The research team built their investigation around a structural equation model, a statistical framework that allows researchers to test networks of hypothesized cause-and-effect relationships simultaneously rather than one variable at a time. Using SmartPLS software, the standard tool for partial least squares structural equation modeling, they evaluated how generative AI usage affects creativity both directly and indirectly through three mediating variables: AI self-efficacy, AI literacy, and AI affordance. AI self-efficacy refers to a student’s belief in their own capacity to use AI tools effectively, a concept rooted in Bandura’s social cognitive theory. AI literacy captures knowledge and competence concerning AI systems, including awareness of their limitations. AI affordance describes the perceived action possibilities that AI tools offer, the sense of what a user can actually accomplish with them.

The findings confirmed that generative AI usage has a statistically significant effect on engineering students’ creativity, with a test statistic exceeding the conventional significance threshold of 1.96 and a p-value below 0.05. The effect size fell in what researchers classify as the moderate range, between 0.15 and 0.35, meaning the relationship is real and meaningful but not overwhelming. More revealing than the direct effect, however, was the mediation structure. The impact of generative AI usage on creativity was transmitted primarily through AI self-efficacy and AI affordance, both of which showed moderate downstream effects on creative outcomes. AI literacy, by contrast, carried a notably weaker indirect effect, even though generative AI usage strongly influenced all three mediators.

This asymmetry between the mediators is one of the study’s most provocative results. Students who used generative AI tools developed stronger confidence, sharper literacy, and richer perceptions of affordance across the board, yet only confidence and perceived affordance translated efficiently into creative performance. Literacy, the researchers suggest, may function more as background knowledge than as an active engine of creativity. Knowing how a large language model works, in other words, does not necessarily mean a student will push it toward novel engineering solutions. What matters more is whether students feel capable of wielding the tool and whether they perceive it as opening genuine possibilities for design and problem-solving.

The study’s second analytical layer addressed trust, and here the design became more sophisticated. Rather than treating trust as a single average effect across all participants, the team split the sample into two groups: a trust-in-AI group and a distrust-in-AI group. Multigroup analysis, a technique that tests whether structural paths differ significantly between subpopulations, revealed that the effects of trust in AI on the relationships between generative AI usage and the three mediators were significantly stronger in the trusting group than in the distrusting group. In practical terms, students who trusted AI extracted more psychological benefit from every interaction with the technology, while skeptical students gained less from the same usage.

This trust-dependent architecture has implications that ripple well beyond engineering education. The result echoes a growing body of literature on the double-edged nature of generative AI in creative domains. Earlier work published in Current Psychology documented paradoxical tensions in how employees use generative AI, finding that the same tools can either support or undermine creative output depending on how they are deployed. Research on ChatGPT dependence has linked inert thinking to overreliance on chatbots, while studies of creative self-efficacy in STEM education argue that beliefs about one’s own creative capacity are central to whether students engage in creative work at all. The new study threads these findings together by showing that trust modulates the entire psychological pipeline from tool usage to creative belief to creative behavior.

The engineering context matters. Engineering creativity is typically characterized as functional creativity, the generation of novel solutions to complex technical problems, a concept developed in the systems models of Cropley and colleagues. Unlike artistic creativity, engineering creativity must satisfy constraints of feasibility, utility, and safety, which makes it a demanding test case for whether generative AI can enhance human ingenuity rather than merely accelerate routine output. Prior systematic reviews have identified fostering creativity in science and engineering education as a persistent challenge, and the arrival of large language models has forced educators to reconsider how creative skills are taught and assessed. The Guangzhou study contributes a psychological mechanism to this debate: generative AI does not act on creativity directly so much as it acts on students’ self-beliefs and perceived possibilities, which then act on creativity.

Methodologically, the research follows established conventions for survey-based structural modeling in behavioral research, including attention to common method biases, a concern documented extensively by Podsakoff and colleagues in their influential review of bias remedies in behavioral research. The study received ethical approval from the Ethics Review Committee of the School of Education at Guangzhou University, and informed consent was obtained from all participants. The authors report no conflicts of interest, and the work was supported by a 2023 Special Task Project of Humanities and Social Sciences Research by the Ministry of Education of China. The raw data supporting the study’s conclusions will be made available by the authors without undue reservation.

For educators and policymakers, the practical message is that simply providing access to generative AI tools is unlikely to be sufficient. If creativity gains flow through self-efficacy and perceived affordance, then training programs should target those beliefs directly, building students’ confidence through scaffolded practice and demonstrating concrete creative possibilities that the tools enable. The weak indirect effect of AI literacy suggests that literacy curricula, while valuable for risk awareness and ethical understanding, should not be expected to drive creative outcomes on their own. And the trust findings imply that institutional culture around AI, including transparency about how systems work and honest discussion of their failure modes, may shape how much psychological benefit students derive from usage.

The study also leaves open questions that future research will need to address. The moderate effect sizes indicate that generative AI usage explains only part of the variance in engineering creativity, leaving room for factors such as team dynamics, prior creative experience, and disciplinary context. The trust-based grouping raises the question of what causes students to trust or distrust AI in the first place, a topic explored in recent chain-mediation work linking AI literacy to perceived trust. As generative AI becomes embedded in engineering curricula worldwide, the Guangzhou findings suggest that the decisive variable may not be the sophistication of the model but the psychology of the student holding the prompt, a conclusion that reframes the debate about AI and creativity from a question about machines to a question about minds.

Subject of Research: The psychological mechanisms linking generative AI usage to creativity in engineering students

Article Title: Engineering creativity through generative artificial intelligence: the role of artificial intelligence self-efficacy, literacy, affordance, and trust

Article References: Guo, H., Zhou, Z., & Ma, F. (2026). Engineering creativity through generative artificial intelligence: the role of artificial intelligence self-efficacy, literacy, affordance, and trust. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1634. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10177-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10177-7

Keywords: generative artificial intelligence, engineering creativity, AI self-efficacy, AI literacy, AI affordance, trust in AI, structural equation modeling, engineering education, Current Psychology, Guangzhou University, social cognitive theory, creativity research

The study, conducted by Hatice Oltuluoğlu of the Department of Fundamentals of Nursing at İnönü University’s Nursing Faculty in Malatya, Turkey, examined 123 patients undergoing hemodialysis at two hospitals — a university hospital and a private hospital — between mid-July and the end of August 2023. Rather than drawing a random sample, the researcher aimed to reach the entire eligible population of 145 patients registered in the participating hemodialysis units, ultimately collecting complete data from 123 individuals. The work was approved by an ethics committee (Decision No. 2023/4388) and conducted in line with the Declaration of Helsinki, with verbal informed consent obtained from every participant.

The central question was deceptively simple: does the way patients experience meaning, purpose, and spiritual connection relate to the hope they carry into their treatment? To answer it, the study deployed two well-validated psychometric instruments alongside a standard patient introduction form. Spiritual well-being was measured with the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy–Spiritual Well-Being Short Form 12, known as FACIT-Sp-12, a tool widely used in chronic illness research that captures a person’s sense of meaning, peace, and faith in the face of disease. Hope was assessed with the Adult Hope Scale, which measures both the willpower to pursue goals and the perceived pathways for reaching them.

The numbers tell a compelling story. Patients in the study scored an average of 31.34 ± 8.92 on spiritual well-being — a level the author characterizes as moderate but approaching the high-level threshold — and an average of 45.95 ± 8.68 on hope, which falls into the high range. More importantly, the two variables moved together. Pearson correlation analysis revealed a moderate positive association between spiritual well-being and hope, with a correlation coefficient of r = 0.576 and a p-value below 0.001, meaning the relationship is extremely unlikely to be a statistical fluke.

But the study went beyond correlation. Using simple linear regression, Oltuluoğlu tested whether spiritual well-being could actually predict hope scores — and it could, decisively. Spiritual well-being accounted for 33.2 percent of the variance in hope among the hemodialysis patients. In psychological research, where dozens of competing factors — depression, social support, income, symptom burden — typically dilute any single predictor’s explanatory power, one variable explaining a third of the variance in a core psychological resource is a result that demands attention.

The finding fits into a growing international literature. Previous studies have linked spiritual well-being to lower depression and stress in hemodialysis patients in Jordan, to resilience in Turkish dialysis populations, and to better adherence to dietary regimens in Iran. A 2025 latent profile analysis published in Hemodialysis International similarly explored how spiritual well-being shapes hope in this population. What distinguishes the new study is its focus on hope itself — a psychological construct that researchers increasingly view as a protective factor against the hopelessness, suicidal ideation, and depression that have been documented at alarming rates among people with end-stage renal disease.

Why would spirituality matter so much for patients whose kidneys have failed? The mechanisms are likely multifaceted. Chronic illness researchers often describe spiritual well-being as a resource for meaning-making: the ability to reframe suffering within a larger narrative of purpose, faith, or connection to something transcendent. For a patient facing an indefinite future of machine-dependent survival, that reframing capacity may be what allows hope — the belief that goals remain worth pursuing and attainable — to survive the daily reality of fatigue, dietary restrictions, and physical decline. Hope, in turn, has been associated in prior research with better treatment adherence, improved quality of life, and greater psychological resilience.

The clinical implications are concrete. The study’s author argues that integrating spiritual assessment and support into routine nursing care could help strengthen patients’ psychological resilience and perceived hope. In practice, that could mean nurses and clinicians routinely screening for spiritual distress alongside physical symptoms, referring patients to chaplaincy or spiritual counseling services, and acknowledging faith and meaning as legitimate dimensions of care rather than private matters outside the clinical sphere. In Turkey, where the study took place, religious coping is a culturally salient resource, but the underlying principle — that meaning and transcendence are health-relevant — applies across cultural contexts.

The study’s limitations deserve honest framing. As a cross-sectional design, it captures a single moment in time and cannot establish causality: it is equally plausible that hopeful patients find it easier to cultivate spiritual well-being, or that unmeasured third factors — social support, disease duration, comorbidities — drive both. The sample, drawn entirely from two hospitals in one Turkish region, also limits generalizability, and the author notes that causal inferences cannot be established from these data. Data supporting the findings are available from the corresponding author upon request, and the research received no external funding.

Even with those caveats, the study adds weight to an increasingly persuasive argument in psychonephrology and holistic nursing: that the inner life of the dialysis patient is not a luxury but a clinical variable. As hemodialysis continues to sustain a growing global population of patients with kidney failure, interventions that target spiritual well-being — from meaning-centered counseling to simple, structured spiritual assessments at the bedside — may offer a low-cost, culturally adaptable way to protect the one psychological resource that keeps patients engaged with their treatment: hope. The full study is available in Current Psychology, volume 45, article 1630, published online on 19 October 2026.

Subject of Research: The relationship between spiritual well-being and hope in patients undergoing hemodialysis

Article Title: The effect of spiritual well-being on hope in hemodialysis patients: a cross-sectional study

Article References: OLTULUOĞLU, H. (2026). The effect of spiritual well-being on hope in hemodialysis patients: a cross-sectional study. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1630. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10195-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10195-5

Keywords: hemodialysis, spiritual well-being, hope, chronic kidney disease, psychology, nursing, cross-sectional study, FACIT-Sp-12, Adult Hope Scale, psychosocial factors, resilience, Current Psychology

The scale of the problem was striking. According to the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, a validated instrument that scores sleep across seven domains including duration, latency, and disturbances, 16.25 percent of the participants met the threshold for severe sleep disturbance, defined as a global score of 8 or higher. Another 28.69 percent showed mild disturbance, with scores between 5 and 7. Taken together, nearly 45 percent of the women in their second trimester were experiencing sleep that was measurably compromised, a finding consistent with meta-analytic evidence that sleep quality deteriorates progressively across gestation.

What makes the new study distinctive is not simply the documentation of poor sleep but the disentangling of the causal-looking architecture behind it. The researchers administered a battery of validated instruments: the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale for depressive symptoms, the Pregnancy-Associated Anxiety Questionnaire for pregnancy-specific worry, the Family APGAR Index for perceived family functioning, and the Life Event Scale for recent stressful experiences. Ordinal logistic regression was first used to screen candidate predictors, and path analysis was then applied to estimate both direct and indirect pathways linking psychological and contextual factors to sleep outcomes.

The path model identified four variables exerting direct effects on sleep quality. Prenatal depression carried the largest standardized effect, with a path coefficient of 0.181, followed closely by pregnancy-related anxiety at 0.165. Being pregnant for the first time showed a small negative coefficient of -0.070, while an introverted personality contributed a coefficient of 0.047. In practical terms, the model indicates that women with more depressive symptoms and stronger pregnancy-specific anxiety tended to report worse sleep, and that dispositional and obstetric characteristics added smaller but detectable contributions independent of mood.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns the variables that did not act directly. Family functioning and stressful life events influenced sleep quality only indirectly, operating through their effects on prenatal anxiety and depressive symptoms. This mediating structure suggests that the family environment and external stressors do not disturb sleep on their own; rather, they shape the emotional climate inside the mother, and it is that emotional state that erodes sleep. The distinction matters for intervention design, because it implies that strengthening family support and buffering life stress may improve sleep primarily by reducing anxiety and depression.

The statistical performance of the model lends credibility to these pathways. Fit indices fell within conventional benchmarks for a good-fitting structural model: the ratio of chi-square to degrees of freedom was 2.797, the root mean square error of approximation was 0.042, and the comparative fit index reached 0.942. These values indicate that the hypothesized network of relationships reproduced the observed correlations among the measured variables reasonably well, supporting the interpretation that mood symptoms sit at the hub of the pathways leading to disturbed sleep.

The results align with a growing body of perinatal sleep research. Meta-analyses have linked insomnia and poor sleep quality to perinatal depressive symptoms, and prospective cohort studies have shown that mid-pregnancy insomnia predicts later depressive episodes. Poor maternal sleep has also been associated with adverse obstetric outcomes, including preterm birth, and with impaired quality of life during pregnancy. By quantifying the relative weights of psychological predictors within a single integrated model, the Ningxia team adds a mechanistic layer to this literature, showing how distal factors funnel through proximal emotional states.

The authors argue that their findings carry a clear clinical message: routine screening for prenatal depression and pregnancy-related anxiety during the second trimester, combined with targeted psychosocial interventions, could effectively reduce maternal sleep disturbance and benefit fetal development. Because the second trimester precedes the period of steepest sleep deterioration, identifying women with elevated depressive or anxiety symptoms at this stage offers a window for prevention. Interventions such as sleep enhancement training, cognitive-behavioral approaches, and family-centered support programs could plausibly interrupt the pathways identified in the model before sleep problems become entrenched.

Several caveats temper the conclusions. The study was cross-sectional, so the direction of causality between mood and sleep cannot be definitively established; poor sleep may itself amplify depressive and anxious symptoms, creating a bidirectional loop that path analysis of a single time point cannot fully resolve. The sample was drawn from a single tertiary hospital in Ningxia, which may limit generalizability to other regions and care settings. All measures were self-reported, introducing the possibility of recall and reporting biases. The authors note that original survey data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable written request, which may facilitate replication.

Even with these limitations, the study offers one of the more detailed maps to date of how psychological and social factors converge on sleep during the second trimester. Its core insight, that depression and pregnancy-related anxiety are the dominant direct predictors while family functioning and life stress act through them, reframes maternal sleep disturbance as an emotionally mediated phenomenon rather than an inevitable physical byproduct of gestation. For clinicians and public health planners, the implication is that protecting sleep in pregnancy may begin not in the bedroom but in the assessment of mood and the strengthening of the family systems that surround expectant mothers.

Subject of Research: Psychological predictors of sleep disturbance in second-trimester pregnant women analyzed with path analysis

Article Title: Relationships between psychological factors and sleep disturbance in second-trimester pregnant women: a path analysis

Article References: Liu, C., Li, H., Jia, J., Yang, D., Yu, Z., Wang, C., Wang, H., Ma, S., & Guan, S. (2026). Relationships between psychological factors and sleep disturbance in second-trimester pregnant women: a path analysis. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1627. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10166-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10166-w

Keywords: pregnancy, sleep disturbance, prenatal depression, pregnancy-related anxiety, path analysis, second trimester, family functioning, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, maternal health, structural equation modeling, psychosocial factors, Current Psychology

The study, conducted by Heng Li of Sichuan International Studies University in Chongqing, China, tested a deceptively simple theoretical proposal. High-power individuals, the argument goes, experience a heightened sense of autonomy, authority, and confidence. That psychological state reduces the pressure to align with others, because powerful people are less dependent on their interlocutors and less motivated to accommodate them. Low-power individuals, by contrast, live in a social world where dependence, vigilance, and the need for acceptance are more salient, which should make them more inclined to mirror the linguistic behavior of the people around them. If that reasoning is correct, then the strength of syntactic priming should vary systematically with power, and the difference should appear even when power is only temporarily induced in the laboratory.

Syntactic priming itself is one of the most robust findings in psycholinguistics. In the classic paradigm established by Kathryn Bock in the 1980s, participants who read or hear a sentence with a particular structure, such as a double-object dative, become more likely to describe an unrelated picture using that same structure. The effect persists across modalities, ages, and languages, and meta-analyses have confirmed its strength in language production. Researchers have proposed two broad mechanistic accounts. One treats priming as transient activation of syntactic representations in a spreading-activation production system. The other treats it as a form of implicit learning, in which the language system updates its expectations about which structures are likely to recur. Either way, the effect operates largely beneath conscious awareness, which makes it a sensitive probe for detecting how psycho-social states modulate linguistic processing.

What makes the new work notable is that most prior research on the social modulation of priming has focused on factors such as social opinion, ostracism, speaker accent, or communicative context. Social power, a foundational construct in social psychology defined as the capacity to influence others while being relatively resistant to influence oneself, had been largely unexplored in this domain. Yet power is known to alter a wide range of perceptual and cognitive processes. Previous studies have shown that high-power individuals process information more abstractly, take others’ perspectives less often, show reduced mirroring responses in the brain, and recognize emotional prosody in voices with lower accuracy than low-power individuals. Power also elevates self-concept consistency and authenticity, and it shapes expectations of social acceptance. If power dampens the tendency to imitate in these domains, the language system should be no exception.

To test this prediction, Li ran two studies using different priming methodologies and different participant populations, a design choice intended to guard against the possibility that any observed pattern is an artifact of a single task or a single group. Study 1 recruited Chinese student participants and used a dialogue-based writing task. Participants were first primed with either high power or low power, a standard social-priming manipulation in which people recall and describe an experience in which they had power over others or in which others had power over them. They then engaged in dialogue with interlocutors whose sentence structures were controlled by the experimenters. The key measure was whether participants subsequently adopted the syntactic structures their interlocutors had used. The results were clear: participants primed with high power were less likely to adopt the syntactic structures used by their interlocutors than participants primed with low power.

Study 2 corroborated the finding with a different task and a different population. This time the participants were community adults rather than students, and the priming methodology was a sentence scrambling task rather than a dialogue writing task. In sentence scrambling paradigms, participants rearrange words or phrases to form sentences, and the structures they produce reveal which syntactic representations have been activated by recent exposure. Once again, participants with high power exhibited a less pronounced syntactic priming effect than participants with low power. The convergence across two tasks, two participant groups, and two experimental formats strengthens the conclusion that the power effect is not tied to any particular methodological quirk but reflects a genuine modulation of the alignment process itself.

The theoretical significance of these results extends beyond the laboratory. Communication accommodation theory, developed by Howard Giles and colleagues, holds that speakers adjust their linguistic behavior toward or away from their interlocutors depending on their social goals, with convergence signaling affiliation and approval. The new findings suggest that power is a hidden moderator of this accommodation process. Powerful speakers, feeling less dependent on their partners, accommodate less, while powerless speakers, whose social outcomes hinge more on acceptance, accommodate more. This asymmetry could help explain a familiar feature of everyday conversation: in interactions between bosses and subordinates, teachers and students, or any pair with a power differential, the grammatical convergence may flow disproportionately from the less powerful side. Over time, such one-sided alignment could shape the linguistic norms of entire communities, since the structures favored by powerful speakers may spread more widely than those favored by powerless ones.

The findings also connect to a broader research program on imitation and social learning. Imitation, whether of gestures, facial expressions, or sentence structures, is a cornerstone of human sociality and a mechanism of cumulative cultural evolution. Previous work by the same author showed that social ostracism, the experience of being excluded, selectively increases language imitation, presumably because excluded individuals are motivated to regain acceptance through affiliation. The power results now complete the picture from the opposite direction: whereas exclusion amplifies the echo of others’ grammar, power mutes it. Together, these studies suggest that syntactic priming is not a fixed property of the language system but a flexible alignment behavior whose strength tracks the speaker’s social circumstances. The perception and production of language, the study concludes, vary significantly between individuals experiencing high and low power, highlighting the profound influence of social dynamics on linguistic processes.

Several caveats and open questions remain. The studies relied on temporarily induced power rather than stable individual differences in power motivation, so it is not yet known whether chronically powerful people, such as long-term leaders, show persistently weaker priming. The participants were Chinese speakers, and although syntactic priming is well documented across languages, including contrastive work on passive constructions in English and Chinese, cross-cultural replication would strengthen the general claim. The data supporting the findings are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, and the study received no external funding. Future research could examine whether the power effect interacts with expectation-based accounts of priming, in which alignment strength depends on the prediction error of the prime, or whether it extends to alignment at other linguistic levels, such as word choice and speech rate. It could also test whether the effect reverses in cooperative contexts, since prior work has shown that power and context jointly moderate verbal mimicry.

For now, the message is striking. The grammar we produce in conversation is quietly tuned by how powerful we feel. A person who feels in charge is less likely to borrow the sentence structures of the person they are talking to, while a person who feels subordinate is more likely to echo them. Language, in other words, is not just a vehicle for transmitting content; it is a social instrument whose alignment settings are calibrated by power. Every dialogue, from a hallway exchange to a boardroom negotiation, carries these linguistic echoes of hierarchy, and the new research shows that the echoes are loudest on the less powerful side.

Subject of Research: The effect of social power on syntactic priming and grammatical alignment in dialogue

Article Title: Linguistic echoes of power: high power leads to weaker syntactic priming effects

Article References: Li, H. (2026). Linguistic echoes of power: high power leads to weaker syntactic priming effects. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1626. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10183-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10183-9

Keywords: syntactic priming, social power, psycholinguistics, language production, communication accommodation theory, imitation, dialogue, sentence structure, social psychology, Current Psychology, Linguistic, echoes

The study team, led by Li Lv of Hubei University together with co-first author Yating Yang of China University of Geosciences, recruited 124 college students. Using the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale, a validated self-report instrument first introduced in 1965, they identified 93 students with depressive tendency and 31 mentally healthy students. The students with depressive tendency were then randomly assigned to one of three groups of 31 participants each: a serious game intervention group that played Celeste, an active control group that played an ordinary entertainment game, and a no-treatment control group that received no game at all. The healthy students served as a fourth reference group, allowing the researchers to ask whether the intervention could bring struggling students back to the psychological baseline of their peers.

Celeste is an unusual candidate for a clinical trial. The game follows a young climber named Madeline as she ascends a mountain while confronting anxiety and self-doubt, and its narrative of struggle, failure, and eventual self-compassion has resonated with millions of players. Unlike purpose-built therapeutic games such as SPARX, which was designed as a self-help intervention for adolescents with depression, Celeste was created as an entertainment product. That distinction matters for the theory behind the trial: the researchers reasoned that the game’s themes of accepting imperfection could operate as a vehicle for self-acceptance, a psychological construct closely linked in prior literature to lower depression, reduced perfectionism, and better mental health outcomes.

All 124 participants completed pre-tests and post-tests on two measures: the Self-Rating Depression Scale and the Self-Acceptance Questionnaire, a Chinese instrument compiled in 1999 by Cong and Gao that assesses both general self-acceptance and acceptance of one’s specific experiences. The statistical analysis used a 2 (Time) by 4 (Group) mixed-design analysis of variance, a technique that examines how scores change over time within each group and whether those changes differ between groups. The results were striking. For depression scores, the Time by Group interaction was highly significant, F(3, 120) = 268.55, p < .001, with a partial eta squared of 0.87, an effect size far beyond the 0.14 threshold conventionally considered large. For self-acceptance scores, the interaction was also significant, F(3, 120) = 33.09, p < .001, with a partial eta squared of 0.45.

Simple effect analyses confirmed where the improvement actually occurred. Only the serious game intervention group showed significant gains from pre-test to post-test. Their depression scores dropped dramatically, F(3, 120) = 1066.53, p < .001, with a partial eta squared of 0.90, while their self-acceptance scores rose sharply, F(3, 120) = 149.92, p < .001, with a partial eta squared of 0.81. By contrast, the active control group that played an ordinary entertainment game and the no-treatment control group showed no comparable improvement. The most remarkable result, however, came from the comparison with healthy students: after the intervention, the post-test depression and self-acceptance scores of the Celeste group no longer differed significantly from those of the mentally healthy control group, with both comparisons yielding p values greater than .05. In practical terms, students who began the study with depressive tendency ended it statistically indistinguishable from peers who had never shown such symptoms.

The design of the trial addresses a persistent weakness in serious game research. Many prior studies compare a game intervention only with a passive control group, making it impossible to tell whether the benefit comes from the game’s therapeutic content or simply from the experience of playing something engaging. By including an active control group that played an entertainment game, the researchers could isolate the specific contribution of Celeste’s narrative and mechanics. The fact that the entertainment game produced no significant change suggests that the benefit was not mere distraction or enjoyment, but something tied to the game’s content. This distinction echoes earlier work by Granic, Lobel, and Engels, who argued in American Psychologist that video games can offer emotional and social benefits, and by Klimmt and colleagues, who described how players undergo enjoyable alterations of self-perception through identification with game characters.

The theoretical framing of the study rests on the construct of self-acceptance, which has deep roots in cognitive behavior therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy. Unconditional self-acceptance, as described by Chamberlain and Haaga and by Fergusson and colleagues in work on perfectionism and depression, refers to the capacity to accept oneself without harsh judgment even in the face of failure or negative feedback. Prior Chinese studies have repeatedly linked low self-acceptance to depressive symptoms among college and medical students, and group counseling interventions targeting self-acceptance have been shown to reduce depression in female college students. The researchers propose that Celeste’s story of a climber who learns to accept her own imperfections may function as an implicit intervention on this construct, allowing players to rehearse self-compassion through gameplay rather than through explicit therapeutic instruction.

The study also situates itself within a broader movement toward digital mental health interventions. Internet-based cognitive behavior therapy has accumulated substantial meta-analytic support for depression and anxiety, and the European Psychologist published a taskforce report in 2018 documenting the efficacy of internet- and mobile-based psychological interventions. Serious games represent a related but distinct approach: rather than delivering therapy through structured modules, they embed therapeutic principles in engaging gameplay. The SPARX trial in New Zealand, published in the BMJ in 2012, demonstrated that a purpose-built fantasy game could serve as a non-inferior self-help intervention for adolescents seeking help for depression. The Celeste trial extends this evidence by showing that a commercial game, never designed as therapy, may nonetheless produce measurable psychological change when its themes align with therapeutic goals.

Subthreshold depression, the condition targeted by the trial, refers to depressive symptoms that fall below the diagnostic threshold for major depression but still cause functional impairment. Research has shown that subthreshold depression in adolescence predicts poorer mental health outcomes in adulthood, and recent Chinese surveys have documented substantial detection rates of subthreshold depression among college students. The National Health Commission of China held a press conference on mental health work in December 2024, reflecting growing official attention to youth mental health. Against this backdrop, a low-cost, scalable intervention that requires no clinician and no diagnosis could have significant public health implications, particularly in university settings where counseling resources are often stretched thin.

The authors caution that the study has limitations typical of early intervention research. The sample consisted of Chinese college students, and the generalizability of the findings to other populations, age groups, and cultural contexts remains to be established. The trial measured outcomes immediately after the intervention, so the durability of the improvement over weeks or months is unknown. The mechanism by which Celeste produced its effects, whether through narrative identification, emotional engagement, or some other process, was not directly tested. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the observed effects, with partial eta squared values of 0.90 for depression reduction and 0.81 for self-acceptance increase, is unusually large for a psychological intervention, and the finding that post-test scores matched those of healthy peers suggests that a commercial game may serve as a genuine vehicle for psychological change. As serious games continue to attract attention as scalable mental health tools, the Celeste trial offers a vivid demonstration that the boundary between entertainment and therapy may be thinner than commonly assumed.

Subject of Research: Serious game intervention for self-acceptance and depressive tendency in college students

Article Title: An intervention study of serious game Celeste on college students’ self – acceptance and depressive tendency

Article References: Lv, L., Yang, Y., Cao, Y., Huang, Y., Feng, Y., Yuan, G., Zhang, B., Chen, Y., & Zhai, Y. (2026). An intervention study of serious game Celeste on college students’ self – acceptance and depressive tendency. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1624. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10187-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10187-5

Keywords: serious games, Celeste, depressive tendency, self-acceptance, college students, randomized controlled trial, mental health intervention, Current Psychology, mixed-design ANOVA, Self-Rating Depression Scale, video game therapy, subthreshold depression

The study, published in Current Psychology by Xinwei Hong, Haiyan Lv, Zhaoli Qu, Hang Fan, and Lin Zhang, draws on three well-established theoretical frameworks from social psychology: the common ingroup identity model, the social identity model of collective action, and the social identity model of collective resilience. Each of these traditions addresses a different piece of the puzzle. The common ingroup identity model, developed originally by Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio, proposes that recasting memberships in separate groups as membership in a single, more inclusive superordinate group can reduce intergroup bias and foster cooperation. The social identity model of collective action, associated with researchers such as Martijn van Zomeren and colleagues, identifies identity, efficacy, and moral outrage as core drivers of people’s willingness to act collectively. The social identity model of collective resilience, advanced by John Drury and colleagues, explains how shared identification within emergent groups helps people cope with disasters and emergencies. By combining these perspectives, the authors sought to explain not only whether a shared sense of “we” promotes prosocial collective action, but also the psychological pathway through which that influence travels.

The research program consisted of two studies with a combined sample of 933 participants. Study 1 used a correlational design, measuring participants’ perceptions of common ingroup identity, hope, group efficacy, common fate, and their tendencies toward prosocial collective action. The results showed that common ingroup identity positively predicted prosocial collective action, and that this relationship was carried along a sequential pathway: a shared identity first fostered hope, hope in turn strengthened beliefs in the group’s collective efficacy, and those efficacy beliefs then translated into a readiness to act for the common good. Importantly, the strength of this indirect pathway depended on how much participants perceived a common fate binding their group together. When common fate was perceived as strong, the motivational chain from identity through hope and efficacy to action was amplified.

Study 2 moved beyond correlation by experimentally manipulating both the type of group identity that participants were led to adopt and the valence of the common fate they were told their group faced. The findings replicated the pattern observed in the first study, providing stronger grounds for causal inference. In addition, Study 2 revealed a further layer of nuance: the valence of common fate moderated the link between hope and group efficacy, as well as the link between group efficacy and prosocial collective action. In other words, whether the shared future people anticipated was positive or negative changed how hope and efficacy interacted to fuel action. These findings clarify the mechanisms underlying prosocial collective action and extend the social identity model of collective action by embedding hope, efficacy, and common fate into a single moderated serial mediation framework.

The emphasis on hope as a group-based emotion deserves particular attention. Hope has traditionally been studied at the individual level, but a growing body of work treats it as an experience people hold on behalf of their groups. Research by Smadar Cohen-Chen and colleagues on intergroup conflict has shown that hope about the possibility of change can loosen entrenched attitudes and open the door to support for conciliatory action. Cohen-Chen and Martijn van Zomeren further demonstrated that group efficacy beliefs predict collective action most strongly when hope is high, suggesting that the two constructs operate as a motivational system rather than in isolation. The present study’s serial mediation design is consistent with this view: hope does not merely accompany efficacy beliefs, it appears to build them, in line with Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build account of positive emotions, which holds that positive emotional states widen people’s thought-action repertoires and help them accumulate durable psychological resources over time.

Common fate is a concept with a long pedigree in social psychology. Classic work on entitativity, the perception that a collection of people forms a coherent group, identified shared fate as one of the strongest cues leading observers to see an aggregate of individuals as a genuine entity. When people believe that they will succeed or suffer together, whether because of a pandemic, a flood, or a changing climate, the psychological boundary between “us” and “them” becomes less consequential. Prior research on global social identity has shown that inducing a shared human identity can increase cooperation in economic games across national boundaries, and studies of disaster response have documented how emergencies can dissolve preexisting social divisions as people come to see themselves as survivors facing a common threat. The present findings add that the valence of that shared future matters: a common fate framed in positive terms appears to sustain the hope-efficacy pathway differently than one framed in negative terms, a distinction with practical implications for how crises are communicated.

The distinction between prosocial collective action and other forms of collective behavior is also relevant here. Much of the collective action literature has focused on protest and contestation, often by disadvantaged groups challenging the status quo. Prosocial collective action, by contrast, refers to cooperative efforts to benefit others or the broader community, such as volunteering, mutual aid, resource sharing, and coordinated helping during emergencies. Research during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated this form of action vividly: studies found that people who identified more strongly with their local communities were more likely to engage in coordinated helping, and that this helping was associated with mental health benefits for both givers and receivers. Work on social identification and risk perception similarly showed that shared identity shaped how people appraised personal and collective risk and whether they adopted preventive behaviors. The present study situates prosocial collective action within the same motivational architecture that has been used to explain protest, suggesting that identity, hope, and efficacy operate across both domains.

The findings also speak to a long-standing debate about the costs and benefits of promoting superordinate identities. Critics have argued that emphasizing a common identity can defuse the grievances of disadvantaged groups and undermine support for structural change, a concern captured in critiques of prejudice-reduction approaches that prioritize harmony over justice. Research among historically disadvantaged communities has shown that intergroup contact and common identity do not necessarily dampen collective action and can, under some conditions, support solidarity-based action on behalf of other groups. Studies of indigenous activism in Latin America have found that common ingroup identity can coexist with, and even strengthen, willingness to act. The present research adds a constructive note to this debate by showing that a common ingroup identity, particularly when paired with a salient common fate, can mobilize prosocial action rather than merely pacify conflict.

Methodologically, the combination of a large correlational study and a follow-up experiment strengthens the evidential basis of the conclusions. Correlational designs can establish that the measured variables covary as theory predicts, but they cannot rule out all alternative explanations, such as reverse causation or the influence of unmeasured third variables. The experimental manipulation of identity type and common fate valence in Study 2 addresses this limitation directly, allowing the authors to make stronger causal claims about the roles of these constructs. The moderated serial mediation model itself represents a methodological advance over simpler mediation tests, because it captures a chain of influence in which one mediator feeds into another, and simultaneously tests how a moderator changes the strength of links within that chain.

For practitioners, the results suggest several actionable levers. Public health campaigns, climate communication, and disaster preparedness programs often struggle to motivate action across group boundaries, whether those boundaries are national, ethnic, political, or generational. The findings imply that messages emphasizing a shared identity and a shared future may be more effective than messages that target individuals in isolation. Framing a crisis in terms of common fate, particularly when that framing highlights achievable positive outcomes, may cultivate the hope that in turn builds collective efficacy. Communicators should be attentive to valence: while threat-based messaging can capture attention, the present results indicate that the emotional and motivational consequences of a shared future depend on whether it is framed as hopeful or foreboding. Community organizations seeking to coordinate volunteers, mutual aid networks, or collective adaptation efforts may benefit from practices that reinforce a superordinate “we,” such as inclusive language, shared rituals, and joint planning across group lines.

The study’s limitations point toward future research directions. The samples were drawn from a single cultural context, and norms around collective action, hope, and group identification vary considerably across societies, so cross-cultural replication remains an open question. The measurement of prosocial collective action relied on self-report tendencies rather than observed behavior, and longitudinal designs would be needed to establish how identity, hope, efficacy, and common fate influence one another over time as a crisis unfolds. Future work might also examine whether the serial pathway holds for other emotions, such as anger or despair, which prior research has linked to collective action in different ways, and whether interventions that experimentally strengthen common fate perceptions can produce durable increases in prosocial behavior. As climate change and other transboundary crises continue to test the capacity of diverse societies to act together, understanding the psychological conditions under which people come to see themselves as sharing one fate, and one capacity to respond, becomes an increasingly urgent scientific and practical task.

Subject of Research: How common ingroup identity and common fate influence prosocial collective action through hope and group efficacy

Article Title: Breathe together and share a common fate: the effect of common ingroup identity on prosocial collective action

Article References: Hong, X., Lv, H., Qu, Z., Fan, H., & Zhang, L. (2026). Breathe together and share a common fate: the effect of common ingroup identity on prosocial collective action. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1428. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09977-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09977-8

Keywords: common ingroup identity, prosocial collective action, common fate, hope, group efficacy, social identity, collective resilience, intergroup relations, climate change, pandemics, social psychology, Current Psychology

Previous research offered conflicting answers. Using vignettes describing dissociative experiences in three different relationship contexts — in the presence of an acquaintance, a close friend, or alone — McKeogh and colleagues found in 2018 that shame was elevated only in the close friend context, suggesting that more intimate relationships may moderate dissociation-induced shame. Yet another vignette study by Dorahy and colleagues showed only tentative support for intimacy moderating the connection between dissociation and reactive shame, instead supporting shame as a more general reaction to dissociative experiences regardless of context. Behavioural responses added another layer: those who dissociated with a close friend wished to stay present and talk about what had happened, whereas those who dissociated with an acquaintance wished it had happened when they were alone. These approach and avoidance motivations are common responses to shame, and whether the self can be repaired or needs protection from further harm is thought to determine which motivation emerges.

The Canterbury team suspected the missing variable was self-discrepancy. Self-discrepancy theory, proposed by E. Tory Higgins in 1987, posits three primary domains of self: the actual self, one’s perception of one’s actual attributes; the ought self, the attributes one feels obligated to have; and the ideal self, the attributes one would like to have. These domains operate from two standpoints — one’s own view and the perceived view of an other. A difference between two self-state representations is a self-discrepancy, for example a feeling that one is falling short of one’s own sense of who one should be. Higgins argued that shame is induced when there is a discrepancy between one’s actual and ideal self-state representations. This claim was challenged by June Tangney and colleagues in 1998, who demonstrated that most people do not distinguish between their ought and ideal selves, or between their own evaluations and those of significant others, theorising instead a general discrepancy between the actual self and some perceived optimal self. The present study therefore focused on an own/actual–own/ought discrepancy, examining whether dissociation that conflicts with how an individual believes they ought to be evokes greater shame than dissociation consistent with this self-guide.

The experiment used hypothetical vignettes written in second-person narrative to maximise immersion and self-referential processing. Participants aged between 20 and 72 years (N = 310), recruited through the Cloud Research crowdsourcing platform, were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: no discrepancy with a close friend, discrepancy with a close friend, no discrepancy alone, or discrepancy alone. A priori power analysis using G*Power estimated a required sample of at least 293 participants to detect a medium-sized interaction effect in a 2 × 2 between-subjects MANOVA with alpha = 0.05 and power = 0.99. The twelve vignettes, adapted from previously published work and pilot tested on seven postgraduate psychology students, described three dissociative experiences: amnesia, in which the person became disorientated, drifted off, and returned unaware of what had happened; a flashback, in which the person lost contact with the world and was transported back to a past traumatic experience; and depersonalization/derealization, in which the person felt detached from their physical body and perceived objects in the room as a long way away. In the no-discrepancy conditions, the person behaved in a way true to their ought self during dissociation; in the discrepancy conditions, the person behaved in a way that violated their ought self. Key words and phrases were bolded to emphasise the dissociative experience, the relationship context and relevant characteristics of the ought/actual self.

Shame was assessed along two qualitatively different dimensions. Direct recognition of shame was captured by a single-item measure in which participants rated the extent to which they felt shame, with shame and embarrassment combined into one rating as members of the same affect family. Indirect shame was measured with the five-item state shame subscale of the State Shame and Guilt Scale, whose items describe shame phenomenologically without naming it — for example, feeling small or wanting to sink into the floor and disappear. The scale showed excellent internal consistency in this study, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.94. Participants who reported any shame also rated seven potential explanations, including feeling exposed, feeling flawed, feeling a loss of control over oneself, and fears of being judged or rejected if someone saw them like that. Behavioural responses, adapted from McKeogh’s earlier work and developed in part from Nathanson’s Compass of Shame, ranged from talking to the close friend about it to quickly leaving the room, hiding the head in the hands, getting annoyed with oneself, or sitting calmly. Trait shame was controlled using the 25-item Experience of Shame Scale (alpha = 0.97) and trait dissociation with the 22-item Detachment and Compartmentalisation Inventory (alpha = 0.97), both containing embedded validity checks that excluded inattentive or socially desirable responders.

The results were technically revealing. Controlling for trait shame, the multivariate analysis showed a significant effect for relationship context on single-item emotions, with ashamed and guilty ratings significantly higher in the close friend context than when alone, while surprised and anxious ratings were significantly higher when alone. There was also a significant multivariate effect for discrepancy status: ashamed, surprised, guilty and anxious ratings were all significantly higher in the discrepancy context, while relaxed ratings were significantly higher when no self-violation occurred. Crucially, the state shame measure told a different story about context. The ANCOVA showed a significant main effect for discrepancy status, with state shame significantly higher in the discrepancy context, but no significant main effect for relationship context and no interaction. The expected amplification — that shame would be highest overall when self-discrepant dissociation was witnessed by a close friend — was not supported, as the interaction between relationship context and self-discrepancy was not significant for either shame measure. Supplementary analyses confirmed that participant age did not account for these effects.

The shame explanations proved equally informative. Discrepancy status significantly influenced how participants attributed their shame: those experiencing self-discrepant dissociation attributed their feelings significantly more to being exposed, feeling flawed, and feeling a loss of control over themselves. This aligns with research indicating that people feel shame when a self-flaw is revealed — in this case, dissociative experiences inconsistent with their self-view. Behavioural responses showed significant effects for relationship context: the desire to talk about the experience was significantly higher with a close friend than when alone, while the desire to leave the room was significantly higher when alone. This contrasts with the classical view that shame is associated with avoidance; if there is an opportunity to soothe shame by talking to a friend, it may be preferred over avoidance. In the discrepancy context, ratings for hiding and getting annoyed with oneself were significantly higher, while sitting calmly was significantly higher when dissociation did not violate the ought self.

The divergence between the two shame measures is itself scientifically interesting. The fact that overt shame, assessed directly via the word shame, was higher in the close friend context supports previous research suggesting social connectedness moderates the dissociation–shame relationship. Shame is associated with social rejection, and the risk of shame-evoking rejection increases as intimacy rises. When alone, there is no risk of real social rejection, reflected in lower overt shame scores. Yet subtle shame indicators showed no differences between being alone and being with a close friend. One possibility is that relationship context particularly influences the explicit appraisal of an experience as shameful: having dissociation witnessed by a close friend may heighten social-evaluative concerns, making shame more readily identifiable without necessarily increasing the broader phenomenological features captured by the State Shame Scale. Alternatively, the divergence may reflect differences in the measurement properties of the two approaches. The findings cannot distinguish between these possibilities but suggest that how shame is assessed may be important when examining the influence of relationship context. It is also possible that close relationships have competing effects: while being witnessed may increase concerns about social evaluation, a close friend may simultaneously represent safety, acceptance or an opportunity for support.

The study has limitations worth noting. Participants imagined dissociative symptoms rather than experiencing them, and perceived realism and immersion were not assessed. There were no direct manipulation checks confirming that participants perceived the intended self-discrepancy, omitted to avoid making the study aims transparent and introducing demand characteristics. The characteristics of the imagined close friendship, such as duration or perceived intimacy, were also not measured, and the three dissociation types were collapsed into a single composite variable, which does not account for the heterogeneity of dissociative experiences. Only the own standpoint of self-discrepancy was used; future research should include vignettes violating the perceived standpoint of others, particularly relevant for understanding the psychology of victims of interpersonal trauma. Nevertheless, the clinical implications are potentially valuable. Where dissociation occurs during therapy, shame may be heightened if the client’s dissociative behaviour violates their ought self. Therapists could examine clients’ perceptions of how they are and how they ought to be, and normalise dissociative symptoms where appropriate, to reduce negative self-appraisals and associated shame. Given that shame and dissociation have been implicated in self-concealment, interventions that reduce shame and dissociation, or their relationship, may ultimately benefit therapeutic safety and progress — though these applications require empirical validation in clinical populations. In summary, the risk of shame as a response to dissociation may be especially heightened when the dissociative experience feels discordant with the individual’s self-representation of who they ought to be or what they ought to experience.

Subject of Research: Psychology

Article Title: The effects of self-discrepancy and relationship context on dissociation-induced shame

Article References: Harding, A., Dorahy, M. J., & Yogeeswaran, K. (2026). The effects of self-discrepancy and relationship context on dissociation-induced shame. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1625. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10175-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10175-9

Keywords: dissociation, shame, self-discrepancy theory, social psychology, Current Psychology, mental health, trauma, effects, self-discrepancy, relationship, context, dissociation-induced

The research team, led by Haiping Liao and colleagues, framed their work around the dual-factor model of mental health, a framework that treats psychological well-being as more than the absence of symptoms. In this view, a complete picture of adolescent mental health requires measuring both distress indicators, such as depression and anxiety, and positive indicators, such as life satisfaction. A teenager free of depressive symptoms is not necessarily flourishing, and a seemingly happy adolescent may still carry significant internal struggles. The researchers used this model as a conceptual orientation, measuring depression, anxiety, and life satisfaction separately rather than jointly classifying participants into dual-factor categories.

The statistical architecture of the study centered on mediation analysis, a technique that tests whether a third variable explains the pathway between a cause and an effect. Here, the direct association between parent-child communication and each mental health indicator was compared against indirect routes running through emotional intelligence, the capacity to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions, and through interpersonal distress, the strain adolescents experience in their social relationships. Three separate outcome-specific models were estimated, one for each indicator, allowing the team to see whether the same family communication signal produced different downstream effects depending on the outcome measured.

The direct associations were substantial. Better parent-child communication was significantly associated with lower depression, with a standardized coefficient of -0.46, and lower anxiety, at -0.41. It was also linked to higher life satisfaction, with a coefficient of 0.49. In standardized terms, these are moderate to strong effects for survey research of this kind, suggesting that the quality of everyday exchanges between parents and adolescents is meaningfully entwined with how teenagers feel about themselves and their lives.

But the indirect pathways proved equally revealing. Emotional intelligence and interpersonal distress together carried a meaningful share of the total association between communication and each outcome. For depression, the combined indirect effect was -0.24; for anxiety, -0.26; and for life satisfaction, 0.14. In practical terms, this means that a considerable fraction of the link between family communication and adolescent mental health operates through internal mechanisms: adolescents who communicate well with parents tend to develop stronger emotional skills, and those skills appear to buffer against symptoms while supporting well-being.

The study also uncovered a serial mediation pathway, a longer causal chain in which parent-child communication first builds emotional intelligence, which then reduces interpersonal distress, which in turn improves mental health outcomes. This serial route was statistically significant for all three indicators, with effect sizes of -0.04 for depression, -0.04 for anxiety, and 0.01 for life satisfaction. The serial pathway accounted for 8.70 percent of the total effect on depression, 9.76 percent on anxiety, and 2.04 percent on life satisfaction. Though individually modest, these percentages describe a specific psychological sequence: family conversation quality may cultivate emotional competence, which then eases social friction, which finally lightens the adolescent’s emotional burden.

This chain has theoretical appeal because it aligns with established developmental science. Adolescence is widely regarded as a sensitive period for sociocultural processing, when the brain’s social circuitry is especially responsive to interpersonal experience. Family communication during this window may function as a training ground for emotional regulation, teaching adolescents how to name feelings, tolerate ambiguity, and repair relational ruptures. Those skills, in turn, could reduce the misunderstandings and conflicts that generate interpersonal distress with peers, teachers, and family members alike.

The measurement tools anchored the findings in validated instruments. Parent-child communication was assessed with a scale originally developed by Barnes and Olson, depression was screened using instruments validated in Chinese populations, anxiety was measured with standardized symptom scales, and life satisfaction was captured with the widely used Satisfaction with Life Scale. Emotional intelligence was measured with an established self-report instrument, and interpersonal distress was assessed with a Chinese-developed inventory. The researchers also took steps to address common method biases, a known threat in single-wave questionnaire studies where all data come from the same respondents at the same time.

The authors are careful about the limits of their design. Because the data are cross-sectional, the direction of influence cannot be definitively established; it is possible that adolescents with better emotional skills and fewer social difficulties also communicate more openly with their parents, or that the relationships are bidirectional. Moreover, because the analyses modeled the three mental health indicators separately rather than jointly defining dual-factor mental health status, the findings should be read as evidence informed by the dual-factor model rather than as a direct analytical test of it. The sample, drawn from Chinese junior and senior high schools, also raises questions about cultural generalizability, though prior cross-cultural work has found links between parent-adolescent communication and adolescent psychological problems across 12 cultural groups.

For parents, educators, and clinicians, the practical implication is that conversations at home may do more than convey information; they may build the emotional and social machinery that adolescents carry into every other relationship. Programs aimed at improving family communication could plausibly strengthen emotional intelligence and reduce interpersonal distress, with downstream benefits for both symptom reduction and well-being enhancement. As adolescent mental health concerns continue to rise globally, this study adds a granular piece to the puzzle: the pathway from a family’s daily dialogue to a teenager’s inner life runs, at least in part, through the emotions they learn to manage and the social tensions they learn to navigate.

Subject of Research: The mediating roles of emotional intelligence and interpersonal distress in the association between parent-child communication and adolescent mental health

Article Title: Adolescent parent-child communication and mental health: The mediating role of emotional intelligence and interpersonal distress

Article References: Liao, H., Lu, Y., Zou, X., Liu, S., & Yuan, J. (2026). Adolescent parent-child communication and mental health: The mediating role of emotional intelligence and interpersonal distress. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09923-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09923-8

Keywords: adolescent mental health, parent-child communication, emotional intelligence, interpersonal distress, depression, anxiety, life satisfaction, dual-factor model, mediation analysis, Chinese adolescents, Current Psychology, family communication

The study, published in Current Psychology by Abdul Karim Kamara of Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Ishmail Bangura of the Institute of Public Administration and Management, University of Sierra Leone, set out to answer a question that has long troubled educators and policymakers in developing economies: do financial difficulties directly damage academic performance, or does their influence travel through more subtle psychological channels? The answer, according to the data, is that the channel matters enormously — and in at least one case, the direction of the effect runs opposite to what intuition would suggest.

The researchers focused on three financial factors. Financial stress captures the anxiety and strain students feel about paying for tuition, accommodation, food and materials. Financial literacy measures students’ knowledge and competence in managing money, budgeting and making informed financial decisions. Financial aid refers to scholarships, grants, bursaries and other forms of support that offset the cost of education. Each of these has been studied before, often in isolation and mostly in high-income countries. What distinguishes the new work is its setting — Sierra Leone, a West African nation still recovering from civil war and the Ebola epidemic, where socioeconomic disadvantage is widespread and university students frequently face acute financial hardship — and its use of a single integrated model that tests all three factors simultaneously while accounting for the mediating role of engagement.

Data were collected from students at six universities in Freetown, the capital, and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM. This technique is well suited to studies that involve multiple interacting variables and latent constructs — abstract concepts like financial stress or engagement that cannot be observed directly but must be inferred from survey responses. PLS-SEM estimates the strength of the pathways connecting these constructs, allowing researchers to quantify both direct effects and indirect effects that operate through a mediator. The method, popularized in methodological work by Hair, Risher, Sarstedt and Ringle, is particularly valuable when sample sizes are large and the goal is prediction and theory testing rather than strict confirmation of a pre-specified covariance structure.

The results upended one of the field’s most common assumptions. Financial stress, on its own, had a negative but statistically non-significant direct effect on academic performance, with a path coefficient of −0.014 and a p-value of 0.569 — far from the conventional threshold for statistical significance. In other words, once the model accounted for other factors, the raw damage that financial worry might inflict on grades essentially disappeared. By contrast, financial literacy showed a significant positive effect on performance (β = 0.198, p < 0.001), financial aid showed an even slightly stronger positive effect (β = 0.205, p < 0.001), and academic engagement itself was the single most powerful predictor in the entire model (β = 0.493, p < 0.001). Students who were absorbed in their studies, invested in their coursework and emotionally connected to their academic goals performed markedly better, regardless of their financial circumstances.

The mediation analysis produced the study’s most surprising finding. Academic engagement significantly mediated the relationship between all three financial factors and academic performance. For financial literacy and financial aid, this followed the expected pattern: students with stronger financial knowledge and better financial support became more engaged, and that engagement translated into better grades. But for financial stress, the indirect effect was positive — β = 0.055, p = 0.003 — even though the direct effect was not. This pattern, the authors note, may reflect what statisticians call suppression, a phenomenon in which the inclusion of a mediator changes the sign or significance of a direct effect. It may also reflect something more psychologically interesting: some students respond to financial challenges not by withdrawing from their studies but by doubling down, increasing their engagement as a deliberate resilience strategy. For these students, financial hardship becomes a motivator rather than a deterrent, channeling anxiety into effort.

This finding resonates with a broader literature on academic resilience and student coping. Prior research in Sierra Leone has documented high levels of stress among university students, and studies from other contexts have shown that financial concern can undermine academic outcomes through reduced belonging and heightened anxiety. But the new results suggest that the relationship is not uniform. Engagement, in this model, acts as a kind of psychological engine that can convert even adverse financial circumstances into academic fuel — at least for some students. The authors caution that this interpretation should be treated carefully, since the suppression pattern may also indicate that the direct and indirect pathways are operating in opposite directions in ways that a cross-sectional survey cannot fully disentangle.

The practical implications are substantial. The findings underscore the importance of expanding financial aid programs, which showed the strongest positive direct effect on performance of any financial factor. They also highlight the value of financial literacy education, which the authors argue should be integrated into university student support services rather than treated as an optional add-on. Students who understand budgeting, debt and financial planning are better equipped to manage the pressures that come with university life, and the data suggest that this competence pays dividends not only in financial well-being but in academic engagement and performance. Finally, the centrality of engagement itself — the strongest predictor in the model — points administrators toward mentorship programs, counseling services and campus initiatives that sustain student motivation and connection.

For governments in Sierra Leone and comparable settings, the message is clear: financial aid is not charity but investment. Prior international research has linked need-based grants to improved persistence and graduation, and studies from China and Europe have shown that financial support systems shape academic development in measurable ways. The Sierra Leone findings extend this evidence to a context where financial hardship is the norm rather than the exception, and where the marginal return on each unit of aid may be especially high. The authors recommend that policymakers expand aid programs and that universities embed financial literacy into the student experience from the moment of enrollment.

The study is not without limitations. It relies on self-reported survey data collected at a single point in time, which means that causal directions cannot be established with certainty and common method biases — a well-known challenge in behavioral research — may influence the results. The sample is limited to Freetown, and students in rural institutions may face different financial dynamics. Nevertheless, the large sample size, the rigorous modeling approach and the consistency of the engagement findings across all three financial factors give the results considerable weight. As universities and governments grapple with how to support students through economic uncertainty, the Sierra Leone study offers a compelling reframing: the goal is not simply to reduce financial stress, but to build the financial knowledge, provide the financial support and cultivate the engagement that together allow students to thrive — even, in some cases, because of the challenges they face.

Subject of Research: How financial stress, financial literacy and financial aid affect the academic performance of university students in Sierra Leone through the mediating role of academic engagement.

Article Title: The impact of financial factors on academic performance among university students: the mediating role of academic engagement

Article References: Kamara, A. K., & Bangura, I. (2026). The impact of financial factors on academic performance among university students: the mediating role of academic engagement. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1425. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09975-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09975-w

Keywords: financial stress, financial literacy, financial aid, academic engagement, academic performance, university students, Sierra Leone, PLS-SEM, structural equation modeling, higher education, student resilience, Current Psychology

The research team, led by Linlin Jin, Daobang Yang, Chaobang Ren and Yuping Zhao of the School of Management at Guangdong University of Technology, analyzed data from the 2018 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey, a large-scale national survey managed by the Center for Social Survey at Sun Yat-sen University. Their analytical sample comprised 12,201 farmers, a scale that lends considerable statistical weight to the findings. Using Probit regression models, a standard econometric technique for modeling binary outcomes such as whether a person does or does not engage in entrepreneurial behavior, the team estimated the relationship between religiosity and the decision to embark on an entrepreneurial journey.

The headline result is straightforward: religiosity is positively associated with farmers’ entrepreneurial behavior. Farmers who reported stronger religious inclination were more likely to have taken the plunge into self-employment or business creation than those with weaker or no religious affiliation. Crucially, the association survived a battery of robustness checks and supplementary endogeneity analyses, the statistical procedures researchers use to guard against the possibility that the observed link is an artifact of reverse causation, omitted variables, or measurement error. In observational data of this kind, such checks are essential, because it is always possible that something else, such as personality, wealth, or local economic conditions, drives both religious belief and business activity simultaneously.

What makes the study more than a simple correlation is its exploration of the pathways through which faith appears to operate. The researchers propose and test two mechanisms. The first is psychological: religiosity is linked to stronger perceived control, the belief that one’s own actions can shape outcomes rather than leaving one’s fate to luck or external forces. Perceived control has long been recognized in the entrepreneurship literature as a key ingredient of entrepreneurial intention and behavior, echoing the logic of the theory of planned behavior, in which confidence in one’s ability to execute a course of action predicts whether one actually pursues it. Religious belief, the authors argue, can supply precisely this sense of agency, offering believers a framework in which effort, discipline and self-regulation are meaningful and rewarded.

The second mechanism is social. Religious involvement is associated with greater social network resources, the web of contacts, obligations and mutual support that individuals can draw upon when they need help. For a farmer contemplating a new venture, this matters enormously. Starting a business in a rural setting typically requires access to informal credit, trusted partners, information about markets, and labor that can be mobilized at short notice. Congregations and religious communities function as dense, trust-rich networks in which reputational stakes are high and cooperation is reinforced by shared norms. Decades of research on social capital and entrepreneurship have shown that such networks lower the practical barriers to business formation, and the new study suggests that religious participation is one route through which rural residents accumulate this intangible infrastructure.

The study also reveals that the faith-entrepreneurship link is not uniform across the population. The positive association was more evident among Buddhist respondents than among other groups, a finding that resonates with scholarship on Buddhist values emphasizing mindfulness, conscious work and ethical conduct, qualities that some researchers have linked to business practice. The association was also stronger among respondents without higher education and among those without a political belief. The authors interpret these patterns through the lens of substitution: for farmers who lack the sense of control that formal education tends to confer, or who lack the institutional backing that political affiliation can provide in the Chinese context, religion may serve as an alternative source of both psychological agency and social support. In other words, faith matters most where other resources for agency and connection are scarce.

This moderating pattern carries significant implications for how we understand entrepreneurship in developing economies. Much of the classic literature on entrepreneurial psychology was built on Western, educated samples, where the levers of self-belief and network formation are assumed to be secular and individualized. The Chinese rural case shows that in settings where formal institutions are thinner and educational attainment is lower, traditional and religious institutions can step into the gap, functioning as informal engines of both self-efficacy and social capital. The finding that religiosity substitutes for political belief is particularly striking in the Chinese context, where political membership has historically been a conduit to resources and opportunities; those outside that system may find in religious communities a parallel structure of belonging and support.

Methodologically, the study is careful in ways that strengthen confidence in its conclusions. The authors controlled for a range of demographic and socioeconomic variables, following best-practice recommendations on statistical control in correlational research, and they conducted mediation analyses to assess whether perceived control and social network resources indeed carry the effect of religiosity onto entrepreneurial behavior. The data themselves come from an anonymized, de-identified national survey conducted under ethical standards consistent with the Declaration of Helsinki, meaning the study involved secondary analysis rather than direct interaction with participants. The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation, reflecting institutional investment in understanding the drivers of rural economic behavior.

Of course, the study has limits inherent to its design. It captures a snapshot from 2018, and the relationship between faith and enterprise is measured through survey self-reports, which are always vulnerable to imperfect recall and social desirability. Endogeneity can never be fully eliminated in observational data, however thorough the supplementary analyses. The authors are also careful with language: their findings describe associations and pathways, not proof that religious belief causes entrepreneurship in any individual case. A religious farmer who starts a business may be responding to market opportunities, family circumstances, or local policy shifts as much as to faith, and the study’s contribution is to show that, after accounting for these confounders, a robust religious effect remains detectable at the population level.

Even with those caveats, the research opens a compelling window onto the cultural psychology of rural enterprise. It suggests that the road from belief to business runs along two parallel tracks, one internal and one external: faith fortifies the mind’s sense of control while simultaneously thickening the social fabric from which ventures are built. As rural China continues its economic transformation, and as policymakers search for levers to stimulate grassroots entrepreneurship, the study implies that the informal institutions of belief deserve a place in the conversation alongside credit access, training and infrastructure. The power of faith, it turns out, may be partly the power of confidence and community, two of the oldest resources entrepreneurs have ever had.

Subject of Research: The relationship between religiosity and entrepreneurial behavior among farmers in rural China, mediated by perceived control and social network resources.

Article Title: The power of faith: why religiously inclined farmers are more likely to embark on entrepreneurial journeys?

Article References: Jin, L., Yang, D., Ren, C., & Zhao, Y. (2026). The power of faith: why religiously inclined farmers are more likely to embark on entrepreneurial journeys?. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1430. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09939-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09939-0

Keywords: religiosity, entrepreneurship, farmers, rural China, perceived control, social network resources, social capital, China Labor-force Dynamics Survey, Buddhism, Current Psychology, self-employment, psychology of religion