The research team, led by Carina Berglund of Nantes Université’s Movement – Interactions – Performance laboratory, together with colleagues from Université Lumière Lyon 2 and Université d’Angers, focused on the Festival du Froid, held in France in 2024. Unlike controlled intervention trials, this was a field study embedded in a genuine community event, capturing the full context in which people actually engage with breathwork and cold exposure: outdoors, in groups, over consecutive days, and amid the social energy of a festival. This ecological realism is precisely what most existing evidence lacks, since the bulk of research on cold exposure and breathwork has examined acute physiological responses or momentary mood shifts in single sessions.

The investigators distributed surveys before and after the festival and received 85 responses in total. Of these, 19 participants, or 22 percent, provided complete paired data from both time points, forming the analytical sample. The primary outcome was trait anxiety, measured with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory’s trait subscale, a widely used instrument that assesses the tendency to experience anxiety as a relatively stable characteristic. The researchers also tracked resilience and cognitive emotion regulation, expecting that these psychological resources might shift alongside anxiety, though that is not what the data ultimately showed.

The headline finding was a statistically significant drop in trait anxiety scores. Before the festival, participants averaged 42.6 points with a standard deviation of 7.8; afterward, the average fell to 39.8 with a standard deviation of 8.3, a reduction of 6.6 percent. The mean difference was 2.79 points, with a 95 percent confidence interval ranging from 0.91 to 4.67. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test, appropriate for non-normally distributed paired data, yielded a p-value of .002, and the standardized effect size, Hedges’ g, came out at 0.68 with a confidence interval of 0.19 to 1.16, which by conventional benchmarks represents a moderate-to-large effect. Importantly, 16 of the 19 participants showed reduced or stable scores, suggesting the change was not driven by a handful of dramatic responders.

What makes this result conceptually interesting is the target of the measurement. Trait anxiety has traditionally been treated as a fixed disposition, something stable across situations and resistant to brief interventions. The authors instead interpret the STAI-Trait score as a marker of negative affectivity, a vulnerability to experiencing negative emotions that may be more malleable than the label trait implies. Viewed through this lens, a multi-day immersive experience combining physiological stressors with communal practices could plausibly shift this vulnerability in the short term, even if longer-lasting change remains an open question that the study was not designed to answer.

The physiological rationale for such an effect is grounded in plausible mechanisms, even though the study did not measure them directly. Cold-water immersion triggers a robust stress response, acutely elevating catecholamines and activating the sympathetic nervous system, and repeated controlled exposure has been hypothesized to improve top-down regulation of autonomic arousal. Deliberate breathwork practices, particularly those involving slow or patterned breathing, are associated with increased vagal tone and reduced subjective tension, while some intense hyperventilation-based protocols produce transient states of altered arousal that participants often describe as cathartic. Group movement and shared physical challenge add further layers, including social bonding, collective efficacy and the mood effects of sustained outdoor activity. A festival format stacks all of these elements together, which makes it impossible to isolate which ingredient, or which combination, produced the observed change.

Indeed, the authors are explicit that the study is exploratory and that no causal claims can be made. The design lacked a control group, so regression to the mean, expectancy effects, the simple passage of time, or the general experience of attending a restorative social event could all account for part of the improvement. The completion rate was low, with only 22 percent of respondents providing paired data, and the sample was small and self-selected, composed of people motivated enough to attend a cold-exposure festival and diligent enough to complete both surveys. Such participants may differ systematically from the general population in baseline anxiety, openness to experience and enthusiasm for the practices involved, all of which limit generalizability.

Two secondary findings add nuance to the picture. First, satisfaction with the festival was uniformly high, indicating strong acceptability of the format; this matters for any future intervention research, since adherence and enjoyment are prerequisites for scaling such programs. Second, and perhaps more surprising, neither resilience nor cognitive emotion regulation changed from before to after the event. If the anxiety reduction had been driven by a genuine strengthening of coping resources, one might expect these measures to move in parallel. Their stability suggests instead that the effect may be closer to an acute reduction in negative affective vulnerability, a temporary recalibration of emotional baseline, rather than a durable upgrade in psychological skills. The authors themselves characterize the finding as preliminary evidence that the festival format is associated with an acute reduction in negative affective vulnerability alongside high acceptability.

The study was conducted within the CNRS Collab Inspire research collaboration agreement between CNRS UMR 6590 ESO and Inspire Potential, with Mathilde Plard serving as scientific lead, and Berglund’s doctoral research is supported by the Horizon Europe Breath program. The protocol received approval from the Ethics Committee for Research of Nantes Université, and the study was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Participation was voluntary and anonymous, with responses linked only by a self-chosen four-digit code, and participants could withdraw at any time without consequence. The sponsors had no role in data collection, analysis or manuscript preparation, and the authors declare no competing interests.

For the growing audience drawn to breathwork circles, ice baths and cold-water plunges, the study offers a cautiously encouraging signal rather than a prescription. It suggests that a multi-day, community-based format combining these practices is safe enough, enjoyable enough and potentially effective enough to justify more rigorous investigation, ideally with randomized or matched control conditions, larger samples, longer follow-up periods and physiological monitoring to identify mechanisms. Until such trials arrive, the Festival du Froid data stand as an intriguing naturalistic data point: a modest but consistent drop in anxiety vulnerability among ordinary people who spent three days breathing, moving and shivering together in the French outdoors, and a reminder that some of the most popular wellness practices of the moment are only now beginning to meet the standards of careful psychological science.

Subject of Research: Psychological effects of a multiday breathwork and cold-water immersion festival on trait anxiety

Article Title: A multiday outdoor festival combining breathwork and cold water immersion is associated with reduced trait anxiety in a naturalistic pre-post study

Article References: Berglund, C., Hallez, Q., Deschamps, T., & Plard, M. (2026). A multiday outdoor festival combining breathwork and cold water immersion is associated with reduced trait anxiety in a naturalistic pre-post study. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00914-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00914-1

Keywords: breathwork, cold-water immersion, trait anxiety, negative affectivity, naturalistic pre-post study, festival, mental health, emotion regulation, resilience, well-being, stress response, Discover Psychology

The study, published open access in Discover Psychology, used an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, a two-stage architecture that lets quantitative patterns be probed qualitatively. In the first phase, the researchers drew a stratified random sample of 397 secondary school students from public schools across the zone. Each student completed questionnaires measuring academic self-regulation and academic motivation, while academic achievement was operationalized as the student’s cumulative academic score, an objective record rather than a self-report. This choice matters: many studies in educational psychology rely on students’ own estimates of their performance, which are notoriously distorted by self-enhancement biases. By anchoring achievement in institutional records, the Ethiopian team reduced one of the field’s most persistent sources of measurement error.

Statistically, the quantitative phase leaned on three complementary techniques. Descriptive statistics established the baseline distributions of motivation, self-regulation, and achievement across the sample. Multiple regression then tested whether each psychological variable independently predicted achievement, and both did: academic motivation and self-regulation each emerged as significant predictors when the other was held constant. The centerpiece, however, was a formal mediation analysis conducted with the PROCESS macro, a widely used computational tool for estimating indirect effects with bootstrap confidence intervals. The indirect effect of motivation on achievement through self-regulation was 0.21, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.14 to 0.29. Because that interval excludes zero, the mediation is statistically reliable rather than a fluke of sampling.

The magnitude of the mediated pathway is the finding’s most consequential feature. With approximately 58 percent of motivation’s total effect flowing through self-regulation, the data suggest that motivation is largely a distal cause of achievement, one that must be translated into behavioral machinery before it can move grades. This aligns with a long theoretical tradition in educational psychology, from self-determination theory’s distinction between wanting and doing to models of self-regulated learning that treat goal setting, strategy use, and self-evaluation as the proximal engines of performance. What the West Hararghe study adds is a quantified decomposition in a low-resource, non-Western context, where most of the underlying theory was never originally tested.

That contextual point deserves emphasis. The overwhelming majority of self-regulation research has been conducted in North America, Europe, and East Asia, leaving open the question of whether the constructs travel. West Hararghe is a largely rural zone in eastern Ethiopia’s Oromia region, where public secondary schools face chronic constraints: crowded classrooms, limited learning materials, and families stretched thin economically. If self-regulation mediates the motivation-achievement link even under these conditions, the finding strengthens the case that self-regulatory skill is not a luxury of well-resourced schools but a fundamental psychological mechanism that operates wherever students pursue academic goals.

The study’s second phase is where it becomes genuinely distinctive. Fifteen students were purposively selected for in-depth interviews, chosen specifically because their quantitative patterns were extreme or anomalous, either exceptionally high or low on the measured variables or inconsistent with the overall statistical trend. This extreme-case sampling strategy is a methodological strength: rather than interviewing a random subset whose experiences may be statistically typical but theoretically uninformative, the researchers targeted the students most likely to illuminate why the mediation pathway exists. Thematic analysis of the transcripts surfaced three themes that map directly onto the quantitative mediation result.

The first theme the researchers describe is self-regulation as a psychological scaffold. Students reported that planning their study sessions and monitoring their own progress made success feel attainable, and that sense of attainability in turn fed their motivation. This is a reversal of the intuitive causal arrow. Common sense says motivation produces planning; the students’ accounts suggest a bidirectional loop in which the concrete act of organizing one’s work generates the motivational energy to continue. The finding echoes Albert Bandura’s insight that self-efficacy grows most reliably through mastery experiences, and it implies that interventions teaching planning skills may pay a double dividend, improving both behavior and belief.

The second theme, familial motivation, is culturally specific and, notably, invisible to standardized measurement instruments. Many students described deriving their drive from family sacrifice, in one vivid example a mother selling roasted barley to pay for her child’s books. The researchers point out that this kind of motivation, rooted in obligation to family and awareness of sacrifice, is not captured by the standardized scales used in the quantitative phase, which were developed largely in Western settings. This is a quiet but important methodological critique embedded in the study: psychometric instruments may systematically undercount the motivational resources of students in collectivist, economically constrained communities, meaning the true effect of motivation in such contexts could be larger than surveys suggest.

The third theme is what the authors call the virtuous cycle of success. Students described a self-reinforcing loop in which a good grade led to planned study efforts, which produced further success and greater motivation. This feedback structure helps explain why the mediation is partial rather than complete: achievement is not only an outcome of motivation and self-regulation but also an input that regenerates both. For practitioners, the implication is that early academic wins are disproportionately valuable, because they seed the loop that sustains long-term performance. Conversely, students who fall behind early may need deliberate scaffolding to break into the cycle from the outside.

The study’s recommendations follow directly from its architecture. The authors call for strengthening school-based counseling services, expanding life-skills interventions that teach concrete self-regulatory strategies, and improving teacher professional development programs so that educators foster motivational and self-regulatory competencies together rather than treating them as separate concerns. The ethics of the work were carefully handled: the protocol was approved by the Ethics Review Committee of the College of Education at Oda Bultum University in March 2024, informed consent was obtained from all participants including parental consent for minors, and participation was voluntary with the right to withdraw. The research received no external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests.

For a global audience, the takeaway is both humbling and actionable. Decades of motivational interventions in schools, from reward systems to mindset messaging, have produced mixed results, and this study offers a plausible diagnosis: motivation without self-regulatory skill has nowhere to go. The Ethiopian data quantify that bottleneck precisely, showing that the majority of motivation’s benefit depends on the student’s ability to plan, monitor, and sustain effort. If the finding generalizes, the highest-leverage investments in education may not be those that make students want to succeed more, but those that teach them, concretely and culturally attuned, how to succeed on a Tuesday evening with a borrowed textbook and a mother selling roasted barley to keep them in school.

Subject of Research: The mediating role of academic self-regulation in the relationship between motivation and achievement among secondary school students in Ethiopia

Article Title: The relationship between academic self-regulation, motivation, and academic achievement among public secondary school students in the West Hararghe Zone of Ethiopia

Article References: Melaku, A. K., & Yusuf, M. G. (2026). The relationship between academic self-regulation, motivation, and academic achievement among public secondary school students in the West Hararghe Zone of Ethiopia. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00868-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00868-4

Keywords: academic self-regulation, motivation, academic achievement, educational psychology, Ethiopia, secondary school students, mediation analysis, self-regulated learning, mixed methods, familial motivation, school counseling, Discover Psychology

The most visible catalyst for change has been the pandemic itself. COVID-19 did more than disrupt daily life; it forced a global reckoning with mental health and its consequences for physical health, employment, relationships, and economic productivity. The editorial cites work by Roche and colleagues, who compared college student samples collected at the same university in 2016 and in 2020 and found increases in stress, depression, and anxiety following the pandemic’s onset. This kind of within-institution comparison is methodologically valuable because it holds many environmental and demographic variables roughly constant, allowing researchers to isolate changes in psychological symptoms across a defined historical moment.

The pattern extends well beyond university campuses. According to the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States, the prevalence of mental health problems has been rising in the wake of the pandemic, and similar upward trends have been documented among children and adolescents. A study by Figas, Giannouchos, and Crouch examined child and adolescent anxiety and depression in the United States both before and during the pandemic, reinforcing the picture of a generation carrying a heavier psychological burden than the one that preceded it. At the same time, awareness of mental health has been increasing worldwide, a cultural shift that may reduce stigma and encourage help-seeking even as it reflects the scale of the underlying need.

One of the most consequential responses to this demand has been the expansion of digital mental health services. A recent review in World Psychiatry by Torous and colleagues surveys the current evidence and implementation challenges for smartphone apps, generative artificial intelligence, and virtual reality in mental health care, illustrating how quickly the technological toolkit has evolved. The editorial emphasizes a particularly important equity dimension: digital services can reach people in rural and remote areas who have historically lacked access to psychological care. For a discipline whose delivery model has long depended on face-to-face clinical contact, the shift toward scalable, technology-mediated intervention represents a structural change in how psychological services are conceived and distributed.

The second major transformation Moustafa identifies is the discipline’s accelerating interdisciplinarity. Psychology has always borrowed from neighboring sciences, but the volume of collaborative work with fields such as architecture and the built environment, business, ergonomics, and law has grown substantially in recent years. This is not merely an academic fashion. Psychological research can, for example, inform ways to improve ecological decision-making, illuminate how remorse operates in legal contexts, and clarify how the design of buildings and urban spaces affects health and wellbeing. Work on mental health and urban design, including studies focusing on post-traumatic stress disorder and zoning, demonstrates how psychological theory can feed directly into planning and policy decisions that shape millions of lives.

The interdisciplinary reach of contemporary psychology now extends to some of the most prominent scientific and social questions of the era, including climate change, digital health, and artificial intelligence. One recent study explored the use of artificial intelligence to simulate client interactions for psychology training, offering trainee clinicians a low-risk environment in which to practice therapeutic conversations. Another examined acceptance of and fear of artificial intelligence across German and Chinese samples, linking attitudes toward AI to personality traits and highlighting how cultural context shapes technological attitudes. These projects show psychology functioning simultaneously as a consumer and a producer of insights from computer science, engineering, and cross-cultural methodology.

Yet the editorial is candid about a persistent weakness at the heart of the discipline: the scarcity of studies conducted and published in non-Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries, the populations researchers abbreviate as non-WEIRD. Decades of research have shown that findings from Western undergraduate samples do not always generalize to other societies, yet the bulk of the published literature still draws on WEIRD participants. This imbalance matters for theory as much as for practice, because psychological models of perception, cognition, emotion, and social behavior risk encoding the particularities of one slice of humanity as universal laws. Correcting it requires more than goodwill; it requires deliberate investment in research infrastructure, training, and publication pathways outside the traditional centers of the field.

Moustafa describes how Discover Psychology has pursued that correction from its launch. The journal’s editorial board has been deliberately diversified, with members drawn from different continents, including non-WEIRD countries, and active efforts have been made to increase submissions from underrepresented researchers and regions. The results are visible in the journal’s pages: a systematic review of psychological research in the Pacific Island nation of Fiji, studies of bullying victimization among in-school adolescents in Benin, work on gender-based violence and psychoeducational materials in Ecuador and Argentina, the adaptation and validation of an Indonesian version of an autism detection tool for early childhood, and a confirmatory factor analysis of a parental play beliefs scale in Thai. The editorial also notes ongoing efforts to build article collections with universities in Central Asia, including institutions in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

These regional studies are not token contributions; they address substantive methodological questions. Adapting and validating a psychological instrument for a new language and culture, as the Indonesian autism detection work does, involves careful psychometric procedures to ensure that the tool measures the same constructs across contexts. Similarly, cross-cultural studies of attitudes toward artificial intelligence require sampling designs and analytical strategies that can separate cultural effects from individual differences. Publishing such work in mainstream international journals helps normalize the idea that psychological science must be tested across the full diversity of human societies, not merely assumed to transfer from one setting to another.

The overall picture that emerges from the editorial is of a discipline at an inflection point. Rising mental health need has raised the stakes of psychological research and care; digital technologies have changed how and where services can be delivered; interdisciplinary collaborations have expanded the field’s questions and methods; and the push for global diversity is beginning to correct long-standing biases in the evidence base. None of these transitions is complete, and each carries challenges, from ensuring the quality and safety of app-based interventions to building sustainable research capacity in underrepresented regions. But the direction of travel is clear. The future of psychology, as Moustafa frames it, will be more interdisciplinary in its collaborations, more technological in its tools, and more genuinely global in the populations it studies and the researchers it includes, a shift that promises not only fairer science but better science.

Subject of Research: The transformation of psychology through interdisciplinary research, digital mental health, and global diversity

Article Title: The future of psychology: interdisciplinary and diverse field

Article References: Moustafa, A. (2026). The future of psychology: interdisciplinary and diverse field. Discover Psychology, 6(1), Article 263. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00900-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00900-7

Keywords: psychology, mental health, COVID-19, digital mental health, interdisciplinary research, WEIRD samples, cross-cultural psychology, artificial intelligence, editorial, Discover Psychology, global diversity, urban design

The authors define employee psychological well-being as the overall condition that allows a worker to enjoy positive mental health, resilience and job satisfaction, so that they can perform well, maintain positive relationships and continue developing both personally and professionally. That definition may sound straightforward, but as the review makes clear, the underlying literature is anything but unified. Studies of workplace wellbeing have proliferated over recent decades, yet they draw on different theories, measure different constructs, and use different methods, making it difficult to draw cumulative conclusions. The new review was designed precisely to impose order on that fragmentation, offering what the authors describe as methodological rigour and transparency through a systematic literature search.

To achieve this, the team applied the SPAR 4 SLR protocol, short for Scientific Procedures and Rationales for Systematic Literature Reviews. This framework guides reviewers through a structured sequence of acquisition, organization and analysis stages, ensuring that each decision about which studies to include, exclude and how to code them is documented and reproducible. Following this protocol, the researchers finalized 105 peer-reviewed articles relevant to employee psychological well-being. The use of an explicit protocol matters because systematic reviews are only as trustworthy as the procedures behind them; by laying out their rationales at every step, the authors allow other researchers to audit, replicate or extend their synthesis with confidence.

Once the 105 articles were assembled, the team subjected them to a two-level analysis built on the ADO-TCM framework. The TCM component, covering Theories, Contexts and Methods, was used to map the theoretical support underpinning the field, cataloguing which frameworks scholars invoke, in which settings they test them and with what research designs. The ADO component, covering Antecedents, Decisions and Outcomes, was used to analyse the drivers of psychological well-being and trace their influence on wellbeing-related choices and outcomes among employees. Together, the two lenses provide a structured synthesis that goes beyond a simple narrative summary, instead generating an integrative framework that connects causes, mechanisms and consequences of workplace mental health.

The findings are revealing in part because they are as much about the state of the science as about wellbeing itself. The review highlights inconsistencies in how psychological well-being constructs are operationalized across studies, meaning that different papers often measure the same broad idea with different scales, definitions and indicators. It also identifies limited attention to mediators, the intermediate mechanisms that explain how workplace factors translate into wellbeing outcomes, and a lack of multi-level theorization, meaning few studies connect individual experiences to team, organizational or societal layers of analysis. These gaps, the authors suggest, have slowed the field’s cumulative progress and obscured the full picture of how workplaces shape mental health.

To address some of that fragmentation, the study presents a conceptual model summarizing all the antecedents of employee psychological well-being identified in the literature. Antecedents, in this context, are the upstream factors that precede and potentially produce wellbeing, and the model organizes them into a coherent structure that future researchers can use to design studies, test relationships and compare findings. By consolidating what is known about these drivers in one place, the model functions as both a map of existing knowledge and an agenda for what remains unknown. The authors intend it as a practical resource for academics seeking theoretical grounding as well as for HR professionals and practitioners who aim to create sustainable organizational health, a goal they frame as central to long-term organizational performance.

The practical implications extend well beyond academia. In an era when burnout, stress and disengagement dominate headlines about the modern workplace, organizations are under growing pressure to invest in employee mental health, yet they often do so without a clear evidence base. A structured synthesis of 105 studies offers precisely that base, showing which factors the literature consistently identifies as supportive of wellbeing and where the evidence remains thin. For HR practitioners, the review’s emphasis on resilience and job satisfaction as pillars of positive functioning suggests that wellbeing programs should aim at more than stress reduction; they should cultivate the psychological resources that let employees thrive, build relationships and keep growing over the course of their careers.

Methodologically, the paper also serves as a demonstration of how modern review protocols can elevate the quality of evidence synthesis in organizational research. The SPAR 4 SLR approach, by requiring explicit scientific procedures and rationales, stands in contrast to older-style narrative reviews in which inclusion criteria can be opaque and selection biases hard to detect. The pairing with ADO-TCM adds an analytical architecture, ensuring that the review does not merely catalogue studies but actively organizes them around theories, contexts, methods, antecedents, decisions and outcomes. Supplementary materials accompanying the article, provided as downloadable data files, further support transparency by documenting the journals included, the list of theories encountered and the data collection techniques used across the reviewed studies.

The publication also reflects broader currents in the science of work. Research on employee health and wellbeing now sits at the intersection of personnel psychology, positive psychology, psychological methods and counseling psychology, and journals are increasingly publishing open-access reviews designed to be citable and widely accessible. This article, published open access on 22 September 2026 after being received on 21 January 2026 and accepted on 24 August 2026, exemplifies that trend, sharing peer-reviewed, accepted research early to provide faster access while carrying a permanent DOI. The authors report that no external funding was received for the systematic review, with open access funding provided by Symbiosis International (Deemed University), and they declare no competing interests.

For the field, the message of this review is twofold. First, employee psychological wellbeing is a construct worth defending in all its richness: a state of positive mental health, resilience and satisfaction that enables performance, relationships and growth, not merely the absence of illness. Second, the science studying it needs more consistency, more attention to mediating mechanisms and more multi-level thinking if it is to deliver actionable guidance at scale. By consolidating 105 studies into a transparent, protocol-driven synthesis and a unifying conceptual model, kumari, Pandita and Bedarkar have given researchers, HR professionals and organizational leaders a clearer foundation on which to build the next generation of workplace mental health science, one in which sustainable organizational health is treated not as a perk but as a systematically understood and deliberately cultivated outcome.

Subject of Research: A systematic literature review of employee psychological wellbeing using the SPAR 4 SLR and ADO-TCM frameworks

Article Title: Exploring employee psychological wellbeing through the SPAR 4 SLR framework

Article References: kumari, P., Pandita, D., & Bedarkar, M. (2026). Exploring employee psychological wellbeing through the SPAR 4 SLR framework. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00879-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00879-1

Keywords: employee psychological well-being, systematic literature review, SPAR-4-SLR, ADO-TCM, workplace mental health, burnout, stress, job satisfaction, resilience, human resource management, organizational health, Discover Psychology