The sample included 69 adults who self-identified as people who stutter and 71 who did not, with participants aged 18 to 65 years. Stuttering status was based on self-identification without independent clinical confirmation. Participants completed the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and the Protective Factors for Resilience Scale. The researchers compared sex, age and education between groups, used independent-samples t tests or Mann–Whitney U tests for questionnaire outcomes, and calculated effect sizes with 95% confidence intervals. Within-group relationships were examined with Pearson or Spearman correlations, with Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate correction applied separately to 36 subscale-level correlations in each group.

The groups did not differ significantly in sex distribution, age or education. No statistically significant between-group differences were detected for any of the nine CERQ subscales, and the corresponding effect sizes were small; the abstract does not establish equivalence between the groups. People who stutter reported lower Personal, Peer, Family and Total Protective Factors for Resilience Scale scores, with small-to-moderate rank-biserial effects. After false discovery rate correction, 12 positive associations involving positive refocusing, refocus on planning and positive reappraisal remained statistically significant within the group reporting stuttering. No correlations remained significant in the group not reporting stuttering.

These results indicate that the study detected lower reported resilience-related protective resource scores among participants who stutter, alongside no detected differences in measured cognitive emotion regulation strategies. The design and analysis do not demonstrate that resilience resources cause emotion regulation strategies, that stuttering causes lower scores, or that the two constructs have different correlation strengths across groups. The cross-sectional design, exploratory analysis, modest sample size and reliance on self-identification of stuttering status limit interpretation. The available source provides the study abstract rather than the complete article, so this report is limited to the findings and methods stated there.

Subject of Research: Cross-sectional comparison of cognitive emotion regulation and resilience-related protective factors in adults who stutter

Article Title: Cognitive emotion regulation strategies and resilience-related protective factors in persons who stutter: a cross-sectional comparative and correlational study

Article References: Alpüran Kocabıyık, N., Erol, E., & Sarı Sülüker, A. (2026). Cognitive emotion regulation strategies and resilience-related protective factors in persons who stutter: a cross-sectional comparative and correlational study. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05815-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05815-5

Keywords: stuttering, adults, emotion regulation, resilience, protective factors, cross-sectional study, psychology, questionnaire, correlation, Cognitive, emotion, regulation

Participants included 130 men and 262 women, with a mean age of 33.75 years. They completed the ASER alongside self-report measures of their solitude experience and affective well-being. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, internal-consistency analyses and correlational analyses assessed the assessment’s structure and validity, while independent-samples t tests and one-way analysis of variance examined differences associated with solitude preference, motivation and frequency.

The exploratory factor analysis identified a temporally differentiated structure: the before-solitude phase had two factors, while the during- and after-solitude phases each had one factor. The ASER also showed good internal consistency, and its scores were significantly associated with dimensions of the solitude experience, providing criterion-related validity. Associations with affective well-being were observed mainly for the during- and after-solitude phases.

Participants who preferred solitude or reported autonomous motivation for solitude had higher ASER scores across the phases. Solitude frequency was associated only with the before-solitude phase. Taken together, the abstract reports preliminary support for a phase-based assessment of solitude-related regulation, rather than definitive evidence for a three-phase emotion-regulation process. The study is limited by its initial validation, reliance on self-report and observational associations in a sample from Taiwan; those features prevent conclusions about causation or generalizability to other populations. Because the supplied evidence is an abstract from an early, editable version of the peer-reviewed article, the summary is limited to the reported methods and findings and does not characterize details available only in the full study.

Subject of Research: Initial validation of a phase-based assessment of solitude-related emotion regulation in Taiwanese adults

Article Title: Solitude as an emotion regulation process: initial evidence from a phase-based assessment

Article References: Lai, Y.-H., Jhu, D.-L., & Lee, K.-H. (2026). Solitude as an emotion regulation process: initial evidence from a phase-based assessment. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05662-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05662-4

Keywords: solitude, emotion regulation, ASER, self-report study, Taiwanese adults, affective well-being, assessment validation, factor analysis, solitude motivation, solitude preference, emotion, regulation

The quantitative phase included 80 undergraduate EFL learners from four intact General English classes. Two classes, with 37 students, continued to receive regular speaking instruction, while two classes, with 43 students, received emotion regulation training integrated into regular speaking instruction. The program was based on Gross’s process model, which includes trainable strategies such as attentional deployment and cognitive reappraisal, and Control–Value Theory, which was used to explain how regulation might help learners experience greater control over valued speaking tasks. A pretest–posttest non-equivalent control-group design was used, with student-level MANCOVA and follow-up ANCOVAs adjusting posttest outcomes for corresponding pretest scores.

All three baseline-adjusted comparisons favored the experimental condition. The multivariate effect was Wilks’ Λ = 0.68, F(3, 73) = 11.51, p < .001, partial η² = 0.32, 95% CI [0.14, 0.46]. Follow-up analyses showed lower speaking anxiety in the training condition, F(1, 75) = 15.82, p < .001, partial η² = 0.17, 95% CI [0.05, 0.33]; higher academic engagement, F(1, 75) = 8.97, p = .004, partial η² = 0.11, 95% CI [0.01, 0.25]; and higher oral performance, F(1, 75) = 13.24, p = .001, partial η² = 0.15, 95% CI [0.03, 0.30]. The qualitative phase involved 12 interviewed students whose accounts were analyzed with reflexive thematic analysis. Six themes emerged, indicating that learners did not respond uniformly: some transferred strategies flexibly, while others continued to struggle during graded, spontaneous or highly evaluative speaking.

Important limitations constrain the interpretation. Treatment was assigned at the class level, and only four classes were available, so the analyses are baseline-adjusted student-level comparisons rather than definitive cluster-adjusted causal estimates. Differences between classes or instructors may therefore account for some of the observed advantages. The interviews explain participants’ experiences but do not establish causal mechanisms. Taken together, the results are consistent with the possibility that explicit emotion regulation training can support emotional management, engagement and oral performance in university EFL speaking classes, but they do not show that the training alone caused the differences between groups.

Subject of Research: Effects of an eight-week emotion regulation training program on anxiety, engagement and oral performance among Chinese undergraduate EFL learners

Article Title: Effects of emotion regulation training on EFL learners’ speaking anxiety, academic engagement, and oral performance: An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design

Article References: Yan, Y. (2026). Effects of emotion regulation training on EFL learners’ speaking anxiety, academic engagement, and oral performance: An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05588-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05588-x

Keywords: emotion regulation training, EFL learners, speaking anxiety, academic engagement, oral performance, mixed-methods study, quasi-experiment, Chinese university students, Effects, emotion, regulation, training

The finding challenges the study’s initial hypothesis that cognitive reappraisal would have a stronger beneficial association with subjective memory performance than expressive suppression. Reappraisal is an antecedent-focused strategy in which a person changes the meaning assigned to an emotionally evocative situation. Expressive suppression is response-focused and involves inhibiting the outward expression of emotion. The investigators proposed that both processes draw on limited executive-control resources that may also support attention, encoding and retrieval. Under that model, reappraisal could preserve cognitive capacity by reducing emotional interference, whereas suppression might require continued monitoring and inhibition. The questionnaire data did not directly test this mechanism, but the comparable regression coefficients suggest that the two strategies were associated with subjective memory in similar ways within this sample.

The study used a descriptive cross-sectional design with an analytical component and was conducted between December 2025 and April 2026. Seven faculties at Port Said University—Engineering, Medicine, Science, Specific Education, Law, Management Technology and Information Systems, and Physical Therapy—were selected by simple random sampling. Students within those faculties were approached in common areas and after lectures using convenience sampling. Of 1,365 students approached, 1,287 completed the questionnaire, a response rate of 94.28%. The median age was 20 years, with an interquartile range of 19 to 21. Most participants were Egyptian and lived in urban areas, while medical students constituted the largest faculty group. Although the sample exceeded the calculated minimum of 402, convenience recruitment within a single university limits how broadly the findings can be generalized to other Egyptian students.

Two validated questionnaires measured the main variables. The 10-item Emotion Regulation Questionnaire assessed cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression using seven-point response scales, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” Six items measured reappraisal and four measured suppression, with total scores ranging from 10 to 70; higher values indicated more self-reported use of the strategies. The 16-item Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire assessed the frequency of reported everyday memory failures on five-point scales, with total scores ranging from 16 to 80. Higher scores represented poorer subjective memory performance because respondents reported more frequent lapses. Prospective-memory items concerned remembering intended future actions, while retrospective-memory items concerned recalling information from the past. Cronbach’s alpha was 0.756 for the total emotion-regulation scale, 0.748 for reappraisal, 0.668 for suppression and 0.864 for the memory questionnaire.

Participants had a median total Emotion Regulation Questionnaire score of 44, with an interquartile range of 37 to 51. Their median reappraisal score was 27, with an interquartile range of 22 to 32, and their median suppression score was 17, with an interquartile range of 13 to 21. The median total Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire score was 50, with an interquartile range of 43 to 58.5. Prospective-memory scores were slightly higher than retrospective-memory scores, with medians of 26 and 24, respectively. These figures describe the questionnaire responses of this cohort and do not establish that the students had measurable deficits in objective memory performance.

All emotion-regulation subscales were negatively correlated with memory-questionnaire domains, with every p-value below 0.001. Spearman’s rho coefficients ranged from −0.153 to −0.226. The strongest correlation was between the total emotion-regulation and total memory scores, at ρ = −0.226, indicating a weak inverse relationship. In multivariable linear regression, both reappraisal and suppression remained independently associated with lower memory-complaint scores after adjustment for sex, faculty and family income. Their coefficients were statistically indistinguishable, with a difference of −0.002 and p = 0.98. The model explained approximately 10.2% of the variance in total memory scores, with an adjusted R² of 0.093, underscoring that emotion regulation was associated with only a small portion of the variation in reported memory difficulties.

Sex, faculty and family income also showed associations with the questionnaire scores. Males reported higher expressive-suppression and total emotion-regulation scores than females, while females reported higher memory-complaint scores. Faculty affiliation was associated with both emotion regulation and memory scores. Academic grade was associated with emotion-regulation scores, whereas family income was associated with memory scores in the unadjusted analyses. In the adjusted model, males had memory-complaint scores an estimated 2.812 points lower than females, with a 95% confidence interval of −4.238 to −1.385. Students in every non-law faculty had higher scores than law students; the largest adjusted difference was for Physical Therapy students, whose scores were 4.993 points higher, with a 95% confidence interval of 2.154 to 7.832. Family income did not reach the study’s significance threshold in the final model, at p = 0.051.

The similar results for reappraisal and suppression may be related to the cultural setting, although the cross-sectional data cannot confirm that explanation. Emotional restraint can be more socially normative in Egypt and other collectivistic Arab societies, where suppressing outward displays may help preserve social harmony. A student who suppresses emotion in that environment may therefore experience the strategy differently from a student in a culture that places greater value on open emotional expression. The finding should not be interpreted as evidence that suppression is generally beneficial or interchangeable with reappraisal. The questionnaires measured how often students reported using each strategy, not whether its use was effective, appropriate to a particular situation or associated with better psychological outcomes.

Subjective memory performance reflects a person’s assessment of everyday memory functioning and can capture distress, metacognitive awareness and perceived cognitive strain as well as actual memory errors. Self-reported complaints do not always correspond closely to performance on objective memory tests. The researchers did not administer objective cognitive assessments or measure anxiety, depression, perceived stress, sleep quality and social media use, even though those variables may be associated with emotion regulation and subjective memory performance. Residual confounding therefore cannot be excluded. Recall bias and social-desirability bias could also have influenced questionnaire responses. The high response rate and large sample improve the precision of the reported associations within the participants, but they do not resolve these limitations or establish whether emotion regulation preceded changes in perceived memory.

The results identify emotion regulation as one possible area for future research, not a demonstrated target for improving memory. A longitudinal study could examine whether changes in emotional strategies precede changes in reported memory difficulties, while a multi-university study could test whether the pattern extends beyond Port Said University. Combining the questionnaires with objective neuropsychological assessments would help determine whether the observed relationships also appear in measurable memory performance. The present study does not support claiming that emotion-regulation training would improve memory, because no intervention was conducted. Its central finding is narrower: among the surveyed Egyptian undergraduates, more frequent reported use of both regulation strategies was associated with fewer reported memory lapses, but the relationship was weak, explained little of the overall variation and cannot be interpreted as causal.

Subject of Research: Associations between emotion-regulation strategies and self-reported memory performance in Egyptian university students

Article Title: Emotion regulation and its association with subjective memory performance among undergraduate students at port said university

Article References: Ismail, S. E., Sharaf Eldin, A. G., Sharaf Eldin, N., & Farrag, N. S. (2026). Emotion regulation and its association with subjective memory performance among undergraduate students at port said university. BMC Psychology, 14(1), Article 1507. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05679-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05679-9

Keywords: emotion regulation, subjective memory performance, memory complaints, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, Egyptian students, cross-sectional study, Port Said University, Emotion, regulation, association, subjective

Researchers led by G. Elise Doppenberg-Smit of Amsterdam University Medical Center report in the journal Supportive Care in Cancer that two previously overlooked features of emotional life, instability and variability, reliably distinguish cancer patients whose emotions have turned maladaptive from those whose emotions remain adaptive. The team tracked 132 patients with solid tumors for 14 consecutive days, pinging their mobile phones five times a day to capture momentary ratings of eight negative emotional symptoms, including feeling irritated, nervous, anxious, down, and worried. It is the first study to examine emotion dynamics in patients with cancer, and its findings could reshape how clinicians decide who needs professional mental health care.

The technical logic behind the study draws on a growing field known as emotion dynamics research. Rather than treating emotions as static quantities, researchers model them as time series, using statistical measures that describe how feelings fluctuate across dozens of moments. Emotional inertia, typically quantified by autocorrelation, captures the tendency of an emotion to carry over from one moment to the next, so that sadness or anxiety lingers and perpetuates rather than fading. Emotional variability, measured by the standard deviation, describes the range of a person’s emotions, or how far they deviate from their own average. Emotional instability, calculated through the root mean square successive difference, or RMSSD, quantifies the magnitude of rapid shifts, so that a person with high instability experiences sudden swings between emotional states.

These three parameters have been studied extensively in patients with depression, anxiety disorders, and borderline personality disorder, where a landmark meta-analysis of more than 11,000 subjects linked them to psychological well-being and psychopathology. But they had never been examined in oncology. The Dutch team recruited patients from four academic and two nonacademic hospitals between August 2021 and April 2024, enrolling people who had started systemic treatment three to seven months earlier. To sort patients into adaptive and maladaptive groups, the researchers used two independent reference standards: a full-structured psychiatric diagnostic interview assessing current depressive and anxiety disorders, and a self-report questionnaire capturing whether patients received or wished to receive a referral for professional mental health care.

The results were striking. Under the psychiatric diagnostic standard, patients with maladaptive emotions showed significantly higher emotional variability across all eight symptoms, with Cohen’s d effect sizes ranging from 0.49 to 0.84, indicating moderate to large effects. Emotional instability followed the same pattern, with effect sizes between 0.48 and 0.79. Under the subjective need standard, the pattern held for six of the eight symptoms, with moderate effects between 0.50 and 0.75 for variability and 0.55 to 0.80 for instability. In plain terms, patients whose emotions had become dysfunctional did not simply feel worse on average; their feelings swung more widely and shifted more abruptly from moment to moment, mirroring the extreme and unstable emotional profiles documented in patients with psychiatric conditions.

Emotional intensity, the traditional measure used in oncology screening tools such as the Distress Thermometer, also separated the groups. Patients with maladaptive emotions rated all symptoms as more intense under the psychiatric standard, with effect sizes between 0.58 and 1.06. Under the subjective need standard, the differences were less pronounced, and only half of the symptoms reached statistical significance. This asymmetry carries an important clinical message: the sheer strength of an emotion is especially indicative of a diagnosable disorder, and less so of a patient’s felt need for psychological support.

The hypothesis about emotional inertia, by contrast, largely failed. Patients with adaptive and maladaptive emotions differed in inertia for only two symptoms, feeling irritated and feeling down, under the psychiatric standard, and showed no significant differences at all under the subjective need standard. Part of the explanation lies in an unexpected data pattern: in nearly 18 percent of patient-symptom combinations, the standard deviation across all 70 assessments was zero, meaning patients consistently answered that a symptom was not present at all during the two-week window. These flat, absent emotions were far more common among patients with adaptive emotions, but their prevalence reduced the statistical power available for the inertia analyses. The researchers note that previous studies on inertia in depression have produced mixed results, leaving its status as an indicator of maladaptive emotions uncertain.

Robustness checks strengthened the core findings. When the team repeated the analyses separately for patients with metastatic and non-metastatic disease, the results resembled those of the full sample, though wider confidence intervals from the reduced sample sizes sometimes produced non-significant differences. A second assessment wave, conducted three months after the first, reproduced the pattern in a subset of 110 patients: variability and instability remained higher in the maladaptive group, while inertia showed inconsistent differences. The study’s use of Ecological Momentary Assessment, capturing emotions in real time across 70 equidistant moments rather than at a single clinic visit, is a key strength, since retrospective questionnaires are vulnerable to recall bias and miss the fluctuations the new measures are designed to detect.

The clinical implications could be far-reaching. Current screening methods that rely on emotional intensity face a well-documented problem: many patients who score above validated cut-offs do not want a referral or do not use psychological care, while additional indicators are needed to distinguish those who genuinely need support. The new findings suggest that instability and variability, alongside intensity, could serve as complementary signals. Before these dynamics can enter routine practice, the researchers caution, threshold values and diagnostic accuracy must be established for each indicator individually and in combination, and their integration into broader symptom monitoring systems must be tested against clinicians’ own impressions. The team also acknowledges limitations, including a smaller maladaptive group than anticipated and wide confidence intervals that underscore the need for replication in fresh samples.

Still, the study opens a provocative new chapter in psycho-oncology. If the way emotions move, rather than merely how strongly they are felt, marks the transition from adaptive coping to dysfunction, then the mathematics of emotional fluctuation may soon become as important to cancer care as the biology of the tumor itself. For the minority of patients whose feelings have turned against them, a phone that notices the swings could be the first step toward getting help.

Subject of Research: Emotion dynamics as indicators of maladaptive emotions in patients with cancer

Article Title: Emotion dynamics as indicators of maladaptive emotions in patients with cancer

Article References: Doppenberg-Smit, G. E., Lamers, F., Braamse, A. M. J., Pruijt, H., Kuip, E. J. M., Werter, I. M., van de Wetering, R. A. W., Verheul, H. M. W., Beekman, A. T. F., Dekker, J., Hoogendoorn, A. W., & van Linde, M. E. (2026). Emotion dynamics as indicators of maladaptive emotions in patients with cancer. Supportive Care in Cancer, 34(11), Article 1103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-026-11320-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00520-026-11320-7

Keywords: emotion dynamics, cancer, psycho-oncology, ecological momentary assessment, mental health, emotional instability, emotional variability, Supportive Care in Cancer, Emotion, dynamics, indicators, maladaptive

The research team, led by Gao-song Guo and Jia-xin Han of Hubei University of Chinese Medicine, together with colleagues from the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: do sleep problems and emotional symptoms cluster together in recognizable subgroups among adults with obesity, and if so, do those subgroups differ in their psychological resources? Rather than treating each symptom dimension as a separate score, the investigators applied a person-centered statistical technique that sorts individuals into classes based on their combined response patterns, an approach increasingly favored in psychiatric epidemiology because it captures the heterogeneity of real patients.

Technically, the analysis drew on seven dichotomized components of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, a validated instrument covering domains such as subjective sleep quality, sleep latency, sleep duration, and daytime dysfunction, alongside dichotomized subscales of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Latent class analysis then searched for the smallest number of classes that could reproduce the observed joint distribution of these nine indicators. The preferred solution identified four classes with high classification precision, reflected in an entropy statistic of 0.923, where values approaching 1.0 indicate that individuals are assigned to their most likely class with little ambiguity.

The four classes were far from equal in size. The largest, comprising 56.5 percent of the sample, was a low-symptom group with minimal sleep or mood pathology. The remaining 43.5 percent fell into three higher-symptom classes: 18.6 percent showed sleep disturbance accompanied by daytime impairment, 12.6 percent displayed depressive symptoms with daytime impairment, and 12.4 percent exhibited a combined high-symptom profile spanning sleep disturbance, anxiety, and depressive symptoms simultaneously. In other words, roughly one in eight adults with obesity in this clinic-based sample carried the heaviest combined burden of sleep and emotional symptoms.

One of the most technically important results concerned the fragility of the class structure itself. When the researchers removed daytime dysfunction from the indicator set, the preferred solution shifted from four classes to three, meaning that the daytime impairment component was doing substantial work in separating the sleep-disturbance class from the depressive-symptom class. The authors are explicit that this sensitivity analysis means the four-class structure should not be regarded as a fixed clinical classification tool. It is a description of the sample’s symptom architecture, one that depends on which components of sleep quality are included in the model.

The study then asked whether membership in these classes was associated with psychosocial variables, using exploratory hierarchical multinomial logistic regression with the low-symptom class as the reference category. The strongest and most consistent finding involved weight self-stigma, the internalized experience of shame and self-blame related to body weight. Each additional point on the weight self-stigma measure was associated with roughly 10 percent higher odds of belonging to the combined high-symptom class rather than the low-symptom class, with an odds ratio of 1.100 per point and a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.047 to 1.156 after full adjustment for demographic and clinical covariates.

Social support showed an inverse pattern across all three higher-symptom contrasts: higher perceived support was associated with lower odds of membership in the sleep-disturbance, depressive-symptom, and combined high-symptom classes alike. The authors caution, however, that the social support measure used in the study showed limited internal consistency, meaning its items did not hang together as reliably as ideal psychometrics would demand, so this exploratory association warrants replication with a stronger instrument. Eating self-efficacy, the confidence in one’s ability to resist maladaptive eating, was associated with lower odds of depressive-symptom class membership specifically, while exercise self-efficacy showed no statistically significant adjusted association with any class.

Demographic variables also differentiated the classes. Male sex and younger age were associated with lower odds of belonging to the sleep-disturbance class, and male sex and no alcohol use were associated with lower odds of combined high-symptom membership. To guard against the statistical uncertainty inherent in assigning individuals to latent classes, the team repeated the principal analyses using the R3STEP approach, a sensitivity method that accounts for classification error when estimating the associations between covariates and most-likely class membership. The core psychosocial findings, particularly those involving weight self-stigma and social support, held up under this more conservative procedure.

What makes these results compelling is the convergence of sleep science and obesity psychology. Sleep deprivation and fragmentation are known to alter appetite-regulating hormones, heighten emotional reactivity, and erode the self-regulatory capacity that successful weight management requires. At the same time, weight self-stigma operates as a chronic psychological stressor, and the stress physiology it engages can disrupt sleep architecture and deepen depressive symptoms. The cross-sectional design of this study cannot disentangle the direction of these arrows, and the authors are careful to state that the findings do not establish causal relationships. A person stigmatized by their weight may sleep poorly because of that stress, or sleep poorly and then feel more stigmatized, or both processes may reinforce each other in a loop.

The practical implication is that assessment in obesity care may benefit from differentiation. A patient whose profile is dominated by sleep disturbance with daytime impairment may need a different intervention pathway than one whose profile centers on depressive symptoms, even if both present with the same body mass index. Screening for sleep quality and mood symptoms together, and paying attention to psychosocial resources such as social support and eating self-efficacy, could help identify which adults with obesity are carrying the highest combined symptom burden. The authors suggest these exploratory cross-sectional findings may inform further evaluation of differentiated assessment approaches, while emphasizing that the four-class solution’s dependence on the daytime dysfunction component means any clinical application must await validation in independent, ideally longitudinal, samples.

Subject of Research: Associations of sleep–emotion symptom classes with weight self-stigma and psychosocial resources among adults with obesity

Article Title: Associations of sleep–emotion symptom classes with weight self-stigma and psychosocial resources among adults with obesity

Article References: Guo, G.-S., Han, J.-X., Chen, F., Xiao, M.-Z., Zhang, Q., Wei, S.-S., Lu, L.-B., Li, Y., Zheng, J.-J., & Cai, Y. (2026). Associations of sleep–emotion symptom classes with weight self-stigma and psychosocial resources among adults with obesity. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05820-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05820-8

Keywords: obesity, sleep, mental health, latent class analysis, weight self-stigma, Associations, emotion, symptom, classes, weight, self-stigma, psychosocial

The study rests on a distinctive theoretical pairing drawn from the cultural-historical tradition. The first concept is perezhivanie, introduced by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which describes how social circumstances acquire psychological significance only as they are refracted through an individual’s emotions, history, and interpretation. The second is an object-oriented account of agency informed by cultural-historical activity theory, associated with Alexei Leontiev and Yrjö Engeström, in which action is understood as directed toward an object — the motivating problem space of an activity — and mediated by cultural, symbolic, and relational resources. Brought together, these frameworks allowed the researchers to move beyond simply cataloguing emotional responses and instead examine how changing interpretations of experience became linked to changing possibilities for action.

The narrative begins with optimism. The manuscript was submitted to a special issue whose theme appeared to align closely with the paper’s focus, and the experienced co-author, Participant 1, expressed confidence that it was the right venue. Across the first four rounds, the authors made substantial revisions, treating reviewer feedback as part of the normal labour of improving a paper. Yet even at this early stage, their experiences diverged in ways that would prove analytically decisive. For the novice author, Participant 2, each revision carried a double weight: the excitement of learning the conventions of scholarly publishing and the pressure of proving herself in what she described as a privileged community. Without a mental map of what a normal review process looked like, she followed reviewers’ suggestions almost unquestioningly, quietly asking herself whether this was what competent scholars did.

The experienced author’s uncertainty developed along a different track. His publishing history had taught him to expect that successive rounds would progressively resolve outstanding issues and move a manuscript toward a decision. When previously addressed concerns resurfaced and new expectations emerged, that expectation became increasingly difficult to sustain. He described the process as rewriting for a moving target, while clinging to the hope that one more round would bring resolution. By his own later reflection, six months of accommodation had eroded his sense of authorship: the paper no longer felt like theirs, and he wondered whether they were still authors or merely responders. Crucially, this articulation gave the novice author a new vocabulary for a problem she had felt but never named, marking the first shift from compliance toward questioning.

The decisive rupture came in the fifth round. Responsibility for the manuscript shifted from the original guest editor to an Associate Editor-in-Chief, and the new reports appeared to come from a different set of reviewers, some of whom revisited issues the authors believed had been resolved. Participant 1, armed with a comparative frame built from many prior review processes, immediately located the problem in the editorial handling: some comments, he said, were not even about the paper they had written. Participant 2, lacking that frame, initially turned the uncertainty inward. Paradoxically, the presence of an experienced co-author intensified her self-doubt — if difficulties persisted despite his expertise, perhaps the deficiency lay with her. She later characterised the experience not as a single dramatic blow but as a slow erosion, in which the manuscript came to feel less like a contribution and more like a test she could not quite pass.

This contrast between the two authors is where the study’s theoretical contribution becomes vivid. The same editorial conditions acquired different psychological meanings because they were lived through different histories and expectations. Experience, the analysis shows, cuts both ways: it supplied the veteran with resources for critically evaluating the process, but it also generated expectations whose frustration produced a distinct form of disappointment. For the novice, the absence of comparative knowledge made ambiguity itself consequential, since she could not tell whether the difficulties stemmed from the manuscript, the journal, or her own capacity. Neither interpretation was fixed. Through dialogue — recorded in meeting notes and messaging threads — the experienced author’s knowledge became a mediating resource through which the novice could relocate the problem from personal inadequacy to the conditions of the review process itself.

After the sixth revision, the editors requested yet another round, this time within a single week. The authors paused for roughly two weeks, and the experienced author articulated a position that the study treats as a turning point: they would revise, but they needed to draw a line, and if the paper was rejected, so be it. When the seventh revision was not resubmitted, the manuscript was rejected for non-resubmission. The authors are careful to frame this outcome not as failure or exhaustion but as intentional boundary-setting — a deliberate choice that the process was no longer worth the time and effort it demanded. In their account, refusing to continue was itself a form of agency, exercised within an evaluative relationship marked by unequal decision-making authority.

The study’s most original conceptual move follows from what happened next. Rather than ending their scholarly engagement, the authors redirected the accumulated tensions, materials, and relationships of the failed publication attempt into a new object of inquiry: the peer-review experience itself, examined through the present duoethnography. They name this process generative agency — the mediated actions through which actors reorganise the experiences and resources generated within one activity around a newly constituted object, giving rise to an associated but analytically distinct activity. The concept differs from object expansion, which reconceptualises the goal of an existing activity, and from transformative agency, which seeks to change an activity’s institutional conditions. Generative agency instead describes a branching developmental trajectory that becomes visible only when analysis extends beyond the boundaries of a single activity system.

The authors are explicit about the limits of this framing. Generativity should not be romanticised: prolonged tension may just as easily lead to withdrawal, disengagement, or burnout, and a discontinued activity does not automatically seed a new one. The duoethnographic method, however, proved unusually well suited to tracing how meaning was reorganised, because it treated the novice–experienced difference as an analytical resource rather than a complication. The authors also stress the ethical labour involved when researchers are simultaneously participants, including ongoing mutual consent and negotiated disclosure, and they note that institutional ethics requirements should still be confirmed before such research begins.

The practical implications reach from doctoral education to editorial policy. The authors argue that novice scholars need more than technical instruction in writing response letters; they need structured access to comparative knowledge about how review processes vary across journals, guidance on distinguishing essential from negotiable requests, and collaborative spaces — writing groups, mentoring relationships — where reviewer comments can be interpreted collectively rather than through individual trial and error. Responsibility for reducing ambiguity, they insist, should not rest primarily with authors. Drawing on earlier scholarship on editorial integrity, they call on journals to explain why reviewers are replaced, clarify whether newly raised concerns are essential to the decision, and provide explicit synthesis when comments conflict or repeat earlier demands. Whether such transparency measures can make prolonged review more coherent and developmentally supportive — without dulling its critical function — remains an open empirical question, one the authors hope future longitudinal and multiperspectival studies, including negative cases, will help answer.

Subject of Research: Emotion, agency, and researcher development in prolonged academic peer review, examined through duoethnography and cultural-historical theory

Article Title: “How many rounds is enough?” A duoethnographic study of emotion, repositioning, and agency in academic peer review

Article References: Cong-Lem, N., & Khanh-Quynh, T. (2026). “How many rounds is enough?” A duoethnographic study of emotion, repositioning, and agency in academic peer review. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 398. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01674-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01674-4

Keywords: peer review, academic publishing, duoethnography, perezhivanie, cultural-historical activity theory, agency, emotion, researcher development, editorial practice, early-career researchers, generative agency, scholarly identity

The study is anchored in the I³ model, a prominent theoretical account in social psychology that treats aggression as the product of three interacting ingredients. The first is instigation, an environmental trigger such as a provocation or a social slight. The second is impellance, an internal push toward aggression, which can be dispositional, situational or physiological and includes emotional states like anger and negative affect. The third is inhibition, the capacity of executive control to hold aggressive impulses in check. By measuring all three components in a single research program, the authors were able to ask a question that has rarely been answered with this level of precision: when pain makes people more aggressive, which of these three ingredients is doing the work?

To find out, the team ran four experiments that combined two validated laboratory measures of aggression with manipulations of pain, emotion and social context. The first behavioral tool was the Voodoo Doll Task, in which participants see an avatar representing another person and choose how many pins to stick into it, a symbolic index of aggressive intent that has been widely used in recent aggression research. The second was the Social Network Aggression Task, in which participants write messages in response to hypothetical social scenarios and the number of aggressive words used provides a more ecologically grounded measure of hostile expression. Acute pain was induced in the laboratory, and emotional states were tracked with established self-report instruments, including the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and visual analogue scales.

The first experiment delivered the central result. Under the conditions tested, acute pain was associated with higher levels of aggressive responses on the Voodoo Doll Task and, crucially, with intensified negative emotions. This pairing is exactly what the impellance component of the I³ model predicts: pain did not simply flip a switch toward violence, but instead raised the internal emotional pressure that makes aggression more likely when a target or trigger is available. In other words, pain appeared to function as a situational impeller, loading the system with negative affect that then spilled over into symbolic aggression toward the avatar.

The second experiment then tested the inhibition side of the equation. If pain-induced aggression arises because pain degrades self-control, then pain should also impair performance on tasks that measure executive control, such as the Stroop task and the Multi-Source Interference Task, both of which index the ability to suppress dominant but incorrect responses. The researchers examined reaction-time based measures of interference and inhibition. Here the results were notably different: the data did not provide clear evidence that pain changed these reaction-time indices of cognitive control under the experimental conditions used. This null result is theoretically meaningful, because it weakens the alternative account in which pain makes people aggressive by hollowing out their inhibitory machinery.

Experiment 3 moved from observation to intervention by asking whether emotional processes could be shifted and, if so, whether aggression would follow. When participants’ positive emotions were enhanced, their aggressive responses on the Voodoo Doll Task under pain were reduced. This is one of the most striking aspects of the research program, because it suggests that the emotional pathway is not merely correlated with pain-induced aggression but is functionally involved in producing it. Boosting positive affect appears to counteract the impellance generated by pain, offering a potential psychological lever for reducing the hostile fallout of physical suffering. The finding also fits a broader literature in which positive emotions broaden thought and dampen the grip of negative states, but here that general principle is tied directly to a measurable aggressive outcome.

The fourth experiment added the missing ingredient: the social situation. Participants were placed under conditions of social evaluation, in which their performance or worth could be judged by others, a classic instigating trigger. Under these social-evaluation conditions, pain was again associated with increased negative emotional responses, and, importantly, social evaluation interacted with those emotional responses in shaping aggression on the Social Network Aggression Task. The implication is that pain does not act in a vacuum. It raises the emotional pressure, but the social context determines how that pressure is channeled. A hurt individual who is simultaneously provoked or evaluated negatively has both the internal push and the external trigger, and the combination produced more aggressive expression than either element alone would suggest.

Taken together, the four experiments sketch a coherent picture. Across the program, pain-related aggressive responses were more consistently associated with impellance, the emotional push, than with inhibition, while instigation shaped how those responses were expressed. This asymmetry is important for how scientists think about the psychology of pain. It suggests that a person in pain who lashes out is not necessarily suffering from failed self-control, a framing that carries moral weight in everyday judgments about aggressive behavior. Instead, the behavior may reflect an emotion-driven amplification that any nervous system could produce, with situational provocation supplying the spark. That reframing aligns the study with mechanistic models in which affective states modulate the threshold for aggressive responses, rather than with deficit models centered on executive failure.

The study also demonstrates methodological strengths worth noting. The researchers analyzed their data with linear mixed-effects models, a statistical approach well suited to the repeated-measures, trial-by-trial structure of laboratory aggression tasks, and they report model comparison using the Akaike information criterion. Participants’ trait aggression was assessed with the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire, allowing the authors to account for stable individual differences in hostile disposition. The work was approved by the Ethics Committee of East China Normal University and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with written informed consent from all participants. The research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, with the funders having no role in study design or analysis.

Like all laboratory research, the findings come with boundaries the authors themselves acknowledge. The aggression measured here is symbolic, expressed toward avatars or in written messages rather than through physical harm, and the pain was acute and experimentally induced rather than the chronic, often neuropathic pain that shapes the lives of many patients. The reaction-time indices of cognitive control showed no clear pain-related change under the specific conditions tested, which may reflect the sensitivity of those measures or the intensity of the manipulation rather than a definitive absence of any inhibitory effect. Still, the convergence across four experiments, two aggression paradigms and three components of a leading theoretical model gives the central claim considerable weight. If future work confirms that strengthening positive affect reliably blunts pain-driven hostility, the results could inform interventions for populations in which pain and interpersonal conflict collide, from chronic pain patients navigating family life to clinical settings where irritability and pain frequently co-occur. For now, the study offers a clear and consequential message: the road from hurting to lashing out runs through emotion, and the social world decides where that road leads.

Subject of Research: The emotional and cognitive mechanisms linking acute pain to aggressive behavior in social contexts

Article Title: The role of emotional pathways in pain-induced aggression in social and cognitive contexts

Article References: Wang, C., Gao, J., Liu, Z., Zhang, M., & Dong, X.-W. (2026). The role of emotional pathways in pain-induced aggression in social and cognitive contexts. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05581-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05581-4

Keywords: pain, aggression, emotion, I³ model, Voodoo Doll Task, Social Network Aggression Task, cognitive control, inhibition, social evaluation, negative affect, BMC Psychology, behavioral neuroscience

The research, published in Scientific Reports, examined three climate-related emotions that previous studies had identified as powerful motivators: anger, compassion and hope. Earlier work had shown that angry people are more likely to want to hold so-called climate criminals to account, that compassionate people are inclined to support victims of environmental damage, and that people who feel hopeful about solutions develop stronger intentions to act. Surveys consistently confirm these links. What surveys cannot easily confirm, however, is whether those intentions survive contact with reality, and that is precisely the gap the Norwegian and Polish team set out to close.

To do so, the researchers designed an experiment that went beyond the questionnaire. More than 2,000 participants in Norway and Poland were each given 200 Norwegian kroner or 20 Polish zloty, a modest but real sum of their own money. The participants were then exposed to a series of short stories crafted to trigger different climate-related emotions. Afterward, they were offered a concrete way to act on whatever they felt. They could donate their participation fee to charity, in this case the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), or they could work through a set of deliberately tedious pattern-finding sheets, with the experimenters donating on their behalf in proportion to the work completed. The second option, which the team calls a real impact task, is what distinguishes this study from most of the existing literature.

The results caught the researchers off guard. Very few participants, hardly any by the team’s own account, gave more money because of the emotional stories they had read, compared with people who had not been exposed to them. The difference in behavior between the emotional conditions and the control was negligible at best. Christian Klöckner, a professor at NTNU’s Department of Psychology who studies why people make environmentally friendly or unfriendly choices, admitted that the team was surprised. The emotional mechanisms that reliably predict stated intentions in surveys simply did not translate into changes in real, costly behavior when put to the test.

This disconnect matters because the field has accumulated a substantial body of evidence showing that emotions do shape attitudes. Klöckner notes that when people are angry, they report stronger motivation and intentions. When people feel a bad conscience, they are more willing to accept climate policies. And hope appears to be a precondition for any engagement at all, since people who believe nothing can be done tend to do nothing. None of that prior evidence is invalidated by the new findings. Instead, the study exposes a fissure between two layers of psychology: the layer where feelings form intentions, and the layer where intentions become behavior. The emotional stories shifted the first layer but left the second essentially untouched.

Klöckner’s earlier work hints that this fissure runs deep. In a separate large-scale project aimed at reducing household energy consumption, his team found that their interventions did in fact lower energy use, yet the participants’ psychological mindsets remained unchanged. The eventual energy savings, he explains, had very little to do with the individuals’ stated intention to save energy. Some people revise their intentions in response to emotional information, while those who make genuine, measurable changes, such as cutting electricity consumption, are not necessarily doing so for the reasons that survey research would predict. The practical lesson is that intention-based measures, the standard currency of environmental psychology, may be poor proxies for the outcomes that actually matter.

For conservation and environmental organizations, the findings arrive at a consequential moment. Non-profits depend heavily on financial contributions from supporters, and understanding what makes people start, stop or continue donating is central to their survival. WWF, which received the donations in this study, openly uses anger, compassion and hope in its fundraising, typically paired with a call to action. Denise Kohn, Senior Corporate Advisor for Partnerships at WWF in Norway, says the organization knows that its financial supporters donate for an average of five to six years, and that any new research shedding light on donor motivation is of genuine interest to the fundraising team.

Kohn also points out that climate itself has proven a difficult fundraising proposition. WWF has never been particularly successful in raising money on climate alone; nature remains a much stronger entry point for donors, and the current political and geopolitical circumstances mean that other crises frequently crowd climate out of public attention. In that sense, the NTNU and Warsaw findings do not simply tell campaigners that emotion fails. They suggest that the emotional architecture of climate engagement is more complicated than a single powerful feeling, and that organizations may need to look beyond one-off emotional appeals if they want to secure durable, behavior-level commitment from their audiences.

The research team is careful not to frame the results as a counsel of despair. Anger, compassion and hope still play vital roles in shaping how people understand climate change, and they likely remain necessary preconditions for engagement even if they are not sufficient on their own. What the study demonstrates is that the motivation behind actual change is more complex than any single overpowering emotion. To untangle that complexity, the team now intends to fund an even larger survey spanning ten countries, aiming to map the differences between people in the intricate patterns of emotional responses to climate change and how those patterns relate to real behavior.

For a field that has leaned heavily on the power of feeling, the message from this experiment is uncomfortable but clarifying. If the goal is to move people from concern to action, the path may run less through the heart than through the messy, contextual, and poorly understood machinery that converts private intention into public behavior. As Klöckner and his colleagues continue their cross-national work, communicators, campaigners and policymakers may need to treat emotional storytelling not as a lever that reliably moves behavior, but as one ingredient in a far more complicated recipe, one that this new line of research is only beginning to write down.

Subject of Research: The impact of anger, compassion and hope on pro-environmental behavior and climate action

Article Title: The negative effect of emotion in climate action

Article References: The negative effect of emotion in climate action. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate action, emotion, anger, compassion, hope, pro-environmental behavior, donations, NTNU, University of Warsaw, climate psychology, behavioral research, WWF

The review, registered prospectively on PROSPERO and funded by the Health Research Board, followed PRISMA 2020 guidelines and searched PubMed, PsycINFO, Web of Science, CINAHL, Embase and Scopus from inception to June 2025. To be eligible, studies had to include participants aged 12 to 30, contain a comparison group of non-users or infrequent users, defined as use on no more than one to two of the past 30 days, and report at least one validated self-report measure of emotion regulation. The team prespecified three instruments: the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, which captures cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression; the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, known as DERS, which probes six domains including nonacceptance, goals, strategies, clarity, impulsivity and awareness; and the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, which covers nine adaptive and maladaptive strategies from acceptance to catastrophizing. Risk of bias was assessed with the ROBINS-E tool, and findings were synthesised narratively.

The scarcity of qualifying evidence is itself a headline. Despite cannabis being used by an estimated 23 million Europeans aged 16 to 64 in the past year, and despite around one in five users developing cannabis use disorder, only four cross-sectional studies worldwide had examined the relationship with validated emotion regulation questionnaires in this age range. Three samples were drawn from university settings and one from an online survey. Cannabis exposure was defined in several distinct ways, including the SCID-5 structured clinical interview for DSM-5, the Marijuana Problem Scale, the Cannabis Use Disorders Identification Test, and simple frequency of use. Three of the four studies were rated at high or very high risk of bias, mainly because they relied on self-reported cannabis exposure and adjusted only limitedly for confounding variables such as psychiatric comorbidity and polysubstance use.

The most statistically powerful of the included studies came from Spain. Sara Weidberg and colleagues at the University of Oviedo examined 2,762 undergraduates with a mean age of 19.5 years, comparing 318 past-month cannabis users against 2,444 infrequent users or abstainers. Users showed higher global dysregulation scores on the DERS, but the significant associations were confined entirely to women. Within the female group, differences clustered in non-acceptance of emotional responses, impulse control difficulties, reduced goal-directed behaviour and lower emotional clarity. Mediation analyses indicated that DERS scores statistically mediated the association between past-month cannabis use and emotional distress in women, with no comparable effects appearing in men. Given the enormous sample, the absence of associations in men is unlikely to reflect low statistical power and instead suggests that cannabis use and reported regulation difficulties align more strongly among women in this cohort, though the cross-sectional design prevents any conclusion about temporal direction.

The remaining studies added texture to that pattern. Mohsen Akbari and colleagues in Iran studied 144 university students divided into cannabis use disorder, problematic internet use and non-affected comparison groups, using the SCID-5 to diagnose cannabis use disorder. Cannabis users reported significantly lower cognitive reappraisal scores on the ERQ than both comparison groups, and while expressive suppression also differed across groups, the reappraisal differences appeared larger and more decisive. This emphasis on reappraisal matters theoretically, because reappraisal is widely regarded as a protective strategy associated with resilience and better mental health outcomes, whereas habitual suppression and rumination are linked to greater symptom severity in depression and anxiety. In the United States, Julia Cavalli and Adriana Cservenka assessed 852 adults with a mean age of 26.9 years and found that higher DERS scores moderated the association between recent stress and cannabis-related problems, with emotion regulation difficulties amplifying the consequences of cannabis use most strongly at higher levels of stress.

The fourth study, by Benjamin Stone in the United States, illustrates how fragile the evidence base remains. Stone examined 198 undergraduates with a mean age of 19.2 years, but only 43 participants had available cannabis-use data for the review’s analyses. Descriptive patterns suggested that students with stronger positive substance-use expectancies and heavier cannabis involvement tended to show higher DERS scores, but none of these trends reached statistical significance, and neither total DERS scores nor any of the six subscales differed significantly between users and controls. The review team re-analysed Stone’s openly available data from the Open Science Framework to obtain comparable summary statistics, a methodological nicety that shows the lengths to which the synthesis went to align reporting across studies with heterogeneous aims and definitions.

What emerges from the cross-study synthesis is a pattern of specific regulatory deficits rather than a generalised inability to manage emotions. The domains most consistently implicated were impulse control, non-acceptance of emotions, goal-directed behaviour and emotional clarity, with reduced cognitive reappraisal also reported on the ERQ. The magnitude of associations appears modest throughout, suggesting small-to-moderate relationships. This specificity fits with broader cognitive-affective models in which emotion regulation depends on core executive functions such as working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility, processes that frequent cannabis users are known to show subtle deficits in. A major meta-analysis of youth cannabis users reported small deficits in executive functioning, learning and memory that largely dissipated with abstinence, though it did not extend to emotion regulation specifically. Neuroimaging studies outside this review also report altered activation in prefrontal and anterior cingulate regions among regular users, strengthening the theoretical plausibility that regulation difficulties may stem from disruptions in control systems involved in both cognition and affect.

The review’s authors are careful to stress that these findings should be interpreted as strictly associations. It remains unclear whether emotion regulation differences precede cannabis involvement, arise from it, or reflect underlying characteristics common to both. None of the included studies examined emotion regulation in the context of polysubstance use, despite cannabis frequently co-occurring with alcohol, nicotine and stimulants in this age group. No studies reported or controlled for psychiatric comorbidity, even though depression, anxiety and attention-deficit disorders are independently associated with emotion dysregulation. No studies incorporated neurocognitive, behavioural or imaging investigations alongside the prespecified questionnaires. The reliance on cross-sectional self-report designs, variation in how cannabis exposure was defined, the absence of potency or cumulative-use data, and a dependence on university-based convenience samples further restrict generalisability. As sex differences were identified within a single large-scale study, it also remains unclear whether the female-specific pattern reflects sample-specific variation or a more generalised phenomenon requiring extensive investigation.

Even within these constraints, the association between cannabis use and specific regulation difficulties was replicated in all four studies, and the authors argue it carries potential clinical and developmental relevance. The findings are consistent with the idea that cannabis may function as a maladaptive strategy to manage distress or suppress unwanted emotions, and they point toward interventions that enhance regulatory flexibility, such as reappraisal training, mindfulness-based relapse prevention and structured emotion regulation skills programmes, as candidates for reducing reliance on cannabis during adolescence and early adulthood. The developmental focus on ages 12 to 30 captures a critical window in which both emotion regulation and substance-use behaviours are still forming, making the findings particularly relevant to prevention and early intervention. Future longitudinal and experimental studies are needed to clarify causal directions, delineate recovery trajectories following abstinence and identify moderators such as age of onset and psychiatric comorbidity. For now, the message is preliminary but pointed: cannabis use in youth appears linked not to a wholesale breakdown of emotional control, but to specific cracks in the regulatory system, and those cracks may be exactly where prevention efforts should aim.

Subject of Research: A systematic review finds that cannabis use in adolescents and young adults is associated with specific emotion regulation difficulties, particularly impulse control, goal-directed behaviour and non-acceptance of emotions, with evidence limited to four cross-sectional studies.

Article Title: Emotion regulation and cannabis use in young people: a systematic review

Article References: Fleury, R., Riaz, S., O’Higgins, F., Anih, A. N., Dooley, N., Staines, L., Healy, C., Gillan, D., Smyth, B., & Cannon, M. (2026). Emotion regulation and cannabis use in young people: a systematic review. Frontiers in Adolescent Medicine, 4, Article 1766637. https://doi.org/10.3389/fradm.2026.1766637

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fradm.2026.1766637

Keywords: cannabis, emotion regulation, adolescence, systematic review, mental health, impulse control, young adults, addiction, Emotion, regulation, young, people