The research team surveyed 140 students with hearing impairment enrolled in Grades 7 and 8 across 27 middle schools that operate integrated education programs. Rather than sampling a subset, the investigators used a comprehensive technique, including every eligible student within the selected schools, which minimized sampling bias and strengthened the internal validity of the results. Academic performance was measured objectively from official school records, using each student’s cumulative first-semester average across nine core subjects, including Amharic, mathematics, English, and general science. Psychological variables were captured through standardized self-report questionnaires, carefully translated from English into Amharic and then into Ethiopian Sign Language so that every participant could respond accurately and comfortably.

The instruments themselves underwent rigorous validation. The 42-item emotional well-being scale, adapted from Patel and Dhar, asks students to rate statements about their feelings, stress, and emotional balance on a five-point scale. The 14-item social self-concept questionnaire, adapted from Laryea, probes how students perceive their own social competence on a four-point scale. Both were pilot-tested with deaf students at a nearby school and showed strong internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values of 0.933 and 0.810 respectively. Forward-backward translation and review by language specialists ensured the Amharic versions preserved the meaning of the original items, a technical detail that matters enormously when measuring subtle psychological constructs across languages and communication modes.

The headline result is striking. Students with hearing impairment in the sample achieved a mean academic score of 62.56 percent, with a standard deviation of 9.94—firmly within the national “satisfactory” band of 60 to 79 percent and significantly above the 50 percent pass mark. A one-sample t-test confirmed the difference was statistically robust, t(139) = 14.95, p < 0.001. This alone is a noteworthy finding, countering deficit narratives that portray deaf learners as inevitably lagging behind. On average, these students were not merely passing; they were performing at a level Ethiopian education policy formally classifies as satisfactory.

But the study’s central contribution lies in its analysis of prediction. Emotional well-being correlated positively with academic performance at r = 0.559, and social self-concept at r = 0.487, both highly significant. When the researchers entered both variables into a multiple regression model, the combined predictors explained 35.9 percent of the variance in academic achievement—a substantial share for two psychological variables. Emotional well-being emerged as the stronger predictor, with a standardized beta of 0.417, while social self-concept contributed a beta of 0.258. In practical terms, the regression equation implies that a ten-point gain in emotional well-being corresponds to roughly a 1.6-point rise in cumulative academic scores, while a ten-point gain in social self-concept corresponds to approximately a 5.2-point rise.

The asymmetry between the two predictors is where the study becomes genuinely revealing. Emotional well-being alone accounted for 31.2 percent of the variance, whereas social self-concept independently explained only 4.7 percent. The authors attribute this gap to the specific conditions of Ethiopian integrated schools. Classroom communication for deaf students frequently generates acute emotional responses—frustration, anxiety, and stress—that can derail attention and persistence in the moment. Emotional regulation, in this view, acts as a proximal mechanism directly governing engagement with learning tasks. Social self-concept, by contrast, operates through broader processes of peer integration and social adjustment, exerting a more indirect influence on day-to-day academic behavior.

Context amplifies this pattern. Many Ethiopian schools lack dedicated psychological counseling services, meaning deaf students must rely heavily on their own internal coping resources when communication barriers arise. Where formal support structures are thin, the capacity to manage one’s own emotional state becomes correspondingly more consequential. This interpretation aligns with the theoretical framework the researchers built from three established models: the Self-Worth Theory of Motivation, which holds that students who feel valued engage more persistently with academic tasks; Expectancy-Value Theory, in which confidence and perceived task value drive effort; and Ecological Systems Theory, which situates individual development within nested layers of family, school, and peer environment.

The study is careful about its limits, and readers should be too. Its cross-sectional design captures associations at a single point in time, so causal direction cannot be established—it remains possible that students who perform well academically subsequently feel better about themselves, rather than the reverse. Self-report measures are vulnerable to social desirability bias, and the sample was confined to urban middle schools in a single city administration, restricting generalizability to rural Ethiopia or to specialized schools for the deaf. The remaining 64.1 percent of unexplained variance is itself informative: instructional quality, teacher attitudes, parental involvement, degree of hearing loss, socioeconomic status, and cognitive factors all likely shape outcomes in ways this model did not test.

Even with those caveats, the implications are hard to ignore. If more than a third of academic achievement among deaf learners traces back to emotional and social psychological factors, then schools that focus exclusively on curriculum and accommodations are addressing only part of the problem. The researchers recommend structured counseling services and peer-support programs tailored to deaf students, teacher training in sign language and cooperative learning strategies, sustained parental emotional support, and inclusive education policies that mandate psychosocial services alongside academic accommodations. For a country expanding its integrated education programs, the message is that emotional well-being is not a luxury or an afterthought—it is, on the evidence, one of the strongest levers available for lifting the school outcomes of students who cannot hear the lesson but are determined to learn it anyway.

Subject of Research: Psychological predictors of academic achievement among students with hearing impairment in Ethiopian inclusive middle schools

Article Title: Emotional well-being and social self-concept as predictors of academic achievement among students with hearing impairment in middle schools of Dessie City Ethiopia

Article References: Zemedkun, M. A., & Tsegaye, S. (2026). Emotional well-being and social self-concept as predictors of academic achievement among students with hearing impairment in middle schools of Dessie City Ethiopia. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 962. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02187-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02187-1

Keywords: hearing impairment, emotional well-being, social self-concept, academic achievement, inclusive education, Ethiopia, educational psychology, deaf students, middle school, multiple regression, psychosocial support, special needs education

The study, led by Millicent Azikiwe, analyzed data from the 2022 cycle of the PISA assessment, which surveyed students in 15 countries and economies. The research focused on the relationships among bullying victimization, perceived school safety, school belonging, teacher support, and emotional well-being. Using structural equation modeling, the researchers tested a framework in which bullying was expected to undermine well-being both directly and indirectly, by eroding students’ sense of safety and connection at school.

The results showed that bullying victimization was negatively associated with emotional well-being, meaning that students who reported more frequent bullying tended to report lower well-being. Bullying was also negatively associated with perceived school safety, suggesting that bullied students felt less safe in their schools. In turn, perceived school safety was positively associated with emotional well-being, as were school belonging and teacher support, indicating that safer and more supportive school climates were linked to better well-being among adolescents.

One of the more notable findings concerned gender differences. The association between bullying victimization and school belonging was stronger among female students than among male students, suggesting that bullying may undermine girls’ sense of connection at school more powerfully. However, the direct association between bullying and emotional well-being did not differ significantly by gender, implying that both boys and girls experience the emotional toll of bullying, even if the relational consequences differ.

The study also found that teacher support was positively associated with school belonging, suggesting that supportive teacher-student relationships may help students feel more connected to their schools. Perceived school safety was likewise positively associated with school belonging, indicating that students who felt safe were more likely to feel they belonged. These findings align with the study’s framework, in which school climate factors were expected to relate to one another and to well-being.

The researchers emphasized that their findings have implications for school policies aimed at promoting adolescent well-being. Because bullying was linked to lower well-being and lower perceived safety, schools may need to address bullying not only as a disciplinary issue but also as a threat to students’ emotional health. At the same time, because school safety, belonging, and teacher support were all positively associated with well-being, schools may be able to promote resilience by strengthening these supportive climate factors.

The study’s use of PISA data gives it considerable breadth, as the assessment covers students in a wide range of countries and economies. However, the researchers noted some limitations. Because the data are cross-sectional, the findings cannot establish causality, and it remains possible that students with lower well-being are more likely to perceive or report bullying. The researchers also noted that the PISA survey measures perceptions, which may differ from objective experiences of bullying or school climate.

Despite these limitations, the study adds to a growing body of evidence linking bullying to poorer mental health among adolescents. Previous research has shown that bullying victimization is associated with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, and that supportive school climates can mitigate some of these effects. The new findings extend this evidence by showing that bullying may undermine well-being both directly and indirectly, by eroding students’ sense of safety and connection at school.

The researchers concluded that their findings underscore the importance of addressing bullying as a public health concern, particularly in light of the emotional toll it takes on adolescents. They suggested that schools may benefit from policies that simultaneously reduce bullying and strengthen supportive school climates, including safe environments, strong teacher-student relationships, and a sense of belonging. Such approaches, they argued, may promote the emotional well-being of adolescents across diverse educational contexts.

The methodological backbone of the study deserves closer attention, because the way the analysis was conducted shapes how much confidence readers can place in its conclusions. Rather than treating every student response as if it carried equal weight, the researchers employed survey-adjusted hierarchical regression analyses that incorporated Balanced Repeated Replication weights. This approach matters because PISA uses complex sampling designs in which schools and students are not selected with equal probability. Replication-based variance estimation allows the analysis to account for this clustering and stratification, producing standard errors that better reflect the true sampling variability within each education system. In practical terms, this means the reported associations are less likely to be statistical artifacts of the sampling design, a concern that has undermined some earlier cross-national studies of school climate.

The sheer scale of the dataset also warrants comment. With 135,348 adolescents distributed across 15 education systems, the study draws on one of the largest samples ever brought to bear on questions of bullying and school climate. Large multinational samples of this kind offer advantages that smaller single-school or single-country studies cannot: they capture considerable variation in how bullying is experienced, how safe students feel, and how supportive their teachers are perceived to be. This heterogeneity increases the likelihood that the observed patterns reflect processes that generalize across rather different educational and cultural contexts, rather than idiosyncrasies of one national system. At the same time, pooling across systems can mask meaningful between-country differences, and the study’s aggregate findings should be read as broad patterns rather than guarantees that every education system behaves identically.

The theoretical framing of the work draws on Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory, which holds that human development emerges from the interplay between individuals and the nested environments they inhabit. Applied to adolescence, this perspective treats emotional well-being not as a fixed individual trait but as a condition shaped by ongoing interactions with peers, teachers, and the broader institutional climate of the school. Within this framework, each variable in the study occupies a distinct ecological position: bullying victimization represents a harmful peer-level experience, perceived school safety reflects the environmental climate, school belonging captures social integration, teacher support represents adult relational support, and emotional well-being indexes psychosocial adjustment. This integrated framing is what distinguishes the study from earlier research that examined these factors in isolation from one another.

The gender findings merit particular reflection in light of prior developmental research. Existing scholarship suggests that female adolescents tend to place greater value on interpersonal relationships and that their emotional states are more closely tied to social connectedness than is the case for male adolescents. The stronger association between bullying victimization and school belonging among female students in this study is consistent with that picture, hinting that relational forms of harm may cut more deeply into girls’ sense of connection to their school community. Yet the absence of a gender difference in the bullying–well-being association is equally instructive. It suggests that while the relational pathway may differ, the emotional consequences of victimization are broadly shared across genders, which argues against well-being interventions that target only one group of students.

It is also worth situating these results within the wider literature on the consequences of peer victimization. Previous studies have repeatedly linked bullying to anxiety, depressive symptoms, loneliness, low self-esteem, school disengagement, and even suicidal ideation, and have documented inverse associations across verbal, relational, physical, and sexual forms of bullying. Earlier work has also highlighted school connectedness as a potential protective resource that can buffer the psychological distress associated with peer victimization. The present study builds on this foundation by placing safety, belonging, and teacher support within a single analytical framework, allowing their relative contributions to be examined side by side rather than in separate analyses.

From a public health standpoint, the findings carry implications that extend beyond individual classrooms. Adolescent emotional well-being is shaped not only by direct experiences of victimization but also by the broader perceptions of social and environmental support that students carry with them through the school day. If perceived safety, belonging, and teacher support are each positively associated with well-being, then interventions that strengthen any one of these climate dimensions may yield benefits even where bullying itself is difficult to eliminate entirely. Whole-school approaches that combine anti-bullying policies with efforts to build trusting teacher-student relationships and inclusive peer cultures would be consistent with this integrated evidence base.

Finally, some caution is warranted when interpreting associations drawn from a single wave of survey data. Because all measures were collected at the same point in time, the direction of influence between bullying, safety perceptions, belonging, and well-being cannot be definitively established. Students who feel worse emotionally may, for example, be more inclined to interpret ambiguous peer behavior as bullying or to rate their school climate more negatively. Moreover, PISA captures students’ perceptions rather than objectively verified incidents, and perceptions can diverge from documented events. Longitudinal designs and multi-informant measures would help clarify these dynamics, and future research building on this framework could track how school-climate perceptions and victimization experiences unfold together over the course of adolescence.

Subject of Research: Bullying victimization and school climate in relation to adolescent emotional well-being

Article Title: When school feels unsafe: bullying victimization, school climate, and adolescent emotional well-being

Article References: Aziku, M. (2026). When school feels unsafe: bullying victimization, school climate, and adolescent emotional well-being. Frontiers in Public Health, 14, Article 1929270. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1929270

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2026.1929270

Keywords: bullying, victimization, adolescents, emotional well-being, school safety, school belonging, teacher support, school climate, PISA 2022, gender differences, public health, Frontiers in Public Health

The research, led by Amber Sterenborg of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam together with colleagues from the Amsterdam Movement Sciences Research Institute, KU Leuven, the Dutch Ministry of Health, and the Public Health Service Amsterdam, used data from the dynamic Sarphati Cohort. This ongoing study collects repeated measurements from residents of Amsterdam, allowing scientists to follow the same individuals across major life and societal transitions. For this analysis, the team included 4,319 parents whose first measurement occurred before or during the pandemic, with all measurements restricted to periods when their children were between zero and three years old. Data collection spanned from October 2019 to January 2025, covering the pre-pandemic baseline, multiple pandemic phases including two lockdowns, and the post-pandemic years through 2024 and 2025.

What makes this study methodologically powerful is its use of linear mixed models, a statistical framework designed for repeated measurements nested within individuals. Rather than comparing different people at different times, mixed models track within-person change while accounting for the fact that some parents contributed more observations than others. The researchers analyzed 6,595 observations of psychological distress and loneliness, and 9,830 observations of parenting stress, distributed across eleven distinct time periods. They also examined self-reported changes in emotional well-being attributed to the pandemic, using descriptive analysis across 9,228 responses. This design allows the team to distinguish genuine temporal trends from artifacts of who happened to respond at any given moment, a persistent challenge in pandemic-era research.

The headline result concerns psychological distress, which rose significantly during the pandemic. Before COVID-19 arrived, the estimated marginal mean distress score stood at 4.41, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 4.12 to 4.71. During the second lockdown, that figure climbed to 4.83, with a confidence interval of 4.52 to 5.13, a statistically significant increase. Encouragingly, distress declined in 2022 as society reopened, suggesting that the acute phase of the pandemic did take a toll that eased with the restoration of normal life. But the recovery did not last. From 2023 onwards, distress began climbing again, and by 2024 and 2025 it reached an estimated marginal mean of 5.11, with a confidence interval of 4.72 to 5.49. That is higher than at any point during the pandemic itself, a finding the authors describe as evidence of ongoing psychological burden among parents of young children.

Loneliness followed a strikingly different trajectory. It increased significantly during the second lockdown, rising from a pre-pandemic estimated marginal mean of 1.40 to 1.78, and then, unlike distress, it never fully returned to baseline. Even in 2024 and 2025, loneliness remained elevated at 1.64, with a confidence interval of 1.48 to 1.79. This persistence is notable because loneliness is not merely an unpleasant feeling; it is a well-established risk factor for depression, cardiovascular disease, and impaired immune function. For parents of toddlers, who depend heavily on informal support from grandparents, friends, and other caregivers, the social disruption of the pandemic may have severed connections that proved difficult to rebuild, leaving a residue of isolation that outlived the emergency itself.

Parenting stress, the third outcome measured, showed perhaps the most concerning pattern of all. It rose modestly but significantly during the second lockdown, from a pre-pandemic estimated marginal mean of 16.0 to 16.3. But instead of declining after the pandemic ended, parenting stress continued to climb, reaching 17.4 by 2024 and 2025, with a confidence interval of 17.0 to 17.7. This continuous upward trajectory across the entire study period suggests that something fundamental changed in the experience of raising very young children, or that the stresses accumulated during lockdown years compounded rather than dissipated. The researchers measured parenting stress using repeated assessments across the full sample, making this one of the most robust longitudinal pictures of post-pandemic parental strain available to date.

The study also examined what predicted poor mental health during the pandemic itself, testing sociodemographic, family, household, and pandemic-specific factors. Four predictors stood out: financial difficulties, dissatisfaction with living conditions, additional childcare needs, and working from home. Each of these was significantly associated with poorer mental health among parents during the pandemic period. The pattern is coherent and intuitive. Families under financial strain faced the crisis with fewer buffers. Crowded or unsuitable housing made lockdown confinement harder to bear. Children with additional care needs demanded more from parents who simultaneously had to work, often from the same kitchen table. And remote work, while protective against infection, blurred the boundary between professional and parental responsibilities in ways that many families found unsustainable. These findings identify concrete targets for policy: the parents most at risk were those juggling material hardship with intensified caregiving demands.

Self-reported emotional well-being told a consistent story. Parents reported that the pandemic had worsened their emotional well-being most severely during the lockdown periods, when restrictions were tightest and support systems most constrained. This subjective measure aligns with the objective trajectory of distress and loneliness scores, strengthening confidence that the statistical trends reflect real experiences rather than measurement artifacts. The convergence of three distinct mental health indicators, each collected repeatedly across more than five years, makes the overall picture difficult to dismiss as a statistical quirk.

Why does this matter beyond the families directly affected? Parental mental health is one of the strongest known predictors of child development. Parents experiencing high distress, loneliness, or parenting stress are less able to provide the sensitive, responsive caregiving that shapes early brain development, emotional regulation, and attachment security during the critical first three years of life. The authors explicitly call for continued monitoring and support for families with young children, alongside research to identify which subgroups face persistent difficulties and how these challenges affect child development. In other words, the consequences of the pandemic for this generation of children may still be unfolding, transmitted through the mental health of their parents. A cohort of toddlers raised under lockdown conditions, whose parents are now reporting more distress and more parenting stress than ever measured in this study, deserves sustained scientific and policy attention.

The study, funded by ZonMw, the Dutch national health research funder, carries important caveats and strengths worth weighing. Its population-based design and dynamic cohort structure reduce the selection bias that plagued many pandemic studies, which often relied on convenience samples of highly motivated online respondents. Restricting analyses to parents of children aged zero to three keeps the comparison group meaningful, since parental stress naturally varies with child age. Yet the modest effect sizes, visible in the relatively small shifts in estimated marginal means, remind us that population averages can conceal both families in crisis and families who weathered the storm well. The authors themselves emphasize the need to identify which subgroups face persistent difficulties. What the data make unambiguous, however, is the direction of travel: three years after the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency, parents of very young children in Amsterdam are lonelier, more distressed, and more stressed by parenting than they were before COVID-19 ever existed. The pandemic may be over as a public health event, but for these families, its psychological aftermath is still very much alive.

Subject of Research: Long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of parents with young children

Article Title: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health of parents with young children up to three years post-pandemic: a dynamic, population-based cohort study

Article References: Sterenborg, A., Vlemincx, E., van Acht, F., Groot-Sluijsmans, B., Kattevilder, J., Ujcic-Voortman, J. K., Wiegersma, A. M., van Stralen, M. M., & Basten, M. (2026). Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health of parents with young children up to three years post-pandemic: a dynamic, population-based cohort study. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05733-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05733-6

Keywords: parental mental health, COVID-19 pandemic, psychological distress, loneliness, parenting stress, young children, cohort study, Sarphati Cohort, lockdown, emotional well-being, child development, public health

The research team focused on middle childhood, a developmental window roughly spanning the ages of six to twelve, when peer relationships begin to rival family relationships in emotional importance. During this period, children increasingly build reciprocal, intimate friendships that serve as training grounds for empathy, conflict resolution, and social support. The participants in the study had a mean age of 10.4 years, with a standard deviation of 0.48, placing them squarely in this formative stage. At this age, having a mutual best friend is not merely a pleasant feature of school life; it is a developmental resource associated with protection against victimization, better adjustment to school transitions, and lower levels of internalizing problems. Understanding what qualities children bring to these friendships—and how those qualities shape the friendships’ texture—has therefore become a central question in developmental science.

To capture prosocial behavior in its full complexity, the researchers distinguished between altruism and concern for others. Altruism, in this framework, refers to voluntary, action-oriented helping: sharing resources, assisting a classmate in distress, or sacrificing one’s own time for another’s benefit. Concern for others, by contrast, captures the emotional, other-oriented side of prosociality—the empathic worry a child feels when a peer is sad or hurt, and the motivation to relieve that distress. This distinction echoes a broader movement in the field, championed by researchers such as Gustavo Carlo and Kristina Dunfield, to decompose prosocial behavior into subtypes such as helping, sharing, and comforting, each with its own developmental trajectory, motivational profile, and social consequences. Treating kindness as a monolith, the argument goes, obscures the very differences that matter most for prediction and intervention.

Methodologically, the study combined complementary sources of information about children’s social worlds. Altruistic behavior and emotional concern were assessed through self-report questionnaires, allowing children to describe their own tendencies toward helping and empathic worry. Mutual best friendships were identified using peer nominations, a technique in which children name the classmates they consider their best friends; a friendship counts as mutual only when both children name each other. This nomination approach is widely regarded as more objective than self-reported friendship alone, because it anchors the analysis in relationships that both parties recognize. The children who had mutual best friendships then reported on the quality of those friendships using dimensions drawn from established friendship quality measures, including companionship, help, closeness, emotional security, and conflict. Finally, all children completed a standardized measure of loneliness, adapted from the classic loneliness and social dissatisfaction scales developed by Steven Asher and colleagues in the 1980s.

The statistical strategy centered on multiple regression analyses, which allowed the researchers to estimate the unique contribution of altruism and concern for others to each friendship quality dimension and to loneliness, while controlling for the overlap between the two prosocial dimensions. The results were consistent for altruism: children who reported higher levels of altruistic behavior perceived their best friendships as higher in positive qualities across the board. Altruism predicted greater companionship, more help, deeper closeness, and stronger emotional security within the friendship. It also predicted lower levels of loneliness. In other words, the action-oriented helpers in the sample were not only enjoying richer friendships but were also less likely to feel socially isolated, suggesting that altruistic behavior functions as an active ingredient in building and maintaining rewarding peer bonds.

Concern for others told a more complicated story. As expected, emotional concern predicted greater emotional closeness in best friendships, lower levels of conflict, and reduced loneliness. These findings align with a substantial literature linking empathy to smoother conflict resolution and deeper relational intimacy; children who genuinely worry about a friend’s feelings may be better equipped to de-escalate disagreements and to provide the emotional attunement that close friendships require. But the analysis also produced one unexpected result: concern for others predicted lower companionship. Children high in empathic concern, that is, reported spending less time in the shared, activity-based side of friendship—the playing, hanging out, and doing-things-together dimension that companionship captures.

The authors interpret this counterintuitive pattern through the distinct functional roles the two prosocial dimensions may play. Altruism, being behaviorally oriented, may promote active engagement: the child who helps, shares, and steps in is visibly present in the flow of daily peer life, generating opportunities for joint activity and reciprocal support. Concern, being emotionally oriented, may contribute to depth rather than breadth—fostering intimacy and reducing relational strain, but not necessarily driving the frequency of shared activities. A child who feels deeply for others may invest in the emotional quality of a friendship without being the companion who organizes games or initiates playdates. The finding underscores that prosocial behavior is not a single dial that can be turned up uniformly; its dimensions pull friendship quality in partially different directions, and a complete account of children’s social development requires attending to both.

The loneliness findings deserve particular attention given growing concern about loneliness among young people worldwide. Meta-analytic work, including a 2021 synthesis by Tian and colleagues, has tracked trends in loneliness across decades of research on children and adolescents, and recent studies have explored how prosocial behavior relates to loneliness both directly and through social cognition. The present study adds a dimensional twist: both altruism and concern for others were associated with reduced loneliness, but apparently through partly different relational pathways—altruism through broad positive engagement across friendship qualities, and concern through closeness and low conflict. Loneliness in childhood is not simply the absence of peers; it is a subjective discrepancy between desired and achieved social connection. Children who actively help may find themselves more embedded in networks of mutual obligation and goodwill, while children who empathically attune to others may experience their existing relationships as more secure and less fraught.

The study also situates itself within a Greek educational and cultural context, which the authors treat as theoretically relevant rather than incidental. Greece has been described in prior literature as a relatively collectivist cultural setting, where family and in-group ties carry substantial weight, and the country’s prolonged socioeconomic crisis has been linked in epidemiological work to heightened mental health concerns among adolescents. Prior Greek studies, including work by Leontopoulou on altruism in Greek children and by Antonopoulou and colleagues on how primary school children perceive best friendships, provide local grounding for the present findings. Whether the differential effects of altruism and concern generalize across more individualist cultural contexts remains an open empirical question, but the cultural embedding of the study is a reminder that the meaning and expression of kindness are shaped by the social worlds in which children develop.

For practitioners, the implications are concrete. School-based social and emotional learning programs, whose effectiveness was reinforced by Durlak and colleagues’ influential 2011 meta-analysis, often target prosocial behavior as a unitary outcome. The new findings suggest that such programs might benefit from deliberately cultivating both action-oriented helping and empathic concern, since each appears to nourish different aspects of friendship—engagement and support on one hand, emotional depth and harmony on the other. Interventions that prompt acts of kindness, such as the kindness-counts experiments of Layous and colleagues, may boost peer acceptance; pairing those behavioral prompts with empathy training could, on this evidence, address the intimacy and conflict dimensions of friendship that kindness alone may not reach. The authors also caution that self-report measures of prosocial behavior are vulnerable to social desirability bias, a limitation the field has long acknowledged, and they note that the data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request given confidentiality constraints. The study received ethics approval from the Greek Ministry of Education and the Institute of Educational Policy, with written parental consent and child assent. As the authors conclude, conceptualizing prosocial behavior as a multidimensional construct is not an academic nicety—it is essential for understanding how kindness translates into the friendships that shelter children from loneliness.

Subject of Research: The role of altruism and concern for others in children's friendship quality and loneliness during middle childhood

Article Title: Understanding the Role of Prosocial Behavior in Children’s Peer Relationships: Implications for Friendship Quality and Loneliness

Article References: Vairami, M., Aivazidi, M., & Petrogiannis, K. (2025). Understanding the Role of Prosocial Behavior in Children’s Peer Relationships: Implications for Friendship Quality and Loneliness. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00497-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00497-1

Keywords: prosocial behavior, altruism, concern for others, friendship quality, loneliness, middle childhood, peer relationships, peer nominations, social development, emotional well-being, Greece, developmental psychology

The research team, led by Gaoyan Wang and Yuelin Song under the supervision of corresponding author Shumei Zhuang, recruited 415 dyads, each consisting of a patient with advanced lung cancer and their spousal caregiver, from four tertiary hospitals across China. Rather than treating coping and quality of life as isolated variables measured separately in patients and caregivers, the investigators applied a technique known as network analysis, which maps the statistical relationships among many individual components simultaneously and reveals which nodes sit at the heart of the system.

Network analysis has gained considerable traction in psychological science over the past decade. Instead of assuming that an underlying latent cause produces observable symptoms, the network approach treats psychological constructs as systems of mutually interacting elements. In this framework, some nodes become central because they are strongly connected to many others, meaning that changes in those nodes can propagate through the entire system. Bridge nodes, meanwhile, are components that connect otherwise distinct communities, in this case the community of dyadic coping behaviors and the community of quality of life dimensions. Identifying these bridges matters because they represent the pathways through which interventions in one domain might ripple into another.

To build the network, the researchers used well-validated instruments. Patients completed the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Lung questionnaire, which captures physical, social, emotional, and functional well-being alongside lung cancer-specific concerns. Spousal caregivers completed the Quality of Life Family Version, and both partners filled out the Dyadic Coping Inventory, a measure grounded in the systemic-transactional model developed by Guy Bodenmann in the 1990s. That model conceptualizes coping as an inherently interpersonal process: stress experienced by one partner becomes shared stress, and couples can respond with supportive behaviors, delegated coping, common problem-solving, or negative patterns such as hostile and ambivalent responses.

The statistical machinery behind the study relied on the qgraph and networktools packages in R to estimate centrality and bridge centrality, while the bootnet package was used to test the stability and accuracy of the estimated network through bootstrapping procedures. This methodological rigor is important because network estimates can be unstable in smaller samples, and the authors took care to demonstrate that their central and bridge findings were robust to resampling. The multicenter design, spanning four hospitals, also strengthens the generalizability of the findings within the population of older Chinese couples facing advanced disease.

The headline finding is striking: caregivers’ delegated coping emerged as the most prominent negative central node in the entire network, strongly associated with patients’ physical and functional well-being. Delegated coping refers to a pattern in which one partner takes over tasks and responsibilities on behalf of the other, effectively absorbing the stress by doing things for the ill spouse. While this may look like devotion from the outside, the network position of this node suggests that heavy reliance on delegation travels with poorer quality of life outcomes, particularly in the physical and functional domains that matter most to patients with advanced cancer.

By contrast, caregivers’ supportive coping, which involves empathic listening, expressing understanding, and helping the partner reframe stress, acted as a positive central node in the network, associated with more favorable quality of life. The contrast between these two caregiver behaviors is clinically meaningful. Both involve the caregiver actively engaging with the patient’s stress, yet their network signatures point in opposite directions. The implication is that how caregivers engage matters more than whether they engage, and that interventions aimed at building supportive communication skills may be more productive than those that simply encourage caregivers to take on more tasks.

Perhaps the most consequential result concerns the bridge nodes. Patients’ emotional well-being and caregivers’ delegated coping emerged as the key bridges linking the coping community to the quality of life community. In practical terms, this means that emotional well-being in patients is the point of contact through which dyadic coping processes most strongly influence how patients experience their lives, while delegated coping by caregivers is the coping behavior most tightly wired into the quality of life system. Targeting these bridge nodes, the authors argue, offers the most promising leverage for future dyadic interventions, because strengthening or weakening a bridge component can alter the flow of influence between two otherwise separable domains.

The study’s context amplifies its importance. Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, and the burden is especially heavy in China, where recent analyses of the Global Burden of Disease study document a substantial and rising toll of respiratory tract cancers. Older patients with advanced disease face limited treatment options and intense symptom burden, and their spousal caregivers, often elderly themselves, report high levels of caregiving strain and diminished quality of their own lives. Prior systematic reviews of supportive interventions for family caregivers of patients with advanced cancer have found that effective, scalable support remains scarce, making the identification of precise intervention targets all the more valuable.

The authors are careful about the limits of their design. This was a cross-sectional study, capturing a single moment in time, so the network maps associations rather than proven causal pathways. The direction of influence between coping and quality of life cannot be established from these data, and the clinical relevance of the identified central and bridge components, the researchers note, should be evaluated in longitudinal and intervention studies before being translated into practice. Still, the study offers something rare in this literature: a data-driven, system-level map of which specific coping behaviors and well-being dimensions matter most in older couples confronting advanced lung cancer. If future trials confirm that reducing caregivers’ reliance on delegated coping, fostering supportive communication, and protecting patients’ emotional well-being can reshape the network in beneficial ways, the findings could help move couple-based cancer care from broad psychosocial support toward precisely targeted interventions built on the architecture of the stress system itself.

Subject of Research: Dyadic coping and quality of life in older couples facing advanced lung cancer, analyzed with network analysis

Article Title: Dyadic coping and quality of life in older couples with advanced lung cancer: Identifying central and bridge components

Article References: Wang, G., Song, Y., Li, L., Che, X., Hou, K., Jiang, Y., Li, M., Yu, L., & Zhuang, S. (2026). Dyadic coping and quality of life in older couples with advanced lung cancer: Identifying central and bridge components. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1541. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10097-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10097-6

Keywords: dyadic coping, advanced lung cancer, quality of life, spousal caregivers, network analysis, older couples, delegated coping, supportive coping, emotional well-being, bridge centrality, psycho-oncology, China

The study was led by Paicheng Liu of Guangdong Medical University, together with Zili Xu of Zhejiang University’s School of Public Health, Yunying Zhu and Sisi Li of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, and colleagues. Drawing on data from 608 adults aged 60 and above in Qiantang District, Zhejiang Province, the team set out to test a deceptively simple hypothesis: that older people with higher well-being are more likely to engage with community- and home-based care, or CHBC, a service model that China has championed as a middle path between traditional family caregiving and institutional care.

What makes the study distinctive is its dual conception of well-being, rooted in decades of psychological theory. Hedonic well-being refers to pleasure, positive emotion, and life satisfaction—the classical philosophical pursuit of happiness—while eudaimonic well-being captures purpose, meaning, psychological functioning, and social contribution, tracing back to Aristotle’s notion of the good life. The researchers measured both dimensions using the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form, a validated instrument developed by Corey Keyes that assesses emotional, social, and psychological well-being along a continuum from languishing to flourishing. Rather than treating well-being as a single undifferentiated feeling, the analysis disentangled these strands and asked which of them actually predict care use.

The methodological design was equally careful. Participants were recruited through stratified random sampling, ensuring the sample reflected the older population of the district. CHBC utilization was measured along two axes: the frequency of service use and the variety of service types consumed, capturing both intensity and breadth of engagement. To analyze the data, the team employed descriptive statistics, linear regression, and—critically—propensity score matching, a statistical technique that helps control for confounding variables by comparing service users and non-users with otherwise similar characteristics. This allowed the authors to estimate the association of well-being with care utilization more rigorously than a naive correlation would permit.

The headline finding was clear: higher overall well-being scores were significantly associated with greater CHBC utilization, with a p-value of .019. When the researchers broke well-being into its components, two dimensions stood out. Emotional well-being, the hedonic component encompassing positive feelings and satisfaction with life, showed an even stronger association with service use (p = .007). Social well-being—encompassing a sense of belonging, social acceptance, and integration into one’s community—was also positively associated with utilization (p = .017). In other words, elders who feel good emotionally and feel connected socially are more likely to take advantage of the care services available to them.

Perhaps the most nuanced finding concerns the moderating role of social context. The associations between well-being dimensions and the use of specific service types differed according to marital status and living arrangements. Among married individuals and those who resided with others, higher well-being was linked to greater service utilization. This pattern suggests that well-being does not operate in a vacuum: its effect on care-seeking appears to be channeled through the social networks that surround an older adult. A spouse or co-residing family member may act as an information conduit, an encourager, or a logistical enabler, amplifying the tendency of a flourishing elder to engage with community services. Conversely, elders who are unmarried or living alone may face barriers that dampen even positive well-being into actual service use.

The implications of this finding ripple outward to a society undergoing one of the fastest demographic transitions in history. Research cited by the authors indicates that China’s population is aging at a faster pace than Japan’s over the coming decades, straining both family-based care traditions and the institutional care system. Confucian norms of filial piety have long made family caregiving the default expectation, yet shrinking family sizes, urban migration, and the rise of empty-nest households have eroded that foundation. CHBC has emerged as the policy response—an approach that delivers medical, personal, and social support while allowing elders to remain in their own homes and communities. Despite its demonstrated benefits, including reduced disability and promotion of aging in place documented in international studies, uptake in China has remained stubbornly low.

By identifying well-being as a significant correlate of utilization, the study reframes the problem. Previous frameworks, such as Andersen’s behavioral model of health services use, emphasized predisposing factors, enabling resources, and need. The new findings add psychological flourishing to that calculus: an elder’s emotional and social state influences whether services are sought even when they exist and are affordable. The mechanistic logic is plausible. Positive emotions broaden an individual’s thought-action repertoires and build personal resources, as psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s work suggests, while purpose and social integration foster the self-efficacy needed to navigate service systems. Elders languishing emotionally or socially may lack the motivation, energy, or informational pathways to seek help, even when help is available.

The policy prescription that follows is both simple and profound. Rather than focusing solely on expanding service supply or lowering costs, the authors argue that policymakers should target older adults with low well-being and limited social networks—precisely the groups least likely to use services and most vulnerable to care gaps. Practical interventions could include integrating well-being screening into community health assessments, pairing isolated elders with peer navigators, and designing outreach programs that leverage spouse and co-resident networks to normalize and facilitate service uptake. In doing so, China’s care system would treat emotional and social flourishing not as a luxury for later, but as a precondition for the success of the entire care model.

The research also carries a caution about equity. If flourishing elders use services while languishing ones do not, existing disparities in care access could widen: those most in need may be the least likely to receive help. The study’s finding that the well-being effect operates differently across marital status and living arrangements offers a map of where such disparities concentrate. As aging societies worldwide grapple with sustainable long-term care, the Chinese evidence adds a new dimension to the global conversation: the psychology of happiness and meaning may be as consequential for elder care as economics or infrastructure. In the contest between hedonism and eudemonism, the victor appears to be older adults themselves—provided societies recognize that well-being is not the reward of good care, but, in part, the road to it.

Subject of Research: The role of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in community- and home-based care utilization among older adults in China

Article Title: Hedonism and eudemonism: the role of well-being in community- and home-based care utilization among older adults in China

Article References: Liu, P., Xu, Z., Zhu, Y., & Li, S. (2026). Hedonism and eudemonism: the role of well-being in community- and home-based care utilization among older adults in China. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1483. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10037-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10037-4

Keywords: well-being, hedonism, eudaimonism, community-based care, home-based care, older adults, China, aging, social networks, care utilization, emotional well-being, Current Psychology

The research, conducted by Jeenkyoung Lee of the University of Missouri and published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, drew on the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative biennial panel of U.S. adults aged 50 and older. The analytical sample included 7,217 older adults with an average age of 73.57, about 62 percent of whom were women. Relationship quality was assessed at four time points spanning 2006/2008 through 2018/2020, using questionnaires that captured both positive dimensions of the parent-child bond, such as feeling understood and being able to rely on children, and negative dimensions, including criticism, excessive demands, and being let down when counting on them.

Technically, the study employed growth mixture modeling, a statistical approach that does not assume all people follow the same developmental path. Instead, it searches for hidden subgroups within the population whose trajectories of change differ qualitatively. For both positive and negative relationship quality, the analysis identified five distinct trajectory groups: high-stable, moderate, increasing, decreasing, and low-stable. The vast majority of older parents, 69 percent, belonged to the high-stable positive relationship group, while 62 percent sat in the low-stable negative group, confirming that most aging parents enjoy warm, low-conflict ties with their children. Yet meaningful minorities occupied less comfortable positions, including a small but notable 3 percent whose negative relationship quality climbed sharply from a low starting point over the 16-year window.

The theoretical scaffolding for the work combines the interpersonal mechanisms model with the life course perspective. The former, rooted in attachment theory, proposes that support, intimacy, and hostility in close relationships shape long-term well-being through emotional regulation, stress physiology, and behavioral pathways. The latter emphasizes the principle of linked lives, the idea that human destinies unfold interdependently within family networks, and the concept of accumulated effects, whereby sustained exposure to stress or support compounds gradually over decades. From this vantage point, a single snapshot of family harmony or discord tells only part of the story; it is the enduring pattern, whether stable, improving, or deteriorating, that may matter most for health.

When the researchers linked trajectory group membership to cognitive function, measured with the modified Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status, a 27-point screening battery covering word recall, serial subtraction, and backward counting, a clear asymmetry emerged. Only the negative relationship trajectories predicted cognition. Older parents in the increasing negative relationship group had significantly poorer cognitive function, whereas those in the low-stable negative group showed significantly better function. Intriguingly, the high-stable negative group, whose members reported persistently elevated conflict, was not significantly worse off, suggesting that it is the worsening of a relationship, rather than its chronic strain alone, that signals cognitive risk. This pattern aligns with the emergent distress model, which holds that rising negativity over time is particularly corrosive because it reflects growing relational breakdown rather than a settled, if unhappy, equilibrium.

The positive relationship trajectories, by contrast, showed no significant associations with cognitive function on their own. The authors offer several explanations. Global evaluations of the parent-child bond may not capture the kinds of stimulating interactions that, from a social neuroscience perspective, engage neural circuits and trigger the release of neurochemicals such as oxytocin and dopamine, which have been linked to cognitive benefit. There is also the intergenerational stake hypothesis to consider: older parents tend to evaluate their relationships with children favorably, which compresses variability in positive ratings and may blunt their statistical association with health outcomes. Notably, however, a joint-effect analysis revealed that parents who combined consistently high positive relationship quality with consistently low negative quality, the best of both worlds, exhibited better cognitive function than would be expected from either dimension alone.

Perhaps the most surprising finding concerned gender. Prior literature has often portrayed mothers as the family’s kin-keepers, more emotionally invested in children and more vulnerable to relational stress, with some earlier studies finding that parent-child strain took a heavier toll on mothers’ psychological well-being. Given this backdrop, the study hypothesized that relationship trajectories would matter more for mothers’ cognition. Instead, multiple-group structural equation models, in which the paths from trajectory membership to cognition were first constrained and then freed to differ by gender, showed no significant differences between mothers and fathers. Chi-square difference tests and Wald tests were uniformly non-significant across the positive, negative, and joint-effect models. Long-term patterns of parent-child relationship quality, particularly the negative ones, appear to carry comparable weight for the cognitive health of aging men and women.

The study controlled extensively for potential confounders, including age, race, ethnicity, education, household wealth, marital status, urban versus rural residence, self-rated health, difficulties with activities of daily living, total number of children, and baseline cognitive function. Even after these adjustments, the associations between negative relationship trajectories and cognition held. Sensitivity analyses by study entry cohort and by the extent of missing data produced no meaningful changes in the results, strengthening confidence in the findings, though the authors caution that selective participation and attrition remain unavoidable challenges in longitudinal aging research.

Several limitations temper the conclusions. The relationship measures aggregated parents’ perceptions across all their children, potentially diluting the influence of particularly close or particularly fraught individual bonds; geographic proximity, which is restricted in the Health and Retirement Study data, could not be examined. The four-year intervals between assessments may have missed shorter-term fluctuations, and the cognitive screening tool provides only a global measure rather than domain-specific performance or biological markers such as brain imaging. The pooling of two entry cohorts also meant that the final assessment for later participants coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, a period with documented cognitive effects, although sensitivity analyses found no cohort-related differences in the main results.

Even with these caveats, the implications are substantial. As populations age and cognitive impairment places mounting pressure on families and health systems, the findings point to an underappreciated lever: the emotional quality of intergenerational ties. Because it was the deterioration of relationships, not merely their chronic negativity, that tracked with poorer cognition, the results suggest that shifts toward conflict in a parent-child bond may serve as an early warning sign worth monitoring. The author argues for relationship-based interventions and public health initiatives that look beyond the marital dyad to encompass the enduring influence of adult children on their aging parents’ minds. In a demographic landscape where adult children increasingly serve as primary caregivers, keeping those relationships from souring may be not just a matter of family harmony, but a component of cognitive protection in late life.

Subject of Research: Long-term trajectories of parent-child relationship quality and their association with cognitive function in older adults

Article Title: Trajectories of Parent-Child Relationship Quality and Cognitive Function among Older Adults: Differences between Mothers and Fathers

Article References: Lee, J. (2026). Trajectories of Parent-Child Relationship Quality and Cognitive Function among Older Adults: Differences between Mothers and Fathers. Applied Research in Quality of Life. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-026-10670-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11482-026-10670-y

Keywords: cognitive function, parent-child relationship quality, older adults, aging, Health and Retirement Study, growth mixture modeling, intergenerational relationships, mothers and fathers, life course perspective, relational stress, structural equation modeling, cognitive decline