The research team set out to test a specific theoretical proposition. Schools, they argue, provide daily interaction opportunities in which aggressive behavior is gradually discouraged through peer feedback, adult supervision, and the social consequences of visible conflict. Remove that environment, and aggression might either decay from lack of practice or intensify as frustration builds. The closure of schools for an entire academic trimester offered a natural experiment: what happens to aggression when the primary arena for peer conflict disappears?

To answer that question, the researchers used a short-longitudinal design, measuring aggression at two time points separated by the closure. Participants, of whom 49.1 percent were female, completed self-report instruments assessing both the forms and the functions of aggression, as well as a measure of the forms of aggression alone. This distinction matters in aggression research. Forms describe how aggression is expressed, whether physically, verbally, relationally, or through damage to reputation, while functions describe why it is deployed, for example proactively to gain an advantage or reactively in response to provocation. Separating the two allows researchers to see not just whether aggression changed, but whether its underlying character shifted.

The statistical approach was correspondingly careful. The team fitted mixed-effects regression models using established R packages, including lme4 and glmmTMB, and subjected the results to residual diagnostics with the DHARMa framework. Because the study involved multiple comparisons across aggression subtypes and sexes, the authors controlled the false discovery rate using the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure, a standard safeguard against spurious findings. Effect sizes were evaluated through variance components appropriate to generalized linear mixed models. This methodological rigor is worth noting because studies of pandemic-era behavior often relied on cross-sectional snapshots; here, the same adolescents were compared with themselves across time, which strengthens causal interpretation, even if no study of this kind can fully isolate the closure as the sole cause of change.

The headline result is one of stability. For most measured forms and functions of aggression, scores before the closure did not differ significantly from scores after it. In other words, adolescents did not become more aggressive overall when schools closed, nor did they become noticeably less aggressive. That null result is itself informative. It suggests that the developmental trajectory of aggressive behavior in this age group is robust enough to withstand a major disruption to the social environment, at least over the timescale of a single trimester.

But the stability was not uniform. The one clear exception was reputational aggression, a form of aggression aimed at damaging another person’s social standing through gossip, rumor-spreading, and public humiliation. Reputational aggression increased over the closure period, but only among girls. Boys’ reputational aggression remained steady. This sex-specific finding is one of the most intriguing elements of the study, because reputational aggression depends heavily on social networks and communication channels rather than physical proximity. The researchers’ interpretation is that digital technology may have substituted for in-person contact, giving adolescents, and particularly girls, new avenues for the kind of status-focused conflict that reputational aggression represents.

The broader sex differences in the data align with a long tradition of aggression research. Boys reported being overall more aggressive than girls across most measures, a pattern documented repeatedly in developmental studies across many countries. The exceptions were relational aggression, which involves excluding or manipulating social relationships, and reputational aggression, where the boys’ advantage disappeared. These two forms of aggression are often described as more covert or indirect, and previous work has suggested they are deployed at comparable rates by both sexes, sometimes with girls showing equal or greater use. The new findings fit that picture and extend it by showing that the sex gap in these covert forms persisted through a period of radically altered social conditions.

What does the stability of aggression actually mean? The authors propose a balance hypothesis. On one side of the ledger, the loss of in-person contact removed many opportunities for physical and verbal confrontation in corridors, classrooms, and playgrounds, which should have pushed aggression down. On the other side, adolescents compensated by moving their social lives online, where aggression can take digital forms: hostile messages, exclusion from group chats, and the public circulation of damaging content. If the decrease in face-to-face aggression was roughly offset by an increase in technology-mediated aggression, the total would appear stable even though its composition changed. The rise in girls’ reputational aggression is consistent with this account, since reputation management and social comparison are especially salient in online environments popular with adolescent girls.

The study sits within a larger body of pandemic-era research on adolescent development. Systematic reviews have documented widespread effects of social isolation and loneliness on youth mental health, and neurodevelopmental work emphasizes that adolescence is a sensitive period for social learning, when peer interaction shapes everything from emotion regulation to identity. Depriving adolescents of peer contact for months was never going to be developmentally neutral. Yet the effects on specific behaviors have proved harder to predict. Some studies reported increases in stress-related aggression during lockdowns, while others found that removing adolescents from high-conflict school environments temporarily reduced bullying. The new findings suggest that aggression is not simply suppressed or unleashed by school attendance; it adapts to whatever social ecology is available.

For educators and clinicians, the practical implications are sobering. If aggression migrates rather than disappears when schools close, then anti-bullying and violence-prevention programs, which are typically delivered in classrooms and rely on bystander training and teacher supervision, may need digital counterparts that operate where adolescents actually socialize. The finding that girls’ reputational aggression rose during the closure points to a specific target for such interventions: online rumor, gossip, and status attacks that adults may not witness. The authors also caution that their sample was modest in size and drawn from a single cultural context, and that self-report measures depend on adolescents’ willingness to disclose aggressive behavior. Data from the study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, and the work was funded by the Portuguese social inclusion organization EPIS with additional support from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. As schools worldwide periodically close for public health reasons, the lesson of this study is that adolescent aggression is not a fixture of the schoolyard alone. It is a flexible behavior that follows its opportunities, and understanding it requires watching not just where adolescents are, but where they go when their usual world closes.

Subject of Research: Changes in the forms and functions of adolescent aggressive behavior before and after school closure

Article Title: Aggressive behavior in adolescence: comparisons from before to after school closure

Article References: Vagos, P., Carvalhais, L., Pinto, D., & Cabral, J. (2026). Aggressive behavior in adolescence: comparisons from before to after school closure. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1598. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10154-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10154-0

Keywords: aggression, adolescence, school closure, reputational aggression, relational aggression, sex differences, cyberbullying, digital technology, longitudinal study, peer conflict, COVID-19, developmental psychology

The study forms part of the CHANSE-funded TIMED project, which explored digitalisation and time perception across Europe. Between December 2022 and May 2023, six national teams each conducted 50 interviews lasting on average 51 minutes, in person, by telephone or online. Participants ranged from 18 to 91 years old and included students, retirees, unemployed people and workers from diverse sectors. Crucially, the interview schedule did not ask directly about pandemic digital experiences; instead, participants spontaneously brought up COVID-19 in 148 of the 300 interviews. The researchers argue that this unprompted quality is valuable, because what people volunteer about the past signals which experiences were novel, meaningful or emotionally charged enough to be encoded and recalled years later.

The theoretical backbone of the analysis is Self-Determination Theory, the influential framework developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, which holds that well-being depends on the fulfilment of three needs. Autonomy is the sense of acting from one’s own volition rather than under external control. Competence is the feeling of mastery and effectiveness. Relatedness is the need to feel connected and to belong. Because the pandemic collapsed work, family, leisure and social life into a single domestic space, as communication scholar Christian Fuchs put it, activities usually performed in different roles at different times and places converged into one unstructured home-bound space-time, threatening all three needs simultaneously. Digital technology was the obvious candidate to compensate, but whether it did so proved deeply conditional.

The first major theme the researchers labelled conditional autonomy. For some participants, particularly those with abundant free time after furlough or reduced outdoor options, digital entertainment and app-supported exercise helped them fill and shape their days meaningfully. One British probation officer described how a paid fitness app with hundreds of exercise videos became vital for maintaining routines during lockdown. Remote work also offered temporal flexibility, allowing people to choose when to work rather than adhering to fixed office hours, but this benefit clustered among those who already had time to spare. For time-poor participants with caregiving responsibilities, teleworking often blurred the boundary between work and family, pushing paid labour into evenings and nights. A Czech union expert described working from home with a small child as hell, mentally and physically exhausting, and criticised the individualistic assumption that work-life balance could simply be achieved through personal effort.

Space mattered as much as time. Participants who had private rooms and adequate equipment recalled remote work as comfortable and even empowering, with some interpreting their employer’s sudden acceptance of home offices as a sign of trust. Others, sharing cramped quarters or a single computer, found digitalisation an obstacle rather than a liberation. A Spanish psychologist recalled clients unable to speak freely in therapy sessions for fear of being overheard by family members. Some participants also reframed home working sceptically, viewing it as a means for organisations to cut operating costs or extract higher productivity, with one noting that employees grew accustomed to five Zoom meetings a day, a pace that became an implicit standard even after hybrid working returned. Autonomy, in these accounts, was not a property of the technology but an outcome of its interaction with living space, equipment, caregiving loads and organisational power.

Competence showed the same conditional pattern. On one side, participants remembered struggling to keep pace with digital demands: parents overwhelmed by their children’s school platforms, students unable to concentrate through four-hour stretches of video lessons, employees frustrated by flawed public digital infrastructure. One retired Spanish accountant recounted how a faulty QR code system at the state employment service ultimately cost her financial aid, an experience she attributed not to personal failing but to her country’s inadequate digital infrastructure. On the other side, some recalled growing through digital accomplishments, such as a British camera operator whose industry rigged remote-controlled camera heads so film crews could work safely, or workers whose productivity rose once commuting disappeared. The researchers found that competence frustration typically arose when digital demands exceeded existing personal, social or cognitive capabilities, particularly where organisations failed to provide support, realistic expectations or adequate infrastructure.

Relatedness produced perhaps the most emotionally resonant findings. Digital tools were remembered as a lifeline, in the words of one British participant, preserving birthdays, festivities and daily contact when physical gatherings were impossible. Hospitals bought tablets so patients could stay in touch with loved ones, and video calling, once an exotic exception reserved for friends abroad, became an ordinary part of private life. New forms of participation also emerged: group chats that had never existed before, Facebook communities offering companionship, and late-night livestreamed concerts where viewers typed into chats in real time. One kitchen porter described watching her favourite metal bands perform at one in the morning, broadcast from American living rooms, as amazing precisely because the chat allowed genuine interaction despite isolation.

Yet the same memories carried an undercurrent of loss. Participants repeatedly described digitally mediated contact as functional but insufficient, lacking the intimacy, spontaneity and embodied presence of face-to-face encounters. Some reported emotional fatigue and deliberately limited their screen time; others noticed friendships fading when they existed only through Messenger or Teams. In professional and educational settings, the option to switch cameras off fostered anonymity and diffused responsibility, making relationships transactional. A Czech IT worker observed that in hybrid meetings the people in the room talked while those connected online, 98 per cent of them, stayed silent, and that casual kitchen and canteen small talk, along with verbal skills, was eroding. Once restrictions lifted, many participants deliberately retreated from digital social spaces, confirming that technology had been a necessary substitute rather than a preferred mode of connection.

The authors argue that these findings move beyond the vague conclusion that technology has mixed effects, echoing Melvin Kranzberg’s first law that technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. By identifying the specific socio-material conditions, time availability, spatial arrangements, infrastructural adequacy, organisational power relations and caregiving responsibilities, that determined whether digital tools supported or frustrated need satisfaction, the study offers a framework for anticipating how digital life might shape well-being in future crises. The researchers caution that their convenience sample, skewed toward university-educated participants, cannot represent entire populations, and that memories are reconstructive rather than verbatim records. Even so, they conclude that digital well-being should be treated not merely as a matter of individual self-discipline but as a structural and collective issue, demanding equitable infrastructure, realistic organisational expectations and need-supportive digital policies, both during health emergencies and in ordinary digital life beyond them.

Subject of Research: Retrospective accounts of how digital technology use during the COVID-19 pandemic affected satisfaction of the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Article Title: Connected and confined: memories of digital experiences in relation to autonomy, competence, and relatedness during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article References: Witowska, J., Goncikowska, K., Schoetensack, C., & Černohorská, V. (2026). Connected and confined: memories of digital experiences in relation to autonomy, competence, and relatedness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1514. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09895-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09895-9

Keywords: digital technology, COVID-19 pandemic, autobiographical memory, self-determination theory, autonomy, competence, relatedness, remote work, cyberpsychology, digital well-being, thematic analysis, social connection

The research team, led by Shuiling Lu of Wuzhou University together with colleagues at UCSI University and Zhengzhou Normal University, followed PRISMA 2020 guidelines to sift the literature published between January 2015 and May 2025. Starting from 1,964 database records drawn from Web of Science, Scopus, Sage, Springer Link and JSTOR, and applying a search string that combined problem-based learning terms with creativity and higher-education keywords, the team ultimately retained fifteen peer-reviewed studies for systematic review. Only six of those studies, all quasi-experimental designs with pretest-posttest control groups, provided the complete statistical data needed to enter the meta-analysis.

The pooled result from those six studies was eye-catching. Compared with traditional instruction, problem-based learning was associated with a large improvement in creativity outcomes, yielding a pooled Hedges’ g of 1.64 with a 95 percent confidence interval running from 0.96 to 2.32. The overall effect was statistically significant, with a Z-statistic of 4.72 and a p-value below 0.001. In every one of the six studies, the problem-based learning group outperformed the control group on creativity measures, though the magnitude of the advantage varied considerably from one context to another.

That variation is where the caution begins. The heterogeneity statistic, I-squared, came in at 88.5 percent, meaning that the overwhelming majority of the variability between studies reflects real differences in contexts, interventions and measurements rather than random noise. The Q-test confirmed this, returning a value of 43.29 with five degrees of freedom and a p-value below 0.001. With only six studies available, the authors could not run formal subgroup analyses or meta-regression to statistically disentangle those sources of variance. They describe their pooled estimate as an upper-bound figure, potentially inflated by methodological weaknesses, and frame the primary contribution of their work not as a single number but as a demonstration that positive effects appeared consistently across diverse settings.

Methodological quality was a persistent concern. Using the ROBINS-I tool for non-randomized studies, two independent reviewers rated all fifteen included studies as carrying serious or critical risk of bias. The main culprits were inherent to educational research: the absence of randomization, which leaves the confounding domain at serious risk, and the impossibility of blinding students and instructors to the teaching method they were receiving. Missing outcome data and selective reporting, by contrast, were consistently rated low risk. A funnel plot showed slight asymmetry, hinting that small negative studies may be under-represented in the literature, though with only six points the plot has limited reliability.

The individual study effects tell a story of their own. Problem-based learning in engineering education produced the largest single effect, a Hedges’ g of 2.83, though that figure was converted from a reported Cohen’s d because raw standard deviations were unavailable, introducing uncertainty. Writing education yielded a g of 2.52, while PBL combined with digital mind-mapping in mathematics produced a moderate-to-large g of 1.40. Two engineering studies reported comparable effects of 0.99 and 1.41, and the smallest effect, 0.75, came from a dance-based intervention, suggesting that topic relevance, facilitator expertise and implementation fidelity all moderate outcomes. The authors stress that these subgroup comparisons are purely descriptive and hypothesis-generating, since no statistical comparisons between variants were possible.

One of the review’s most striking findings concerns how creativity itself is measured, and how differently that happens across disciplines. In arts and humanities contexts such as fashion design, collage making, dance and writing, assessors foregrounded aesthetic originality, narrative coherence, emotional connection and self-expression. In science and engineering settings, by contrast, creativity was judged through solution feasibility, technical viability, collaborative problem-solving and inventiveness in tackling authentic design problems. This pattern supports the domain-specificity view of creativity, treating it not as a single unified construct but as something that manifests differently depending on disciplinary expectations, a distinction educators must respect when designing both activities and assessment rubrics.

The measurement problem runs deeper still. The included studies operationalized creativity through markedly different instruments, from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking to self-report Likert scales and researcher-developed rubrics, each capturing distinct facets of fluency, flexibility, originality and usefulness. Two of the six meta-analyzed studies relied on self-report scales, which research suggests are vulnerable to social desirability bias and may correlate only moderately with demonstrated creative performance. Notably, the studies reporting the largest effects tended to use self-report measures or researcher-developed rubrics, raising the possibility that measurement characteristics inflated the observed magnitudes. None of the included studies employed widely validated, standardized creativity instruments with established psychometric properties, and all follow-ups were short-term, with none exceeding six months, leaving the durability of any creativity gains unknown.

Despite these caveats, the review identifies three mechanisms that appear to amplify problem-based learning’s effect on creativity. First, integrating the arts introduces non-verbal modes of expression, allowing students to externalize tacit knowledge through concept mapping, collage and dance that is difficult to articulate in words alone. Second, digital augmentation through platforms such as MATLAB, Genially and gamification tools creates interactive environments that scaffold creative risk-taking and sustain motivation, as seen in studies of matrix algebra and gamified mathematics training. Third, hybrid models combining problem-based learning with project-based learning generate synergistic gains across the so-called 4C competencies of creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking. The authors note these mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, though because most interventions bundled multiple components, the unique contribution of each cannot yet be isolated.

For educators and curriculum designers, the practical message is that problem-based learning shows genuine promise as a creativity-oriented strategy in higher education, particularly when enriched with digital tools or arts integration, but recommendations must remain tentative pending stronger validation. The authors call for future research built on randomized controlled designs, validated standardized creativity assessments and delayed post-tests to establish both causality and durability of effects. They also highlight gaps in the evidence base: disciplinary concentration in engineering and STEAM, sparse representation from the liberal arts and natural sciences, an exclusively undergraduate population, and incomplete reporting of key moderators such as intervention duration and facilitator expertise. Until such rigorous studies arrive, the dramatic effect size of 1.64 should be read not as a guarantee but as an encouraging, preliminary signal that when students are handed real problems to solve together, their creative capacities may genuinely flourish.

Subject of Research: The effect of problem-based learning on creativity outcomes in STEAM higher education

Article Title: Enhancing creativity in STEAM higher education through problem-based learning: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Article References: Lu, S., Phang, S. M., Judge, S. K., Liu, Y., & Fu, K. (2026). Enhancing creativity in STEAM higher education through problem-based learning: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1075. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02125-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02125-1

Keywords: problem-based learning, creativity, STEAM education, higher education, meta-analysis, systematic review, pedagogy, divergent thinking, digital technology, arts integration, quasi-experimental design, educational assessment