The research team, led by Federica Papa and Francesca Cuzzocrea of the University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro, together with Rosalba Larcan and Francesca Liga of the University of Messina, set out to untangle a question that has long interested environmental psychologists: why do some adolescents come to see themselves as stewards of the marine environment while others, raised in the same coastal communities and exposed to the same media messages, do not? The answer they propose involves two interacting forces, one relational and one motivational. The relational force is parent-child civic communication, the everyday exchange between parents and teenagers about social issues, community problems, and the responsibilities citizens have to one another and to shared resources. The motivational force is the orientation of a young person’s life goals, specifically whether those goals are intrinsic or extrinsic in character.

The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goals comes from decades of motivation research. Intrinsic goals are those centered on personal growth, meaningful relationships, community contribution, and self-acceptance, aims that are satisfying in themselves. Extrinsic goals, by contrast, center on external markers such as wealth, fame, and physical image, aims whose value depends largely on the approval of others. Previous work in self-determination theory has shown that people who prioritize intrinsic aspirations tend to report greater well-being and, relevantly here, stronger pro-environmental and prosocial attitudes. The Italian team hypothesized that this motivational orientation might be a key bridge between what happens inside the family and how adolescents behave toward the marine environment.

To test these ideas, the researchers recruited 277 adolescents aged between 11 and 17 years, with a mean age of 13.75 years and a standard deviation of 1.76. Participants completed self-report questionnaires measuring three constructs: the quality of civic communication they experienced with their parents, the relative priority they placed on intrinsic versus extrinsic life goals, and their sense of environmental responsibility toward the sea. The sample spans early and middle adolescence, a developmental window in which identity, values, and long-term aspirations are actively under construction, and in which parental influence competes with peers, schools, and digital media for a young person’s attention.

Analytically, the study employed structural equation modeling, a statistical framework that allows researchers to test whether a network of hypothesized relationships among variables fits the observed data. Rather than examining each pair of variables in isolation, structural equation modeling evaluates an entire theoretical pathway simultaneously, here the proposed chain running from family communication through life goal orientation to marine environmental responsibility. This approach also makes it possible to estimate indirect effects, situations in which one variable influences another only by way of an intermediate variable, which was central to the team’s hypothesis about intrinsic goals serving as a motivational bridge.

The results supported the core predictions. Parent-child civic communication was positively associated with intrinsic life goals, meaning that adolescents who reported richer civic conversations with their parents also tended to prioritize growth, community contribution, and relational aims. Notably, no significant association emerged between civic communication and extrinsic goals, suggesting that family dialogue about civic matters specifically nourishes intrinsic aspirations rather than shifting motivation across the board. In turn, intrinsic life goals were positively associated with marine environmental responsibility, while extrinsic goals showed no significant relationship with that outcome. Money, image, and status, in other words, did not predict a sense of obligation toward the ocean; self-transcending and growth-oriented aims did.

Perhaps the most consequential finding was the indirect pathway. The modeling revealed an indirect association between parent-child civic communication and marine environmental responsibility operating through intrinsic life goals. In practical terms, this means that family conversations about civic life appear to matter for ocean stewardship not because parents lecture their children about plastic pollution or overfishing, but because such conversations seem to cultivate a broader motivational posture, one oriented toward contribution and connectedness, from which environmental responsibility toward the sea follows as a natural expression. The sea, in this framework, is not the explicit subject of the formative dialogue; it is the beneficiary of the values that dialogue instills.

The authors frame these findings as a contribution to understanding the psychological and relational processes associated with adolescents’ engagement in environmental sustainability and marine conservation. That framing matters because marine ecosystems face mounting pressure from pollution, warming, and overexploitation, and because behavior change campaigns aimed at young people often assume that information alone drives action. This study points instead to a motivational and relational architecture: if the goal is to raise adolescents who feel responsible for the ocean, interventions may be more effective when they strengthen the quality of civic dialogue within families and nurture intrinsic aspirations, rather than relying solely on delivering facts about marine degradation. Schools, environmental organizations, and public agencies could, in principle, design programs that equip parents with the tools and prompts for these conversations, treating the family as an underused site of environmental education.

The study also carries methodological and interpretive caveats worth noting. The data are cross-sectional and self-reported, drawn from a single set of questionnaires completed at one point in time, so the modeled pathways represent associations consistent with the proposed theory rather than demonstrated causal effects. It remains possible, for example, that adolescents who already feel responsible toward the sea elicit more civic conversation from their parents, or that unmeasured factors, such as direct experiences with coastal environments, shape both dialogue and responsibility. The sample of 277 Italian adolescents, while adequate for the modeling approach used, also leaves open questions about how these dynamics operate in other cultural contexts, where family communication norms and the cultural salience of the sea may differ considerably.

Even with those limits, the research adds a distinctive piece to a growing picture of environmental development in adolescence. It suggests that the seeds of ocean stewardship are planted in ordinary family life, watered by conversations about what it means to be a citizen, and expressed through the intrinsic goals young people come to hold for themselves. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Center for Psychological Research and Intervention at the University of Messina, conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and the ethical guidelines of the Italian Association of Psychology, and carried out with informed consent from all participants and their parents or legal guardians. As marine conservation increasingly looks to the next generation, the message of this work is quietly radical: the path to a more responsible relationship with the sea may begin not on the shoreline but at home, one civic conversation at a time.

Subject of Research: The role of parent-child civic communication and intrinsic versus extrinsic life goals in adolescents' environmental responsibility toward the sea

Article Title: Adolescents’ environmental responsibility toward the sea: the role of parent-child civic communication and life goals

Article References: Papa, F., Cuzzocrea, F., Larcan, R., & Liga, F. (2026). Adolescents’ environmental responsibility toward the sea: the role of parent-child civic communication and life goals. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-08945-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-08945-8

Keywords: adolescence, environmental responsibility, marine conservation, parent-child communication, civic engagement, intrinsic goals, extrinsic goals, life goals, structural equation modeling, self-determination theory, family communication, environmental psychology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09923-8

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

Advance care planning, often abbreviated as ACP, is a technical term for something deceptively simple: helping people articulate, while they still can, what kind of treatment they would want if they became unable to speak for themselves. It encompasses naming a surrogate decision-maker, documenting preferences about life-sustaining interventions, and discussing these wishes with clinicians and loved ones. In Western health systems, ACP has been promoted for decades as a way to align care with patient values, reduce unwanted intensive interventions, and ease the burden on families forced to guess at a relative’s wishes. In China, however, the practice has faced distinctive headwinds. Traditional beliefs hold that discussing death openly can bring misfortune, and medical decisions are frequently made by families rather than disclosed fully to patients, particularly when a diagnosis is considered serious.

The research team, led by Yujie Wu of Xi’an Siyuan University together with colleagues at Harbin Medical University and City University of Hong Kong, set out to address a gap in the evidence. Previous studies of ACP acceptance in China had largely concentrated on specific populations, such as patients with cancer or chronic illness, or had examined individual family characteristics in isolation. What remained unclear was the combined contribution of multiple family-related contexts, including family structure, family health, family communication, and the family’s social standing in the community, to ACP acceptance among the general older population. The new survey was designed to capture that broader picture using a multi-stage sampling method that reached older adults across the country’s regions between June and August 2022.

The scale of the data collection is notable. Respondents aged 60 and above were recruited from across mainland China, and self-reported acceptance of ACP was measured with a single-item visual analogue scale, a technique in which participants rate their acceptance on a continuous scale rather than choosing from fixed categories. The mean score came in at 62.78 with a standard deviation of 24.59, suggesting that, on average, older Chinese adults lean toward acceptance but with enormous variability from person to person. That spread is itself a finding: acceptance of end-of-life planning is far from uniform, and understanding what accompanies high versus low acceptance is the central analytical task of the study.

To identify the factors associated with acceptance, the researchers used stepwise linear regression, an exploratory statistical approach in which variables are added or removed from a model according to whether they improve its explanatory power. The team examined a wide array of characteristics, including chronic disease status, region of residence, household composition, sibling count, experience of injury events, attitudes toward death education, neighbor relationships, family social status, family health, family communication, and household finances. Family health and family communication were measured with validated instruments, the Family Health Scale-Short Form and the Family Communication Scale-10, giving the analysis technical grounding beyond simple self-reports.

The adjusted results reveal a striking pattern of negative associations. Older adults with chronic disease, those living in Western China, those in nuclear families, and those with siblings reported lower acceptance of ACP. The chronic disease association may seem counterintuitive at first glance, since one might expect people managing long-term illness to be more receptive to planning ahead. Yet the finding resonates with qualitative research suggesting that in the Chinese cultural context, families sometimes shield relatives with serious illness from information about their condition, and patients themselves may avoid conversations that could be read as giving up. Living in a nuclear family rather than an extended household was also linked to lower acceptance, hinting that the presence of a wider web of relatives may create more occasions for end-of-life discussions to surface naturally.

On the positive side of the ledger, several characteristics were associated with higher acceptance. Older adults who had experienced injury events, who supported death education more strongly, who reported better neighbor relationships, who perceived higher family social status, who described better family health and better family communication, and who had household debts all reported greater acceptance of ACP. Some of these associations invite careful interpretation. The link between injury events and acceptance could reflect a salience effect, in which a brush with harm makes future vulnerability concrete and motivates planning. The debt association is more puzzling but may connect to financial realism: people who have confronted economic precarity may be more attuned to the costs of uncontrolled end-of-life care and more willing to think ahead about what they would and would not want.

Perhaps the most technically important result concerns the incremental contribution of the family-related factors themselves. When the researchers added family context variables to the model, the explained variance increased by 5.2 percent. That figure is meaningful but modest, and the standardized coefficients for most family-related variables were small. The authors are explicit about what this does and does not mean. Family context appears to be one component of a broader set of factors related to ACP acceptance, not the dominant force. Individual attitudes, cultural beliefs, health system exposure, and other unmeasured characteristics likely account for the larger share of the variability in acceptance. The study also cannot establish determinants or causal effects, since a cross-sectional survey captures associations at a single point in time and cannot demonstrate that family characteristics cause changes in acceptance, nor can it show the feasibility or effectiveness of family-centered ACP interventions.

The regional finding, that older adults in Western China reported lower acceptance than those elsewhere, adds a geographic dimension to the analysis. Western China encompasses provinces with lower average incomes, thinner health infrastructure, and populations that include many rural and ethnic minority communities. Differences in health literacy, access to palliative care services, and exposure to discussions about end-of-life options could all contribute to the gap. If ACP is to be promoted nationally, the results suggest that a one-size-fits-all campaign may miss the mark, and that regionally tailored approaches, sensitive to local economic conditions and family norms, may be needed.

For clinicians, policymakers, and families, the survey carries a practical message wrapped in an honest caveat. The associations identified here, from family communication to neighbor relationships to household structure, offer concrete entry points for interventions that hope to normalize end-of-life conversations. Programs that strengthen family communication skills, integrate death education into community health services, and engage the wider social network around older adults may find more traction than efforts aimed at individuals alone. At the same time, the modest 5.2 percent increase in explained variance warns against overpromising: changing acceptance of advance care planning will likely require attention to the full ecosystem of factors surrounding older adults, not family dynamics in isolation. As China’s population ages at one of the fastest rates in the world, the question of how families and health systems together prepare for the end of life is becoming impossible to defer, and studies like this one provide the empirical map from which that preparation must be drawn.

Subject of Research: Health Services Research

Article Title: Family-related factors associated with acceptance of advance care planning among older adults in China: a nationwide cross-sectional survey

Article References: Wu, Y., Liang, C., Li, C., Yue, F., Sun, X., Wu, S., Liu, Y., Yu, Z., & He, M. (2026). Family-related factors associated with acceptance of advance care planning among older adults in China: a nationwide cross-sectional survey. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15416-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15416-y

Keywords: advance care planning, older adults, China, family communication, palliative care, end-of-life care, cross-sectional survey, gerontology, Family-related, factors, associated, acceptance

The authors frame their inquiry against a sobering backdrop: attempted and completed suicide is described as rising both in South Africa and globally. Much of the existing scholarship and clinical effort, they note, has concentrated on identifying the causes of suicidal behavior and on the treatment and rehabilitation of the person who attempted suicide. Families, by contrast, have received what the researchers call peripheral attention. That imbalance matters because families are not passive bystanders. They are the immediate care environment, the first line of monitoring, and often the only continuous support available once formal treatment ends. If the family system is destabilized, the recovery environment for the patient is destabilized with it.

To investigate what families actually experience, the researchers adopted a qualitative approach operating within the phenomenological tradition. Phenomenology is a design built to capture lived experience in its own terms: rather than testing hypotheses about variables, it asks what a phenomenon feels like from the inside and what meanings people attach to it. In this study, that meant asking families to describe, in their own words, what life has been like since the suicide attempt. The design is well suited to an underexplored topic, because it allows the researchers to surface categories of difficulty that pre-existing checklists and diagnostic instruments might never have anticipated.

The sampling strategy was purposive, meaning participants were deliberately chosen for their direct relevance to the research question rather than at random. Five families living with persons who had attempted suicide were recruited, alongside ten social workers who encounter these situations professionally. The inclusion of both groups is methodologically significant. Families provide the experiential account of the aftermath, while social workers provide the service-delivery perspective, revealing what support is currently offered, what is asked of families, and where the system falls short. Triangulating these two vantage points allows the study to compare what families need with what the profession actually provides.

Data collection relied on semi-structured interviews, a technique that combines a prepared interview guide with the freedom to probe unexpected themes as they emerge. This flexibility is crucial in sensitive research: a rigid questionnaire might miss the moment when a participant reveals, unprompted, that they no longer know how to speak to their own child. The interview transcripts were then analyzed using Thematic Content Analysis, a systematic procedure in which researchers code the data, group codes into candidate themes, and refine those themes until they form a coherent map of the participants’ experiences. The result is a set of interlocking challenges that describe the family’s condition after a suicide attempt.

The first and most consequential finding concerns psychological destabilization. Families reported that the aftermath of the attempt undermined their psychological well-being, a formulation that captures the persistent anxiety, hypervigilance, and emotional exhaustion that come with living alongside someone who has previously tried to end their life. In clinical terms, the suicide attempt functions as a traumatic event not only for the attempter but for the entire household, producing a state in which ordinary family life is reorganized around the possibility of another attempt. The study’s contribution is to document this destabilization from the family’s own perspective, within the South African context, where such documentation has been scarce.

The second finding concerns communication. Families described how the aftermath of the attempt damaged their patterns of interaction, leaving them struggling to hold meaningful conversations with the person who had attempted suicide. This is a subtle but profound disruption. Communication is the mechanism through which families monitor risk, express care, and negotiate the practical business of daily life. When meaningful dialogue collapses, relatives may avoid mentioning the attempt for fear of triggering another crisis, while the attempter may interpret the silence as stigma or rejection. The household becomes caught in a loop of careful, guarded exchanges that satisfy no one and protect no one, a dynamic the study identifies as a core challenge requiring professional attention.

Perhaps the most striking finding is structural: the researchers found no dedicated social work services for families of suicide attempters. The irony the study exposes is sharp. Families were, in practice, drawn into the professional process, asked to share detailed information about the family setting so that the social worker could better understand the patient. In other words, the family was treated as a source of clinical data about someone else, while receiving no parallel service addressing its own needs. The family’s knowledge was extracted; the family’s distress was not treated. This asymmetry reveals a gap in the architecture of aftercare, one that the authors argue is both unnecessary and fixable.

The social workers themselves did not dispute the gap. According to the study, they acknowledged the situation and committed to providing aftercare services to help families navigate the aftermath of an attempted suicide. That commitment, the authors suggest, is the seed of a reimagined professional scope. Rather than treating the suicide attempter as an isolated clinical case, social work could adopt holistic interventions that include both the patient and the family as legitimate service recipients. Concretely, that would mean family-focused counseling to repair communication patterns, psychosocial support to address the household’s psychological destabilization, and structured aftercare that continues after the acute crisis has passed. The findings, the authors write, are fundamental in assisting social workers to rethink the scope of their services in exactly this direction.

The study carries implications well beyond the five households it examined. Globally, suicide prevention strategies increasingly recognize that families are both protective resources and hidden casualties, yet service systems in many countries, including South Africa, still route support almost exclusively to the individual patient. By documenting the family’s experience through a rigorous phenomenological lens and by naming the absence of dedicated services, Ngoveni and Sekudu provide the evidentiary basis for policy and practice change. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa, in accordance with guidelines set by the National Health Research Ethics Council, and obtained written and verbal informed consent from participants, an important marker of rigor in research on such a sensitive topic. The authors declare no funding was received for the work and report no competing interests. What remains is the challenge the study poses to the profession: a family that has lived through a suicide attempt is not merely a context for someone else’s treatment. It is a unit of care in its own right, and until social work services are designed for it, the aftermath of every attempt will continue to ripple through South African homes largely unaddressed.

Subject of Research: Challenges faced by families of suicide attempt survivors and the role of social work intervention in South Africa

Article Title: Challenges faced by families living with persons who have attempted suicide and the need for social work intervention in South Africa

Article References: Ngoveni, S., & Sekudu, J. (2026). Challenges faced by families living with persons who have attempted suicide and the need for social work intervention in South Africa. Discover Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-026-00601-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44192-026-00601-6

Keywords: attempted suicide, families, social work, South Africa, mental health, aftercare services, psychological well-being, family communication, qualitative research, phenomenology, holistic intervention, suicide prevention

The study was led by Jean-François Bureau of the University of Ottawa’s School of Psychology, together with Ariane J. Gauthier and Audrey-Ann Deneault of the Université de Montréal and a team of collaborators including Nicole Racine and Steve Lorteau. The team recruited 52 French-Canadian parent-adolescent pairs and asked each member of the pair to report on their own experiences. Parents answered questions about how recently they had discussed climate change with their child, what role they believed they should play in supporting their adolescent, what barriers stood in the way of those conversations, and their own levels of climate distress and worry. Adolescents, meanwhile, reported on their climate anxiety, climate distress, the coping strategies they used, and how often they engaged in pro-environmental behaviors such as conserving energy, reducing waste, or participating in environmental activities.

Because the sample was small, the researchers turned to Bayesian generalized linear models, a statistical framework that estimates the probability that an effect is real rather than relying solely on traditional significance thresholds. Bayesian methods are particularly useful in pilot studies because they can quantify evidence even when the number of participants limits statistical power, and they allow researchers to express findings as degrees of belief updated by the data. Using this approach, the team tested whether each parent-reported feature of climate communication predicted adolescent outcomes while accounting for the clustered structure of the dyadic data.

The clearest signal involved timing. Adolescents whose parents reported discussing climate change with them within the past month engaged in more frequent pro-environmental behaviors than adolescents whose parents had last raised the topic less recently. In other words, the recency of family climate conversations, not merely whether such conversations had ever happened, tracked with whether teenagers were actually doing things that benefit the environment. This finding aligns with a broader literature suggesting that family communication is one pathway through which environmental concern is transmitted across generations, and it echoes prior work showing that adolescents who talk about climate change with parents and friends are more likely to support climate policies and report climate worry that motivates engagement.

Just as revealing were the findings about the roles parents believe they should occupy. Parents who endorsed a more inspirational communication style, framing their role as one of motivating and uplifting their adolescent rather than simply informing or warning, had teenagers who reported greater meaning-focused coping. Meaning-focused coping is a construct drawn from the climate psychology literature, particularly the work of Maria Ojala, in which young people manage distress by reinterpreting the problem through lenses of hope, purpose, and positive engagement rather than through denial or sheer emotional suppression. Previous studies have linked meaning-focused coping to sustained environmental engagement and better subjective well-being, making the association between an inspirational parental stance and this coping style one of the most practically encouraging results in the study.

Not all barriers to conversation were benign. When parents identified their child’s lack of interest as the main obstacle to discussing climate change, their adolescents showed reduced climate anxiety and tended to use coping strategies that downplayed the severity of the issue. The researchers interpret this pattern cautiously: low anxiety paired with minimization could reflect genuine resilience, but it could equally signal disengagement, in which a teenager protects themselves from an uncomfortable topic by treating it as irrelevant. Distinguishing between healthy emotional regulation and avoidance is a central challenge in the eco-anxiety literature, and this finding suggests that a parent’s perception of adolescent indifference may be a marker worth attending to rather than a reason to drop the subject entirely.

The study also documented an emotional spillover effect within parents themselves. Parents who reported that their own climate-related emotional responses constituted a barrier to talking with their adolescent also reported greater climate worry and distress. This is a technically important observation because it implies that the obstacles to family climate communication are not only informational, such as not knowing the science, but affective, rooted in the parent’s own unprocessed feelings. A parent who feels overwhelmed by climate news may avoid the topic at home, inadvertently leaving their teenager to navigate climate emotions alone. Prior research on climate silence has found that people frequently avoid discussing global warming even with close family and friends, and the new findings suggest that this silence may have developmental consequences within households.

The theoretical scaffolding of the study draws on several well-established frameworks. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of human development situates the family as the microsystem most proximal to the adolescent, the environment in which climate attitudes are first rehearsed. Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior and Bandura’s social cognitive theory both predict that observed and discussed behavior shapes intention and agency, mechanisms that plausibly connect frequent family climate talk to the higher rates of pro-environmental behavior observed here. The measurement instruments themselves reflect the field’s recent maturation: adolescent climate anxiety was assessed with validated scales, including French-language adaptations of the Climate Change Anxiety Scale originally developed by Susan Clayton and Bryan Karazsia, and climate worry was measured with instruments validated in prior psychometric work.

The broader context gives these findings urgency. Large international surveys, including the landmark 2021 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health, have documented that climate anxiety is widespread among children and young people across the globe and is intertwined with perceptions that governments are failing to respond. Canadian national surveys have similarly reported elevated climate emotions among youth, and recent meta-analytic work has linked eco-emotions to mental health outcomes in young adults. Against this backdrop, understanding which family dynamics buffer distress while preserving engagement, rather than producing either paralysis or denial, has become a pressing question for developmental and environmental psychologists alike.

The authors are careful to frame the study as a pilot, and the limitations are real. Fifty-two dyads is a modest sample, the design is cross-sectional so causal direction cannot be established, and the participants were French-Canadian families, raising questions about generalizability across cultures and languages. It remains possible, for instance, that adolescents who already behave pro-environmentally prompt more frequent climate conversations with their parents, rather than the conversations driving the behavior. Longitudinal and larger-scale studies will be needed to disentangle these pathways. Still, the study’s data are publicly available on the Open Science Framework, supporting transparency and replication, and the research was funded by the Consortium National de Formation en Santé with ethics approval from the University of Ottawa. The practical takeaway for families is cautiously optimistic: talking about climate change at home, recently and with an orientation toward inspiration rather than alarm, is associated with teenagers who cope more meaningfully and act more concretely, while the emotional barriers parents carry may be as consequential as any knowledge gap.

Subject of Research: Parent-adolescent communication about climate change and its associations with adolescent climate anxiety, coping strategies, and pro-environmental behaviors

Article Title: Parent–adolescent communication about climate change: Associations with climate distress, coping, and pro-environmental behaviors

Article References: Bureau, J.-F., Gauthier, A. J., With, S., Villeneuve, V., Becerra, A. K. E., Hull, S. E., Lorteau, S., Racine, N., & Deneault, A.-A. (2026). Parent–adolescent communication about climate change: Associations with climate distress, coping, and pro-environmental behaviors. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1516. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10019-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10019-6

Keywords: climate change, parent-adolescent communication, climate anxiety, eco-anxiety, coping strategies, pro-environmental behavior, adolescents, environmental psychology, climate distress, family communication, Bayesian analysis, Current Psychology

The study, led by Hamed Nouri of Gonabad University of Medical Sciences together with colleagues from Shahid Beheshti and Gonabad Universities of Medical Sciences, set out to address one of the most persistent problems in institutional elder care. Older adults frequently move into nursing homes because of physical frailty, cognitive decline, or the absence of caregivers able to support them at home. Whatever the reason, the transition almost always involves a degree of separation from the family network that once structured daily life. That severing of ties, the researchers note, can quietly erode mental health, feeding loneliness, hopelessness, and the slow accumulation of depressive symptoms that often go undetected in busy institutional settings.

To test whether routine video calls could counteract this process, the team designed a quasi-experimental study conducted in 2022 across nursing homes in Tabriz, a major city in northwestern Iran. Using cluster sampling, they enrolled 61 older adults and randomly assigned them to two groups. Twenty-nine participants in the intervention group received weekly video calls with their family members for two months, delivered alongside the normal schedule of in-person visits. The remaining 32 participants in the control group continued with routine visits only, receiving no structured video communication. The design allowed the researchers to isolate the specific contribution of the video-call program from the baseline care environment that all residents shared.

The outcome measures were two of the most widely used instruments in geriatric research. Depression was assessed with the Geriatric Depression Scale, a validated screening tool designed specifically for older populations and, in its shortened 15-item form, efficient enough for repeated administration in clinical settings. Perceived social support was measured with the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, or MSPSS, which captures how supported individuals feel across distinct domains, including family, friends, and significant others. Both instruments were administered at baseline and again after the two-month intervention period, and the data were analyzed in SPSS version 26 with statistical significance set at a p value below 0.05.

The results were striking in both magnitude and consistency. After two months, the mean depression score in the intervention group was significantly lower than in the control group, with an effect size of 0.87 and a p value of 0.001. In behavioral research, an effect size approaching 0.9 is considered large, suggesting that the video-call intervention produced a substantial difference rather than a marginal statistical blip. In practical terms, residents who spoke with their families on a screen each week reported meaningfully fewer depressive symptoms than those who relied on routine contact alone.

The intervention also reshaped how supported the residents felt. Perceived social support scores rose significantly in the video-call group relative to controls, with an effect size of 0.67 and a p value of 0.01. This is a moderate-to-large effect, and it points to a plausible psychological mechanism underlying the improvement in mood. Perceived social support, the subjective sense of being cared for and connected to others, is one of the best-established protective factors against depression across the lifespan. By giving residents a reliable, recurring channel of family contact, the intervention appears to have strengthened that psychological buffer, and the mood benefits followed.

The technical simplicity of the intervention is part of its appeal. Unlike complex telemedicine platforms that require specialized equipment, training, and ongoing technical support, the program relied on ordinary video calls, delivered weekly, with the residents’ own family members. The effect was measured over a short period of just two months, meaning the benefits emerged quickly. For nursing home administrators, this suggests that a video-communication program could be introduced with minimal infrastructure and at low cost, layered onto existing visiting arrangements rather than replacing them. The study’s authors conclude that video communication can be used in nursing homes to enhance the short-term well-being of residents.

As with any study, the design carries limitations worth keeping in view. The trial was quasi-experimental rather than a fully randomized controlled trial, which is why the authors report it was not registered in a clinical trials registry. Although participants were randomly assigned to the two groups, cluster sampling within nursing homes introduces the possibility of site-level differences that a larger, multi-center randomized design would better control. The sample of 61 participants is modest, and the two-month follow-up captures short-term effects only; whether the mood benefits persist, accumulate, or fade once the calls stop remains an open question. The findings were also drawn from a specific cultural context in Iran, where family ties and visiting norms may shape both the feasibility and the emotional weight of video contact, so replication in other settings will be important.

The ethical framework of the study was carefully documented. The research received approval from the Ethics Committee of Gonabad University of Medical Sciences under ethics code IR.GMU.REC.1401.039, and written informed consent was obtained from all participants, who were fully informed about the study’s objectives and the research team before taking part. The researchers also completed the necessary permissions and coordination with the directors and management of the nursing homes involved. The work received no specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors, and the authors declare no competing interests.

For a rapidly aging world population, the implications extend well beyond Tabriz. Depression in later life is associated with worse physical health outcomes, higher rates of institutionalization, elevated health care costs, and increased mortality, yet it remains underdiagnosed and undertreated in care facilities. Interventions that are cheap, scalable, and acceptable to older adults are urgently needed. This study suggests that the humble video call, already woven into the daily lives of younger generations, may be one of the most accessible tools available. As families disperse across cities, countries, and continents, scheduled screens may become a standard prescription of modern elder care, bridging the distance that separates aging parents from the children and grandchildren who love them.

Subject of Research: Effect of family video calls on depression and perceived social support in nursing home residents

Article Title: Impact of family video calls on depression and perceived social support among older adults residing in nursing home residents in Tabriz

Article References: Nouri, H., Rajaee, M., BasiriMoghadam, M., & Sadeghmoghadam, L. (2026). Impact of family video calls on depression and perceived social support among older adults residing in nursing home residents in Tabriz. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08282-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08282-0

Keywords: nursing homes, older adults, depression, social support, video calls, telemedicine, geriatrics, mental health, family communication, Iran, Impact, family

The study drew on data from 319 participants aged 65 and older who were enrolled in a community-based health screening program in Japan. This population matters because the overwhelming majority of older people worldwide live at home rather than in institutional care, and their day-to-day well-being hinges on informal networks of relatives, neighbors, and friends. To capture the dynamics of these networks, the team used two validated instruments. Social support was assessed with the Social Support Giving and Receiving Scale for the Elderly at Home, which measures support as a bidirectional phenomenon, acknowledging that older adults are not merely passive recipients of care but active contributors to the people around them. Self-disclosure was evaluated with the Self-Disclosure Questionnaire, a self-assessment tool developed specifically for research with community-dwelling older adults in Japan.

Rather than treating social support as a single continuous score, the researchers employed cluster analysis, a statistical technique that groups individuals according to shared patterns across multiple variables. This approach revealed three distinct profiles of social support among the participants. The first cluster was characterized by low receiving combined with high giving—older adults who actively helped others but received comparatively little in return. The second cluster showed both low receiving and low giving, representing people whose support relationships had thinned out in both directions. The third and largest-profile category comprised participants with balanced or high receiving, whose networks delivered support that met or exceeded what they provided. The existence of these distinct patterns underscores that social support in later life is not a uniform resource but a set of different relational configurations with potentially different consequences for health.

The demographic and functional differences between these clusters proved telling. Participants in the giving-oriented cluster—younger within the study range and marked by higher functional capability and more extensive social networks—were, in effect, the helpers of their communities. Their capacity to provide support reflected physical and social resources that many of their peers no longer possessed. By contrast, individuals in the receiving-oriented cluster tended to be older, with lower functional capability, consistent with the intuitive picture that as physical capacity declines, the balance of support shifts from giving toward receiving. This gradient illustrates a fundamental asymmetry in aging: the same person may move across these clusters over time as health and social circumstances change, and the transition can be abrupt when illness or functional loss strikes.

The centerpiece of the analysis, however, was the relationship between self-disclosure and social support. Using regression models that adjusted for relevant covariates, the researchers found that greater self-disclosure to family members was significantly associated with higher levels of both giving and receiving social support, with the association reaching a p-value below .001—a threshold indicating an extremely low probability that the finding arose by chance. In practical terms, older adults who opened up to their families about their inner lives were embedded in richer, more reciprocal webs of mutual assistance. The finding aligns with long-standing social psychological theory, from Altman and Taylor’s social penetration model, which describes how relationships deepen through progressively more personal disclosure, to exchange-based accounts showing that disclosure tends to be reciprocated, drawing conversation partners into closer, more supportive bonds.

Intriguingly, the pattern changed when the researchers examined disclosure to friends and acquaintances. Here, the association was confined to giving support, reaching statistical significance at p = .023. Older adults who shared more of themselves with friends and broader acquaintances were more likely to give help to others, but this outward-facing openness did not translate into greater receipt of support in return. One interpretation is that friendships in later life, while valuable and often rich in emotional rewards, are structurally different from family bonds. Friends may be similarly aged and similarly capable, and therefore less positioned—or less obligated—to deliver instrumental care when needs arise. Families, by contrast, typically span generations and carry normative expectations of caregiving, so that disclosure within them activates both emotional closeness and practical assistance.

The study’s implications extend to public health and community care policy, particularly in rapidly aging societies such as Japan, which has built a community-based integrated care system premised on informal support networks surrounding each older resident. If self-disclosure within families functions as a gateway to reciprocal support, then interventions that encourage open communication—family conversations, counseling approaches, or even structured programs that teach and normalize the sharing of personal concerns—could strengthen the informal safety net that formal services increasingly depend upon. The finding that family disclosure predicts both directions of support also suggests a possible lever for addressing the low-receiving, low-giving cluster, the most isolated profile identified in the study, in which older adults neither contribute to nor draw from a support network.

As with any cross-sectional study, important caveats apply. The design captures a single moment in time, so it cannot establish whether self-disclosure causes richer support or whether supportive relationships simply create more opportunities for disclosure; most likely, the two reinforce each other in an ongoing loop. The sample comprised participants in a community health screening program, a group that may be more health-conscious and better connected than the general older population, raising questions about generalizability that the authors themselves acknowledge. Moreover, the data are not publicly available because they contain information that could compromise participant privacy, which limits independent reanalysis. The research was approved by the Sapporo Medical University Ethical Review Board, and all participants provided written informed consent after the procedure was explained. Funding came from the Health, Labour and Welfare Sciences Research Grants under grant number 23GB2001.

Future research, the authors suggest, should test these relationships longitudinally and, more ambitiously, develop interventions designed to promote self-disclosure among older adults. If the findings hold up under such scrutiny, the practical message is strikingly simple: encouraging older people to talk openly with their families about their feelings, worries, and daily experiences may do more than relieve loneliness in the moment. It may build and sustain the two-way currents of help—given and received—that keep people healthier, more connected, and more secure as they age. In an era when societies worldwide are scrambling to care for unprecedented numbers of older residents, one of the most powerful tools may not be a new service or technology, but a conversation at the kitchen table.

Subject of Research: The association between self-disclosure and the giving and receiving of social support among community-dwelling older adults

Article Title: Role of Self-Disclosure in Receiving and Giving Social Support Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study

Article References: Shimokihara, S., Yokoyama, K., Ihira, H., Matsuzaki-Kihara, Y., Mizumoto, A., Tashiro, H., Saito, H., Makino, K., Shimada, K., Yama, K., Miyajima, R., Sasaki, T., & Ikeda, N. (2026). Role of Self-Disclosure in Receiving and Giving Social Support Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study. Ageing International, 51(3), Article 30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-026-09671-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12126-026-09671-x

Keywords: social support, self-disclosure, older adults, aging in place, family communication, community-dwelling seniors, cluster analysis, functional capability, social networks, well-being, cross-sectional study, gerontology