belonging — values, committed action, and self-as-context — act as regulatory mechanisms that facilitate the experiential conditions SDT describes as satisfying autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Several of these processes share features with metacognitive functioning, since they involve observing one’s own thoughts and internal states, raising the possibility that flexibility training could be especially valuable where metacognition is compromised — the authors point to eating disorders, where metacognitive dysfunction is a recognized maintaining factor. The framework also extends across the lifespan: needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness remain central even in late adulthood and dementia care, and flexibility processes may help older adults sustain need satisfaction. The authors even invoke the COVID-19 lockdowns, which frustrated multiple needs simultaneously, as a case where promoting flexibility could inform psychological preparedness for collective crises.

The authors are careful to flag the limits of their contribution: this is a conceptual rather than empirical analysis, and the proposed links between flexibility processes and need satisfaction remain theoretically grounded but untested within the framework itself. The next step, they argue, is fine-grained longitudinal and mediation research examining how specific ACT processes relate to individual SDT needs, alongside theoretical work to more precisely define and operationalize yearnings so they can be directly compared with established motivational constructs. If that program succeeds, the payoff could be substantial: a unified motivational science in which the clinical machinery of acceptance, defusion, and values-based action is understood not merely as symptom reduction, but as a concrete, trainable route to satisfying the psychological nutrients on which human flourishing demonstrably depends.

Subject of Research: A conceptual comparison of ACT yearnings and Self-Determination Theory basic psychological needs

Article Title: ACT yearnings and SDT basic psychological needs: a conceptual comparison and integrative perspective

Article References: Mastino, S., & Mulatti, C. (2026). ACT yearnings and SDT basic psychological needs: a conceptual comparison and integrative perspective. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1532. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10093-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10093-w

Keywords: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Self-Determination Theory, basic psychological needs, yearnings, psychological flexibility, mindfulness, motivation, autonomy, competence, relatedness, well-being, process-based therapy

The research team, led by Julianah Fakolade alongside Peter Kinderman, Shaima Hassan, and Anam Elahi, searched six electronic databases from 1983 through February 2026, initially identifying 12,608 records. After deduplication, screening of 8,926 titles and abstracts, and assessment of 62 full-text articles, thirteen studies met the inclusion criteria, ten from database searching and three through backward citation searching. The team used the SPIDER framework to structure the search and the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme qualitative checklist to appraise methodological rigour, which informed rather than dictated the weighting of evidence during a four-stage narrative synthesis. The included studies spanned more than four decades, from a 1985 dissertation on dropout among Black psychotherapy patients to work published in the mid-2020s, underscoring how persistent the problem has been.

The participants, comprising 138 males and 102 females with gender unreported in two studies, came from diverse backgrounds including African American, African-Caribbean, Latinx, Hispanic, Somali, Asian, and other ethnically minoritised communities. Nine studies were set in the United States and four in the United Kingdom. Most relied on interviews and purposive sampling, employing analytic techniques ranging from thematic analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis to grounded theory-informed approaches. From this body of evidence, six interconnected themes crystallised: perspectives and expectations of therapy, cultural and societal influences, practical and accessibility barriers, the therapeutic relationship, systemic and service-level barriers, and autonomy and control in treatment engagement.

The first theme revealed that discontinuation often begins with doubt. Participants questioned whether therapy would help at all, frequently perceiving faith, conversations with family and friends, or even substance use as more effective coping strategies. Others found that treatment failed to meet their needs, or that their difficulties eased earlier than the planned course anticipated, prompting them to leave. Some participants described feeling pressured, even hounded, by services to engage, an experience of pursuit that felt coercive rather than supportive. The review situates these findings within the psychotherapy literature on outcome expectations, which consistently shows that belief in therapeutic efficacy fuels hope, engagement, and improvement, a process researchers call remoralisation. When expectations were low or misaligned with the reality of sessions, motivation drained away and dropout followed.

Cultural and societal influences emerged as perhaps the most distinctive thread for ethnically minoritised clients. Eight studies identified stigma, emanating from communities, families, and friendships, as a powerful engine of shame that discouraged continued attendance. Participants described being labelled mad or crazy, and absorbing cultural narratives that framed mental health difficulties as personal weakness or something to be confined within the family. For those holding intersecting marginalised identities, such as being both ethnically minoritised and LGBTQ+, stigma compounded, intensifying isolation and accelerating the decision to quit. Language posed a further obstacle: many participants felt they lacked the English vocabulary to articulate their distress, while others found therapists unwilling to acknowledge faith or cultural context, perceiving a lack of holistic support. This resonates with established evidence that mental health stigma robustly suppresses help-seeking and that perceived cultural competence strengthens alliance formation and retention.

Practical barriers, though not unique to minoritised populations, weighed heavily and often interacted with socioeconomic disadvantage. Transportation difficulties produced discomfort that eventually curtailed attendance; unstable housing, relocation, financial constraints, work, and childcare responsibilities competed with therapy for scarce time and energy. These logistical pressures echo decades of research identifying practical constraints as key predictors of premature termination. Crucially, the review argues that such discontinuation frequently reflects constrained access rather than diminished therapeutic interest, a reframing with direct implications for how services interpret and respond to missed appointments and early exits.

The therapeutic relationship proved decisive in eight of the thirteen studies. When therapists were perceived as inexperienced, insensitive, or biased, and when clients felt their feelings were insufficiently considered, disengagement became markedly more likely. Participants reported disliking a therapist’s style, experiencing boundary crossings, or suffering relational ruptures that went unacknowledged. Where ruptures were recognised and repaired, engagement often continued; where they were left to fester, therapy ended. This pattern aligns with rupture-repair models of psychotherapy and with meta-analytic evidence identifying the therapeutic alliance as one of the strongest predictors of retention and outcome. Some participants simply could not form a working bond, breeding doubt about whether the intervention could work at all.

Systemic and service-level barriers added another layer. Participants described under-resourced services, rushed sessions, fragmented care pathways, confusing transfers between therapists, and departures of therapists that severed hard-won relationships. Many felt poorly informed about what therapy involved and what expertise their therapist held. Others resented being labelled dropouts when, in their view, they were simply selecting the services that best met their needs. Those prescribed medication described a focus on long-term pharmacological management that left them unheard and disempowered. The final theme, autonomy, ties these threads together: participants who were pressured into treatment, denied choice of therapist, or excluded from decisions sometimes used discontinuation itself as a means of reclaiming control, a dynamic consistent with self-determination theory, which positions autonomy as a core psychological need underpinning sustained engagement.

The authors translate these findings into a multi-level agenda. Clinically, culturally adapted interventions that align therapeutic approaches with clients’ cultural, religious, and social contexts may improve engagement, particularly given that much of the evidence base for psychological therapies was developed in predominantly White populations. At the service level, distinguishing systemic dropout patterns from therapist-level variation could inform training, supervision, and evaluation, while flexible delivery models, including remote and hybrid formats with variable scheduling, could dismantle logistical barriers without compromising effectiveness. Relationally, shared decision-making, explicit goal setting, early alignment of expectations, and collaborative review of progress offer concrete tools for building alliances that survive ruptures and sustain hope.

The review is candid about its limitations. Heterogeneous methodologies, inconsistent definitions of dropout, reliance on US and UK samples, restriction to English-language studies, and the inclusion of six dissertations all constrain generalisability, as does the grouping of diverse ethnic groups that may obscure within-group differences. Yet the convergence between dissertation and peer-reviewed findings strengthens confidence in the synthesis. The core message is unambiguous: when ethnically minoritised adults leave therapy early, they are rarely disengaged or unmotivated. They are responding, often rationally, to structural barriers, culturally incongruent care, broken therapeutic relationships, and curtailed autonomy. Closing the retention gap therefore demands more than better appointment reminders; it requires culturally responsive, flexible, and genuinely collaborative models of care that confront inequality while honouring the client’s voice.

Subject of Research: Psychotherapy discontinuation experiences among ethnically minoritised adults: a systematic review and qualitative synthesis

Article Title: Understanding Psychotherapy Discontinuation Among Ethnically Minoritised Adults: A Systematic Review and Qualitative Synthesis

Article References: Fakolade, J., Kinderman, P., Hassan, S., & Elahi, A. (2026). Understanding Psychotherapy Discontinuation Among Ethnically Minoritised Adults: A Systematic Review and Qualitative Synthesis. Community Mental Health Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-026-01720-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10597-026-01720-8

Keywords: psychotherapy discontinuation, therapy dropout, ethnic minority mental health, therapeutic relationship, cultural competence, stigma, mental health services, qualitative synthesis, therapeutic alliance, shared decision-making, health inequalities, autonomy

The study, led by Hengzhe Wang and Haiying Wang of Northeast Normal University together with Xingchao Wang and Fanwei Meng of Shanxi University, tracked 811 Chinese adolescents across two measurement waves separated by three months. At baseline, the participants averaged 16.42 years of age, with a standard deviation of 0.83, and the sample included 381 boys and 430 girls. Rather than taking a single snapshot, the team employed a two-wave cross-lagged panel design, a statistical architecture that allows researchers to separate the stability of each construct over time from the directional effects that one variable exerts on another across the interval. This design is widely regarded as one of the more rigorous tools available for probing temporal precedence in developmental psychology, though it stops short of proving causation in the experimental sense.

Helicopter parenting, the construct at the heart of the investigation, refers to a constellation of excessively protective and controlling behaviors in which parents constantly intervene in their children’s lives, shielding them from failure, making decisions on their behalf, and monitoring their activities with unusual intensity. Decades of research have associated this style with impaired attachment quality and elevated depressive symptoms, and recent meta-analyses have consolidated evidence that overparenting predicts internalizing problems across adolescence and emerging adulthood. Yet the research team identified a critical gap: almost no prior work had tested whether the reciprocal, bidirectional relationships among helicopter parenting, parent-child attachment, and depressive symptoms differ systematically by gender, leaving a potentially important source of heterogeneity unexplored.

To measure the key constructs, the researchers administered validated self-report instruments at both time points. Attachment quality was captured with instruments rooted in the tradition of the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment, a measure developed originally by Armsden and Greenberg in 1987 to assess the emotional and cognitive dimensions of adolescents’ bonds with their caregivers. Depressive symptoms were assessed with a scale descended from the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale, the widely used screening instrument introduced by Radloff in 1977. Helicopter parenting was measured with established overparenting scales that tap the frequency of intrusive, overprotective, and excessively helping behaviors perceived by the adolescent. All participants completed the same battery three months apart, permitting the estimation of autoregressive and cross-lagged paths within a multiple-group structural equation framework.

The statistical engine of the study was a series of multiple-group cross-lagged analyses in which the strength of each longitudinal path was first estimated separately for boys and girls and then formally compared across groups. This approach is technically demanding: the models must account for the temporal stability of each variable, the concurrent associations among constructs at each wave, and the possibility that observed differences between groups reflect measurement rather than genuine psychological processes. By constraining paths to be equal across gender groups and then testing whether releasing those constraints significantly improved model fit, the researchers could identify precisely which longitudinal relationships differed for boys versus girls. The results revealed that several such paths were not equivalent across the two groups, providing clear evidence that gender moderates the dynamics linking parenting, attachment, and mood.

Among the most consequential findings was the pattern emerging from the path connecting helicopter parenting at the first wave to parent-child attachment at the second. For boys, higher levels of overprotective parenting predicted a significant decline in the quality of the parent-child bond three months later. For girls, this negative longitudinal effect was absent. In other words, the corrosive impact of hovering on the felt security of the parent-child relationship appeared to operate selectively, undermining boys’ attachment but leaving girls’ bonds comparatively unaffected over the same interval. The researchers interpret this through the lens of gendered socialization: boys may experience intrusive parental control as a more direct affront to their emerging autonomy and self-reliance, whereas girls, socialized toward relational closeness, may read the same behaviors as evidence of care rather than control.

The path from helicopter parenting at time one to depressive symptoms at time two also differed statistically between boys and girls, although an important nuance deserves emphasis: neither of the group-specific coefficients reached conventional statistical significance on its own. This means the difference between the groups was detectable in the model comparison, but the individual effects were small enough that the study cannot claim robust direct effects of overparenting on depression for either gender over this three-month window. The finding underscores a recurring theme in the helicopter parenting literature, where associations with internalizing symptoms are often modest and may depend heavily on contextual factors, measurement choices, and the developmental window under study. Direct effects, the data suggest, may be less important than the indirect routes that run through the parent-child relationship itself.

Perhaps the most surprising result concerned the direction of effects running from attachment to depression. Parent-child attachment at the first wave positively predicted depressive symptoms at the second wave among boys, yet negatively predicted depressive symptoms among girls. For girls, the conventional picture held: stronger, more secure attachment served as a protective factor, forecasting fewer depressive symptoms three months later. For boys, the opposite pattern emerged, with higher reported attachment at baseline foreshadowing more depressive symptoms at follow-up. The authors note that this counterintuitive reversal may reflect complexities in how boys interpret and benefit from close parental ties during late adolescence, a period in which expectations of independence intensify, or it may indicate that boys with elevated depressive symptoms simultaneously maintain but struggle to draw comfort from parent relationships. The authors also caution that these coefficients describe statistical associations over time rather than deterministic mechanisms.

A fourth finding added a different dimension to the gender story: depressive symptoms displayed greater temporal stability among boys than among girls. Boys who reported elevated depression at the first wave were more likely to report it again three months later, while girls’ symptom levels showed more flux over the same short interval. This pattern carries clinical significance because stable symptoms are often considered a marker of persistent, entrenched distress, whereas greater variability may offer more entry points for intervention. Combined with the attachment findings, the stability result suggests that the architecture of adolescent depression may be qualitatively different for boys and girls, not merely different in degree, echoing broader epidemiological evidence that girls face higher overall rates of internalizing problems while boys may experience more persistent symptom trajectories.

The research team frames the overall pattern as a call for gender-sensitive approaches to family and mental health interventions. If helicopter parenting erodes boys’ attachment security but not girls’, and if attachment protects girls from depression while showing a more complicated relationship for boys, then one-size-fits-all parenting guidance and clinical protocols risk missing their mark. Parenting programs might, for instance, emphasize autonomy support especially for parents of sons, while clinicians working with adolescent girls might prioritize strengthening the parent-child bond as a protective resource. The study’s limitations warrant consideration: the three-month interval is short, the sample was drawn from a single cultural context in China where norms around parental involvement differ from Western settings, and all data were adolescent self-reports, which can conflate perception with behavior. Participant-level data are not publicly available because the participants were minors, though the Mplus syntax for the principal analyses is shared in a supplementary replication package. Funded by the General Program of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education of China, the study opens a clear agenda for future work: longer intervals, cross-cultural replication, and multi-informant designs to determine whether these gendered dynamics hold as adolescents transition into adulthood.

The gender differences documented in the study align with theoretical accounts of adolescence as a period in which gendered expectations around autonomy and relatedness intensify. Late adolescence, particularly around age sixteen, marks a developmental stage in which peer relationships and identity formation take on heightened importance, making sensitivity to parental intrusion potentially uneven across genders. Cross-lagged panel modeling of this kind relies on the assumption that constructs are measured equivalently over time and across groups, and the researchers’ strategy of formally comparing constrained and unconstrained paths guards against mistaking trivial numerical differences for true gender moderation.

It is also worth noting that the three-month interval, while well suited to capturing relatively rapid dynamics in mood and family processes, may be too brief to observe the cumulative effects of overparenting that longer-term studies have suggested. Prior longitudinal work on transactional processes between parenting and adolescent depressive symptoms has shown that effects can vary considerably across timescales, from daily to biennial. Replication with multiple waves spaced over months or years, and ideally incorporating parent reports alongside adolescent self-reports, would help clarify whether the gendered pathways observed here reflect stable developmental differences or context-specific patterns within this Chinese sample.

Subject of Research: Gender differences in the longitudinal relationships among helicopter parenting, parent-child attachment, and depressive symptoms in Chinese adolescents.

Article Title: Too Much is Not Enough: A Cross-Lagged Study of Helicopter Parenting, Parent-Child Attachment, and Adolescents’ Depressive Symptoms by Gender

Article References: Wang, H., Wang, X., Meng, F., & Wang, H. (2026). Too Much is Not Enough: A Cross-Lagged Study of Helicopter Parenting, Parent-Child Attachment, and Adolescents’ Depressive Symptoms by Gender. Applied Research in Quality of Life. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-026-10671-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11482-026-10671-x

Keywords: helicopter parenting, overparenting, adolescent depression, parent-child attachment, gender differences, cross-lagged panel design, depressive symptoms, autonomy, adolescent mental health, longitudinal study, parenting styles, China