The study draws on the Justification-Suppression Model of prejudice, a framework first proposed by psychologist Christian Crandall and colleague Amy Eshleman. The model’s core insight is that genuine prejudice does not simply vanish in societies that condemn discrimination. Instead, it remains latent, regulated by two opposing forces. Suppression, both conscious and automatic, inhibits prejudiced thoughts and feelings so people can conform to social norms, maintain a positive moral self-image, and avoid sanctions. But suppression is cognitively demanding and inherently unstable. What releases the pressure is justification: any ostensibly non-prejudicial factor, such as a target’s own misdeeds, that provides moral cover for negative reactions. Justification, in this account, does not create prejudice; it unlocks the expression of prejudice that already existed, allowing people to express hostility while still seeing themselves as fair and unbiased.

The Palermo team, led by Ivan Giuseppe Cammarata together with Costanza Scaffidi Abbate, Martina Macrillò, and Stefano Boca, extended this framework, originally formulated for discriminatory behavior, to a discrete emotional response. They chose schadenfreude deliberately: expressing pleasure at the misfortune of a stigmatized group such as the LGBTQIA+ community directly violates prescriptive norms of tolerance and empathy, so the emotion should be precisely the kind of reaction that anti-prejudice norms suppress and justifications release. The Italian context was theoretically ideal, the authors argue, because widespread anti-LGBTQIA+ hostility coexists with strong public condemnation of overt homonegativity. A 2024 European Union Fundamental Rights Agency survey found that 54 percent of LGBTIQ people in Italy believe prejudice against their community has increased over the previous five years, while Italy remains one of the few Western European countries without full marriage equality or comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation covering sexual orientation and gender identity.

The experiment, preregistered before data collection, recruited 353 Italian adults through snowball sampling, with 243 women, 107 men, and three participants reporting another gender. Ages ranged from 20 to 74. Each participant first completed the Gender Ideology Belief Scale, or GIBS, a validated 14-item questionnaire measuring anti-gender ideological beliefs across three dimensions: conspiratorial beliefs, such as agreement that a global movement seeks to erase distinctions between men and women; resistance to inclusive education, including the view that discussing gender issues at school confuses children; and adherence to traditional family values, such as endorsing marriage exclusively between a man and a woman. The researchers stress that GIBS captures an openly endorsed ideological stance rather than latent prejudice, and that the term gender ideology here refers to that anti-gender belief system, not to gender studies as an academic field.

Participants were then randomly assigned to read one of two fabricated news reports about the vandalization of a fictional LGBTQIA+ association called Arcobaleno Libero. In the deservingness condition, the report alleged financial misconduct: misappropriation of public funds and private donations, missing accounting documents, and provocative behavior by association members, with residents suggesting the vandalism was no surprise after everything the group had done. In the undeservingness condition, the identical act of vandalism was described as cowardly and unjustifiable, committed against a transparent, socially useful organization whose accounts had repeatedly passed audit. A manipulation check confirmed the contrast worked: participants in the deservingness condition rated the association’s misfortune as significantly more deserved, with a large effect size. Schadenfreude was then measured with four items, including how much participants felt pleased and how much they could not help but laugh when thinking about what happened, showing very high internal consistency.

The results supported the researchers’ predictions. In a moderated regression controlling for age and gender, anti-gender ideology scores significantly predicted schadenfreude, the experimental condition itself mattered, and, critically, the interaction between the two was significant. The link between anti-gender beliefs and pleasure at the organization’s misfortune was substantially stronger when a justification was available. Simple slope analyses quantified the pattern: the slope of ideology on schadenfreude was roughly three times steeper in the deservingness condition, 1.13 versus 0.39. The full model accounted for a substantial 33 percent of the variance in reported schadenfreude. Women reported lower schadenfreude than men, and men scored higher on both the ideological scale and the emotional outcome. Adding religiosity and political orientation as covariates left the focal interaction essentially unchanged, ruling out those factors as confounds.

A sensitivity analysis sharpened the intergroup character of the effect. Heterosexual participants reported both higher anti-gender ideology and higher schadenfreude than sexual-minority participants, so the researchers re-ran the core analysis within the heterosexual subsample alone, where the justification interaction remained highly significant. A three-way regression then showed that the moderating effect of justification was itself significantly stronger among heterosexual participants than among sexual-minority participants. The authors interpret this through Social Identity Theory: the moral cover provided by a justificatory context appears most necessary, and most effective, for out-group members seeking a safe avenue to express pre-existing animosity toward a marginalized target without violating egalitarian norms. The effect, in other words, is not a generalized reaction to wrongdoing but a motivated, identity-based process.

The researchers are careful about what the experiment does and does not prove. Because the two vignettes differ in more than justification availability, the deservingness version also portrays the association less favorably overall, the moderation cannot be attributed to the justification component alone. And because suppression was never directly measured, the findings are consistent with the Justification-Suppression Model rather than a demonstration of the mechanism it proposes; a purely appraisal-based account of schadenfreude, in which deserved misfortune simply elicits pleasure, predicts the same interaction. The residual ideology-schadenfreude link in the undeservingness condition also warrants caution. It may reflect the instability of suppression among people whose convictions are so strong that they do not experience them as prejudice requiring restraint, or it may reflect an experimental artifact: vandalism targeting an advocacy group can itself carry implicit justificatory connotations, blurring the contrast between conditions. The authors suggest that future designs use misfortunes entirely unrelated to social conflict, such as a natural disaster or administrative error.

Several further limitations temper the conclusions. The snowball sample skewed heavily toward women and cannot be generalized to the broader Italian population; schadenfreude was assessed only by self-report, which social desirability pressures may have driven downward, and participants were never explicitly reminded of the norms surrounding public discourse about LGBTQIA+ people, the very constraint the model treats as suppressive. The study also measured reactions to a single named association, so extending the findings to schadenfreude toward LGBTQIA+ people as a whole would be an inferential step the design does not license. Still, the theoretical contribution is clear: the justification-suppression dynamic, long studied for overt discriminatory behavior, appears to extend to discrete affective intergroup responses, and the people most susceptible are those who have integrated hostility into a coherent, openly endorsed ideological worldview. The practical implication is sobering. Prejudice-reduction efforts, the authors conclude, cannot rely solely on reinforcing egalitarian norms; they must also address the justificatory narratives that allow hostility to surface while preserving the individual’s self-image as moral and unbiased.

Subject of Research: Situational justification and the expression of schadenfreude toward an LGBTQIA+ organization as a function of anti-gender ideological beliefs

Article Title: “They got what they deserved”: situational justification and schadenfreude toward an LGBTQIA+ organization

Article References: Cammarata, I. G., Scaffidi Abbate, C., Macrillò, M., & Boca, S. (2026). “They got what they deserved”: situational justification and schadenfreude toward an LGBTQIA+ organization. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 4, Article 1927271. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2026.1927271

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2026.1927271

Keywords: schadenfreude, prejudice, Justification-Suppression Model, anti-gender ideology, LGBTQIA+, intergroup emotions, Social Identity Theory, deservingness, social norms, Italy, experimental psychology, Gender Ideology Belief Scale

The research, led by Potjanee Kamolrat of the International College for Sustainability Studies at Srinakharinwirot University, together with Nanchatsan Sakunpong of the university’s Behavioral Science Research Institute and Sarah Abboud of the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois Chicago, set out to explore a striking gap in the scientific literature. While nature-based interventions have been studied extensively in general populations, almost nothing is known about how they affect LGBTQIA+ people as they age, particularly in Southeast Asia, where culturally relevant, non-clinical mental health supports for this community remain scarce. The team designed a program of nine forest bathing sessions and then carefully documented what participants experienced psychologically.

The study involved 24 LGBTQIA+ adults aged 50 years and older who completed the full series of forest bathing sessions. After the program ended, the researchers conducted four focus group discussions to capture participants’ reflections in depth. To strengthen the reliability of their findings, they supplemented the focus groups with field notes written during the sessions, personal journals kept by participants, and posts shared in a LINE group chat that the cohort used to communicate between sessions. This multi-source approach allowed the team to triangulate the data, comparing what people said in group discussions against what they wrote privately and shared digitally in real time.

Analysis followed the established method of thematic analysis, in which researchers use open coding to identify recurring patterns in qualitative data and then iteratively review and refine those codes into broader themes. Peer debriefing, in which colleagues outside the immediate analysis review the interpretive process, was used to enhance trustworthiness. The result was a remarkably rich map of psychological experience: seven distinct themes emerged from the data, painting a picture of how sustained contact with nature interacted with the participants’ identities, histories, and social lives.

The first two themes concerned well-being in its most fundamental dimensions. Participants reported improvements in mental well-being, describing reductions in psychological distress and a greater sense of calm and emotional balance, alongside improvements in physical well-being, reflecting the embodied nature of the practice. Forest bathing is not simply exercise, though walking is part of it; it is a structured sensory engagement with a natural environment, and the participants’ accounts suggest that this combination of gentle physical activity and mindful sensory attention produced benefits that they perceived in both body and mind. For a population in which social isolation and ageism can exacerbate mental health challenges, these perceived improvements carry considerable practical significance.

The third theme, coping and emotional management, points to a mechanism that may explain why the practice was so resonant. Many LGBTQIA+ older adults have spent decades navigating discrimination, concealment, and exclusion, and the psychological residue of those experiences often surfaces in later life as heightened distress. Participants in the study described the forest sessions as a space in which they could process difficult emotions and develop strategies for managing them. The natural environment, in this sense, functioned not as an escape from their histories but as a supportive setting in which those histories could be acknowledged and worked through at their own pace.

Perhaps the most striking findings concern identity and connection. The fourth theme, valuing LGBTQ+ identity, indicates that the program did more than reduce distress; it appeared to strengthen participants’ relationship with their own identities. The fifth theme, perceived social support, and the seventh, deep communication and connection, suggest that the group format of the sessions fostered bonds among participants that extended beyond the forest itself, as evidenced by the ongoing conversations in the LINE group. For middle-aged and older LGBTQIA+ adults, many of whom report limited access to inclusive care and weakened family or community networks, the emergence of a supportive peer community through a nature-based intervention is a notable outcome.

Interestingly, the sixth theme revealed an unexpected dimension: environmental conservation awareness. Participants developed a heightened sense of care for the forests they had come to know, suggesting that the psychological benefits of nature immersion may be reciprocal. As people feel healed by an environment, they appear more inclined to value and protect it. This finding aligns with a broader body of environmental psychology research showing that direct experiences in nature cultivate pro-environmental attitudes, but its emergence among older sexual and gender minority adults adds a new dimension to that literature and hints at potential co-benefits for conservation engagement in community-based programs.

Beyond documenting psychological experiences, the researchers also asked participants to evaluate the program itself. The study reports that participants identified strengths of the forest bathing program and offered suggestions for improvement, feedback that the authors present as essential for refining future iterations. This evaluative component matters because the ultimate ambition of the research extends past the 24 participants involved. The authors argue that forest bathing represents a promising, inclusive strategy for promoting psychological well-being among LGBTQIA+ older adults and offer their findings as insights for integrating such interventions into public health services for marginalized aging populations. In Thailand and across Southeast Asia, where formal mental health services for LGBTQIA+ elders are limited, a low-cost, community-embedded, non-clinical intervention could fill a critical gap.

The study’s design carries both strengths and limitations worth noting. On the strengths side, the triangulation of focus groups, field notes, journals, and digital posts provides a unusually layered view of participant experience, and the peer debriefing process adds a check on interpretive bias. The study was also retrospectively registered with the Thai Clinical Trials Registry under registration number TCTR20240929005, and it received ethics approval from the Institutional Review Board of Srinakharinwirot University on July 1, 2024, under Protocol No. SWUEC-672263, with written informed consent obtained from all participants. As a qualitative study, however, it cannot quantify the magnitude of the psychological changes reported, and the experiences of 24 participants in Thailand may not generalize to all LGBTQIA+ aging populations. What it does establish, convincingly, is that when given the opportunity to bathe in the forest together, these adults experienced something they described as healing, and that the healing touched their minds, their bodies, their identities, and their connections to one another and to the living world around them.

Subject of Research: Psychological experiences of LGBTQIA+ middle-aged and older adults participating in forest bathing in Thailand

Article Title: Healing from nature: the psychological experiences of LGBTQIA+ middle-aged and older adults through forest bathing

Article References: Kamolrat, P., Sakunpong, N., & Abboud, S. (2026). Healing from nature: the psychological experiences of LGBTQIA+ middle-aged and older adults through forest bathing. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05583-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05583-2

Keywords: forest bathing, LGBTQIA+, older adults, mental health, nature-based intervention, qualitative research, thematic analysis, social support, minority stress, environmental psychology, Thailand, well-being

The research team, led by Ricardo de Pádua Moreira Dantas of the Federal University of Vale do São Francisco, together with Leonardo Rodrigues Sampaio of the Federal University of Campina Grande and Mariana Ribeiro de Souza, surveyed 97 LGBTQIA+ participants recruited online. The sample was predominantly young, with a mean age of 25 years and a standard deviation of 5.5. Cisgender men made up 55.7 percent of respondents and cisgender women 42.3 percent, while trans men accounted for 2.1 percent. The instrument was an online questionnaire adapted from earlier work by Fazzano (2014) and Reynolds (1987), the latter being the professional manual for the Suicidal Ideation Questionnaire. Before deployment, the questionnaire was evaluated by a panel of judges and tested in a pilot study, a standard procedure for establishing that the items measure what they intend to measure.

The headline finding was stark: 82.5 percent of participants reported having experienced homophobic violence. The most frequent forms were malicious comments, reported by 91.3 percent of those exposed to violence, name-calling at 71.3 percent, and social isolation at 41.3 percent. These are not exotic forms of aggression; they are the everyday texture of prejudice, delivered in classrooms, workplaces, and family homes. The researchers used SPSS statistical software to analyze the responses, applying non-parametric tests appropriate to the distribution of their data.

The central statistical result came from Spearman’s rank correlation test, which showed a significant positive association between the total amount of violence experienced and the presence of suicidal thoughts, with a correlation coefficient of ρ = 0.32 and a probability value below .01. In practical terms, the more homophobic violence a participant had endured, the more likely they were to report suicidal ideation. A correlation of this magnitude is moderate rather than overwhelming, but in a field where many risk factors compete for explanatory power, a robust and statistically significant signal tying everyday prejudice to suicidal thinking carries considerable weight.

Two specific forms of violence stood out. Being called names and being socially isolated each correlated with all categories of suicidal thoughts measured in the study, suggesting that these two experiences played central roles in the pathway toward suicidal behavior. This detail matters for theory. Verbal abuse and ostracism are forms of aversive control: they punish self-expression and social contact, and they can systematically narrow a person’s world. From a behavior-analytic perspective, an environment that punishes openness about identity while withholding social reinforcement can push an individual toward escape and avoidance repertoires, of which suicidal behavior represents the most extreme form.

Suicide attempts were reported by 26 percent of the participants, a figure that underscores the severity of the problem even in a modest sample. The attempts were significantly more frequent among cisgender women, with a chi-square statistic of 14.3 and p < .01. Among those who reported attempts, 29 percent said the attempts occurred after episodes of violence. Within that subgroup, social isolation preceded the attempt in 85.7 percent of cases and sexual harassment in 42.8 percent. The temporal ordering reported here, with violence preceding attempts in a substantial fraction of cases, aligns with the minority stress model developed by Ilan Meyer, which holds that chronic prejudice-related stressors, rather than sexual orientation or gender identity themselves, drive elevated rates of mental health problems in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender populations.

The study’s most distinctive contribution is its functional analysis of these events. In behavior analysis, a functional analysis examines the contingencies, the relationships between behavior and its antecedents and consequences, that select and maintain particular actions. The authors argue that aversive contexts such as school and family, operating through punitive contingencies, function as critical variables in the selection of suicidal behavior among sexual and gender minorities. Punishment, in this framework, suppresses the behaviors that are punished, but it also generates collateral effects: escape behavior, aggression, and restricted behavioral repertoires. When a young person’s expressions of identity are repeatedly punished at home or school, the available options contract, and the study suggests that suicidal behavior can emerge as an escape from seemingly inescapable aversive conditions.

This framing leads the researchers to a conclusion with significant public health implications: the persistence of violence and suicide in these populations results not from an individual failure to cope, but from the inadequacy of social and institutional contexts to provide protection and coping repertoires. The imperative, they argue, is cultural change. Interventions that focus solely on treating distressed individuals, in this view, address the downstream consequences while leaving the punishing contingencies intact. The authors call instead for behavioral interventions that take into account explicit behavioral analyses of homophobia, alongside broader institutional reforms in schools, families, and health services. Their conclusions echo a growing literature in behavior analysis that treats prejudice itself as learned behavior maintained by cultural contingencies, and therefore as behavior that can be changed by redesigning those contingencies.

The study connects to a substantial body of prior research documenting elevated suicide risk among sexual minorities. Previous surveys in the United States, Norway, and elsewhere have found higher rates of suicidal ideation and attempts among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents and adults compared with heterosexual peers, and studies of transgender people have linked gender-based victimization to suicide attempts. Brazilian data add urgency: national mortality statistics have recorded thousands of suicide deaths annually, and a 2022 study in Scientific Reports documented high rates of self-reported violence among Brazilian sexual minority adults. By integrating psychological measurement, statistical analysis, and behavior-analytic theory, the new study offers a mechanistic account of how these population-level disparities are produced, one act of punishment at a time.

The authors are candid about the limitations of their work. The sample was recruited digitally, which introduces sampling bias toward people with internet access and willingness to participate in online research, and transgender people were markedly underrepresented, making up only 2.1 percent of respondents. The sample size of 97, while adequate for the correlational tests performed, limits the precision of subgroup comparisons, and the exploratory, cross-sectional design cannot establish causation with certainty. Even so, the convergence of the statistical findings, the temporal reports linking violence to subsequent attempts, and the theoretical coherence of the functional analysis make a compelling case. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Federal University of Vale do São Francisco in December 2019, and participants were offered psychological support before, during, and after participation, with referrals to Brazilian mental health services including the free CVV crisis line. As the authors put it, the findings highlight the imperative for cultural change, a reminder that suicide prevention for LGBTQIA+ people begins not in the clinic alone, but in classrooms, family homes, and the everyday contingencies that determine whether a person’s identity is met with punishment or acceptance.

Subject of Research: The relationship between homophobic violence and suicidal behavior in LGBTQIA+ populations analyzed through behavior analysis and minority stress theory.

Article Title: Homophobia and Suicide in LGBTQIA + populations: A Statistical Survey Through the Lens of Behavior Analysis

Article References: de Pádua Moreira Dantas, R., Sampaio, L. R., & de Souza, M. R. (2026). Homophobia and Suicide in LGBTQIA + populations: A Statistical Survey Through the Lens of Behavior Analysis. Trends in Psychology, 34(1), 415-441. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00509-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00509-0

Keywords: homophobia, suicide, LGBTQIA+, behavior analysis, minority stress, suicidal ideation, social isolation, aversive control, public health, Brazil, mental health, victimization