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

Researchers Alexandre Rimar Cintra and Fábio Leyser Gonçalves, affiliated with São Paulo State University and the University of São Paulo, recruited 290 adult Brazilian gamers through social media, chat groups, and gaming forums in July 2021. The sample was predominantly male, with participants ranging from 18 to 50 years old, and displayed enormous variation in habits: weekly play time ranged from one hour to a staggering 90 hours, average session lengths ran from 12 minutes to 10 hours, and most participants reported playing daily. The team’s central question was deceptively simple. Impulsivity is well established as a correlate of substance addiction, but does impulsive behavior predict gaming disorder, and does the answer depend on what kind of reward a person is actually choosing between?

To answer it, the researchers turned to delay discounting, a cornerstone paradigm of behavioral economics. The concept, rooted in classic self-control experiments from the 1970s, describes how the subjective value of a reward shrinks as the wait for it grows longer. Steeper discounting, meaning a reward loses its perceived value faster with delay, is considered a behavioral marker of impulsivity. In a delay discounting task, participants repeatedly choose between an immediate smaller reward and a delayed larger one, with the immediate offer systematically adjusted until the two options become subjectively equivalent. These indifference points are then summarized by the area under the curve, or AUC, a value between 0 and 1 where lower numbers indicate greater impulsivity.

Here is where the study’s key innovation comes in. Nearly all previous research on gaming disorder and impulsivity used hypothetical money as the reward, a convention inherited from the wider discounting literature. But a growing body of evidence shows that non-monetary rewards are discounted more steeply than money, a phenomenon called the domain effect. Studies of substance dependence have long adapted their tasks to match the substance at hand; tobacco smokers, for example, discount cigarette outcomes far more steeply than monetary ones. Only one earlier gaming study, led by Buono and colleagues in 2017, had ever adapted the task to gaming itself. Cintra and Gonçalves ran both versions: a monetary task where the delayed reward was 100 Brazilian reais, and a gaming-session task where the delayed reward was 60 minutes of play. Delays ranged from one day to six months, with the immediate offer halving its adjustment with each successive choice.

The results on the domain effect were striking. Participants were significantly more impulsive in the gaming task than in the monetary task, with the monetary AUC averaging 0.657 versus 0.393 for gaming time, a large effect size of d = 0.828. The two measures were positively correlated, suggesting they tap the same underlying construct of impulsive choice, yet they diverged sharply in magnitude. The authors caution, however, that this difference could reflect either the domain effect or a magnitude effect, since it cannot be guaranteed that 100 reais and 60 minutes of play were subjectively equivalent. There is also a possible artifact: six months may be far too short a horizon for money, which people routinely think about over years or decades, making monetary choices look artificially self-controlled in this study’s compressed time frame.

The team also rigorously validated the Brazilian Portuguese adaptation of the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale Short Form, or IGDS9-SF, a nine-item instrument covering both DSM-5 and ICD-11 diagnostic criteria. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses converged on a single-factor structure with exceptional fit indices, including a comparative fit index of 0.998. The symptoms most tightly bound to the dependence construct were mood modification from abstinence, failure to cut down, continued gaming despite interpersonal harm, and tolerance. Notably, difficulty controlling the behavior and continuing despite adverse consequences, the core features of addiction itself, emerged as central regardless of whether the population was English-speaking, Portuguese, or Brazilian. Symptoms tied to interpersonal concealment and functional impairment carried less weight in Lusophone samples, hinting at cultural texture in how gaming disorder expresses itself. Applying a cutoff corresponding to answering at least sometimes to every question, 9 percent of the sample fell into the risk group.

The most consequential finding emerged from the logistic regression. Impulsivity measured in the monetary domain showed no significant relationship with gaming disorder risk, in contrast to several earlier studies. But impulsivity in the gaming domain did: each one-tenth increase in gaming AUC, indicating more self-controlled choices, raised the odds of being in the not-at-risk group by about 23 percent. Even more intriguing, weekly gaming time moderated this relationship. Among players logging fewer than 17 hours per week, impulsive choice made virtually no difference to risk. Among the heavy players, the picture changed dramatically, with steeper gaming discounting strongly associated with elevated risk. Estimated probability of belonging to the risk group reached 17.7 percent for high-time players, versus just 1.7 percent for lighter players.

Weekly gaming time itself proved a powerful predictor. Players in the heaviest bracket, 17 hours or more per week, were dramatically less likely to fall in the not-at-risk group compared with those playing under 5 hours, with odds ratios exceeding 17. This echoes the earlier work of Buono and colleagues, who found that gamers playing 17 or more hours weekly showed greater discounting overall. The authors emphasize, following Charlton and Danforth, that time alone cannot define the disorder, since highly engaged players may lack the functional impairments essential for diagnosis. Still, total weekly time clearly outperformed average session duration, and variables like gaming habits, gender, and age showed no significant effects in this sample, even though broader prevalence research points to higher rates among young males.

The study has honest limitations. The convenience sample was recruited online and underrepresented women and mobile gamers, self-report introduces bias, and only 26 participants met the risk criterion, forcing the researchers to use a risk cutoff rather than clinical diagnosis. A sensitivity analysis showed the study was adequately powered to detect odds ratios of roughly 1.60 or greater, meaning the gaming AUC effect, which fell just below that threshold, deserves replication in larger samples. Disentangling the domain effect from the magnitude effect will also require tasks engineered to equate subjective reward values across domains.

Nevertheless, the implications ripple outward. For researchers, the message is methodological: measuring impulsivity in gamers with money alone may miss the very decisions that matter, because the relevant domain is the game itself. For clinicians and the public, the takeaway is more calibrated. Impulsive choice is not a universal red flag for gaming problems; it becomes a meaningful warning sign specifically when combined with heavy weekly play. As gaming disorder continues to provoke debate among scientists, health bodies, and players alike, this study suggests the path forward lies not in condemning a beloved pastime, but in understanding precisely which psychological patterns, in which contexts, turn play into compulsion.

Subject of Research: The relationship between impulsive behavior, gaming habits, and gaming disorder risk in Brazilian gamers.

Article Title: The Relationship Between Impulsive Behavior, Gaming Habits, and Gaming Disorder

Article References: Cintra, A. R., & Gonçalves, F. L. (2026). The Relationship Between Impulsive Behavior, Gaming Habits, and Gaming Disorder. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00520-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00520-z

Keywords: gaming disorder, impulsivity, delay discounting, behavioral addiction, video games, psychology, IGDS9-SF, domain effect, Brazilian gamers, self-control, mental health, Relationship

The trial enrolled 114 women drawn from approximately 20 villages across the Chouf region, an area whose residents have contended with continuing economic instability, political unrest and environmental challenges in recent years. Researchers from Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, randomly assigned participants either to learn the Transcendental Meditation technique or to an active control group that received weekly videos on self-development and well-being. The use of an active control condition matters methodologically: rather than comparing meditators against people receiving nothing, the design allowed the team to compare the effects of learning the meditation technique against participation in another structured activity explicitly aimed at self-improvement, strengthening the case that the observed changes were attributable to the practice itself rather than to attention, expectation or the passage of time.

Participants in the meditation group were instructed to practice for 20 minutes twice a day, sitting comfortably with their eyes closed. Adherence proved remarkably high for a community-based trial. Sixty percent of the women reported practicing twice daily every day or most days, 18 percent practiced once a day, and 20 percent practiced irregularly. No harmful events related to participation were reported during the study period. The researchers say this combination of high adherence and an absence of adverse events is notable, particularly given that the participants were navigating daily lives shaped by chronic stressors rather than volunteering from a leisure-rich, low-stress population.

After three months, the meditation group outperformed the control group on all four outcome measures. Happiness showed the largest change of the four. Women practicing the technique reported increases in happiness at both the one-month and three-month assessments. The control group followed a different trajectory: a small improvement at one month, followed by a marked decrease at three months. The researchers suggest this divergence is meaningful because it indicates that the benefits of the meditation practice did not merely fade or plateau but appeared to consolidate over the study period, while the initial boost seen in the control condition reversed by the end of follow-up.

The statistical analysis also probed which factors were most closely tied to happiness. The team found that self-efficacy and perceived stress were both significantly related to happiness levels, and in their model self-efficacy emerged as the strongest predictor, followed by perceived stress. Together, the two variables accounted for 42 percent of the variance in happiness, a substantial share for psychological research of this kind. Self-efficacy, defined as a person’s perception of their ability to achieve desired results through their own actions, increased over the three months in the meditation group while decreasing in the control group. The researchers argue that this pairing of rising self-efficacy and falling perceived stress is particularly important because both variables were independently linked to happiness in their analysis, pointing to a plausible mechanism through which the practice may exert its effects.

Marie Loiselle, PhD, principal investigator and a researcher in the Department of Maharishi Vedic Science at Maharishi International University, emphasized the strength of the trial’s methods and the breadth of its results. She described the study as significant given its randomized controlled design and the statistically significant changes observed on every measure, noting that it is very encouraging because the women improved across several dimensions of psychological well-being at the same time. In her view, the results suggest that Transcendental Meditation may offer these women an additional way to cope with the significant pressures they face in daily life. Frederick Travis, PhD, who served as statistician and senior advisor on the study, highlighted the same two variables from a different angle. He said the improvements in self-efficacy and the reductions in perceived stress are particularly important because both were related to happiness in the analysis, adding that the findings provide a basis for further research into approaches that may help people cope with persistent environmental stress.

The choice of population was deliberate. The researchers note that women in Lebanon can face multiple, overlapping sources of stress, including economic instability, political unrest, environmental problems and gender inequality. Previous research has also identified cultural and social barriers that may discourage some people from seeking professional help for stress and related psychological difficulties, meaning that low-barrier, self-administered practices could fill a gap where conventional mental health services are difficult to access or socially stigmatized. The trial itself grew out of a community program: the researchers worked in collaboration with the Ladies Foundation for Pure Knowledge, which was nearing the end of a project to teach Transcendental Meditation to approximately 1,000 women in the Chouf region. The foundation approached the research team to investigate whether the practice was producing measurable benefits among the women learning it, turning an ongoing outreach effort into an opportunity for rigorous evaluation.

Susan Hamza, the foundation’s director, reflected on the scale of the response among participants in the broader teaching project. She said that so many of the participants told her their life had been transformed in many ways that words could not even begin to describe, and that those involved in realizing the project have her deep gratitude. Such testimonies are, by themselves, anecdotal, but the trial’s quantitative results give that community enthusiasm an empirical footing: the measured changes in happiness, resilience, self-efficacy and perceived stress among the 114 trial participants aligned with the direction of the reports coming out of the larger teaching program.

The study was approved by the Maharishi International University Research Institute Review Board and registered with the U.S. Clinical Trials Registry under identifier NCT05836129. Funding was provided by the Ladies Foundation of Pure Knowledge in Lebanon and by individual donors, and the authors reported no potential conflicts of interest. The research method was classified as a randomized controlled trial, and the subject population consisted of people rather than clinical samples recruited through hospitals, which the authors present as a strength when studying well-being in community settings.

The investigators are careful to frame the findings as a beginning rather than a conclusion. Of the 114 women who enrolled, 83 completed both posttests, and participants were followed for only three months, leaving open questions about durability and about whether the effects would hold in larger and more diverse samples. The team recommends future studies with six- or 12-month follow-up periods and larger populations in Lebanon and potentially elsewhere in the Middle East, where chronic, population-level stressors are common and scalable, low-cost interventions for psychological resilience are in short supply. If the results are confirmed, the researchers suggest, a technique that requires no equipment, no clinical setting and only 40 minutes a day could become a practical complement to existing efforts to support mental well-being in communities under sustained pressure. Transcendental Meditation itself is described by its practitioners as a simple, natural technique that does not involve concentration, control of the mind, contemplation or monitoring of thoughts or breathing, and that allows the active thinking mind to settle into a state of inner calm, characteristics that may help explain both the high adherence observed in the trial and the feasibility of extending the approach to other stressed populations.

Subject of Research: Effects of Transcendental Meditation on psychological well-being in rural Lebanese women

Article Title: Randomized trial finds Transcendental Meditation improves happiness, resilience and self-efficacy in rural Lebanese women

Article References: Randomized trial finds Transcendental Meditation improves happiness, resilience and self-efficacy in rural Lebanese women. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Transcendental Meditation, randomized controlled trial, Lebanon, rural women, happiness, resilience, self-efficacy, perceived stress, mental health, Women's Health journal, Maharishi International University, psychological well-being

The research team, led by Meghan M. Burke of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Special Education, interviewed sixteen adults whose autistic brothers or sisters engaged in behaviors the siblings perceived as threatening to physical or emotional safety. All sixteen participants reported that their sibling had shown physical aggression, and many described self-injurious behavior, property destruction, and elopement as well. The sample is notable because most existing sibling research relies on convenience samples in which the autistic brother or sister does not display distressing behavior at all. That gap matters: longitudinal studies of autistic individuals suggest that roughly 42 percent demonstrate aggressive behaviors, and about one-third exhibit persistent aggression across development. In other words, the siblings in this new study are not a rare edge case — they represent a substantial and largely invisible population.

To interpret what they heard, the researchers drew on two complementary theoretical frameworks. Trauma Exposure Theory, developed by Cook and colleagues, describes how repeated exposure to threatening events can produce dysregulation, social withdrawal, and diminished self-concept. The Hidden Talents Framework, advanced by Ellis and colleagues in 2022, takes the opposite starting point: it asks which social and cognitive skills are strengthened by adversity, identifying capacities such as enhanced threat detection and stress management that emerge in harsh environments. The study’s design allowed both frameworks to be tested against lived experience rather than assumed in advance. Crucially, the authors emphasize that exposure to distressing behavior does not automatically equal trauma — some siblings described chronic emotional distress, others described events in explicitly traumatic terms, and the framework was used as a lens rather than a diagnosis.

On the positive side of the ledger, participants consistently reported increased resilience. They described developing what one called tougher skin and a greater ability to handle stress. One 32-year-old participant, whose 41-year-old brother had an intellectual disability and anxiety and had lived through episodes of aggression, self-injury, and property destruction, explained that she now reacts calmly in crises involving raised voices or violence precisely because she has been through so many such episodes with him. Another participant, a 27-year-old who helped her family decide to move her brother into a group home, traced her resilience to the weight of that decision — a choice she called the biggest her family had ever made. These accounts align closely with the Hidden Talents Framework’s prediction that adversity can cultivate genuine competence, not merely scar tissue.

The second positive theme was a closer family unit. Several participants said that the shared struggle of managing their sibling’s behaviors drew parents and non-disabled siblings together, sometimes because the family felt isolated from the public and had only each other to rely on. A 19-year-old participant with two non-disabled siblings described the relationship as a mutual safety net: her brothers and sisters used each other for support when things felt uncomfortable or vulnerable, precisely because they lived with the same reality and understood it without explanation. This finding suggests that distressing behavior does not uniformly fracture families; in some households it functions as a bonding force, though the researchers caution that this cohesion may partly reflect isolation from broader social networks rather than pure closeness.

The negative findings were more sobering. Participants reported lasting harm to their mental health, with several using language strikingly close to clinical descriptions of post-traumatic stress. One participant recalled being hypervigilant around anyone who seemed angry, backing away or hiding when she sensed a meltdown coming, even when no physical threat materialized. Another described her experiences as chronic trauma, noting that trauma can exist without meeting full diagnostic criteria for PTSD, and that everyone in her family had experienced periods of depression and anxiety. These reports echo a 2023 scoping review by Rochefort and colleagues, which found that siblings of individuals with autism and distressing behavior show psychological challenges consistent with developmental trauma theory, and earlier work linking the sibling experience to parentification — children absorbing adult responsibilities that carry forward into adult stress and anxiety.

Safety fears formed a second cluster of negative effects. Even participants whose siblings’ behaviors had diminished with age, medication, or residential placement described a bodily state of being on guard. One 49-year-old participant whose brother had a history of violent outbursts reported that, although he had not been violent toward her in years, her physical response around him remained one of fear and anxiousness — she constantly scanned for unpredictable actions like reaching for the steering wheel or hitting her from behind. Another participant, though unafraid for her own safety, described persistent anxiety about her mother, a small-statured primary caregiver she feared could be hurt. Such hypervigilance is well documented in families affected by aggression and trauma more broadly, but it had rarely been examined specifically in adult siblings of autistic individuals until now.

Perhaps the most provocative findings concern life choices, because they directly contradict prior research. Earlier national survey data had suggested that siblings of people with disabilities marry later and have children later, but ultimately do not forgo marriage or parenthood. In this study, several participants said they had decided against having children altogether, reasoning that if they eventually had to take their sibling in, they could not devote the resources and energy another child would need. Others reported stepping back from dating and marriage entirely; one participant said she hesitated to date because she assumed her sister would live with her forever and doubted a partner would accept that, so she questioned whether dating was worth the time at all. The researchers argue that the mere presence or absence of a disability is too crude a variable — it may be the specific experience of distressing behavior that redirects these decisions, a distinction future studies must untangle.

Careers, by contrast, showed a constructive pattern. Multiple participants said their experiences steered them toward disability advocacy and helping professions: one became a special education teacher after years of advocating for her sister within an unsupportive school system, while another described channeling her advocacy into work focused on people in circumstances similar to her brother’s. And despite everything, nearly all participants anticipated assuming future caregiving roles — arranging nearby housing, managing special needs trusts, or worrying about whether the obligation would fall on them alone. That last worry is well founded: consistent with Family Systems Theory and prior research, the study found that caregiving responsibility tends to concentrate on a single sibling, often a female one, rather than being distributed across the family, a pattern that raises the risk of burnout and resentment precisely among those already carrying mental health burdens.

The authors are candid about the study’s limits. The sample of sixteen was predominantly White, female, and high-income, recruited through disability and sibling organizations, which may skew findings toward siblings already connected to support networks; research suggests siblings of color are actually more likely to assume caregiving roles and face distinct advocacy barriers. Diagnoses and behavioral severity were self-reported rather than independently verified, only one side of the bidirectional sibling relationship was heard, and there was no comparison group of siblings whose autistic brothers and sisters lacked distressing behaviors. Still, the practical implications are concrete: practitioners could build peer support groups and forums where siblings with similar experiences connect, refer families to organizations such as the Sibling Leadership Network and the Sibling Support Project, and treat siblings as an untapped advocacy constituency with firsthand knowledge of where policy fails. The study’s core message is that interventions should work both directions at once — leveraging the resilience and family cohesion these siblings have developed while seriously addressing the trauma, hypervigilance, and constrained life choices that too often come bundled with them.

Subject of Research: The perceived positive and negative impacts of distressing behaviors in autistic adults on their adult siblings and future caregiving roles

Article Title: Exploring the Perspectives of Siblings of Autistic Adults With Distressing Behavior: Perceptions of Positive and Negative Impacts

Article References: Burke, M. M., Humphries, R., Burakov, I., Kim, J., Kalb, T., Singh, S., Smith, B. C., & Alagozoglu, E. (2026). Exploring the Perspectives of Siblings of Autistic Adults With Distressing Behavior: Perceptions of Positive and Negative Impacts. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07534-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07534-7

Keywords: autism, siblings, distressing behavior, aggression, trauma, resilience, caregiving, mental health, family systems, life choices, Hidden Talents Framework, qualitative research

The research team, led by Rose Bern of the University of California, Davis, together with colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Toronto Mississauga, and Chapman University, surveyed 186 people practicing polyamory who were living with at least one romantic partner while being physically separated from at least one other. Participants completed their surveys between March and May of 2020, the narrow and anxious window when much of the world first went into lockdown. That timing matters. The respondents were describing their attachment bonds and their emotional states in real time, not reconstructing them from memory months or years later.

Attachment theory, first formulated by John Bowlby and later extended to adult romantic relationships, holds that intimate partners serve two psychological functions: a safe haven that provides comfort in times of threat, and a secure base from which people explore the world. Two dimensions of insecurity have been mapped across decades of research. Attachment anxiety reflects hypervigilance to rejection and an intense craving for reassurance, while attachment avoidance reflects discomfort with closeness and a tendency to suppress reliance on others. Classic theory assumed a single primary attachment figure, but people in polyamorous relationships maintain multiple concurrent romantic bonds, raising the question of whether each partner can independently function as an attachment figure and whether insecurity toward one partner spills over into another relationship.

To measure these dynamics, the researchers administered the short form of the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale separately for the cohabiting partner and the separated partner, allowing anxiety and avoidance to be assessed within each bond. Psychological outcomes were captured with the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 for depressive symptoms and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale for anxiety symptoms, alongside a measure of perceived COVID-19 threat and distress. Relationship outcomes were assessed with the Couples Satisfaction Index and commitment items adapted for each specific relationship. The analytic strategy then regressed each outcome on attachment anxiety and avoidance toward both partners simultaneously, which is what allowed the team to detect cross-relationship effects that would be invisible in studies of monogamous couples.

The within-relationship findings were consistent with the broader attachment literature. Higher attachment anxiety toward a partner predicted lower relationship satisfaction with that partner, whether the partner was cohabiting or separated. Higher avoidance likewise predicted lower satisfaction within each corresponding relationship. These results reinforce the idea that each relationship in a polyamorous network functions as its own attachment system, with insecurity in a given bond degrading the quality of that bond rather than being diluted across multiple partnerships.

The pandemic-specific findings were more surprising and more finely differentiated. Attachment anxiety toward both the cohabiting partner and the separated partner predicted greater COVID-related distress, suggesting that anxious insecurity in any attachment bond left people more emotionally exposed to the global threat. Avoidance, however, worked in opposite directions depending on living arrangement. Avoidance toward a cohabiting partner predicted lower COVID distress, plausibly because avoidantly attached individuals who were confined with a partner experienced the enforced closeness as more stressful when their defensive distance was unavailable, or alternatively because distancing strategies buffered them. Avoidance toward a separated partner, by contrast, predicted higher COVID distress, consistent with the interpretation that avoidant individuals tolerate separation poorly when the pandemic forecloses the possibility of reconnection on their own terms.

Perhaps the most theoretically provocative result was the single cross-relationship effect that emerged: attachment anxiety toward a separated partner predicted increased commitment to the cohabiting partner. In other words, people who felt insecurely anxious about a partner they could not reach became more devoted to the partner they were locked in with. The authors interpret this pattern through the lens of interdependence and attachment dynamics: the physical presence of a safe haven during a period of acute threat may strengthen bonds to that haven, particularly when an alternative attachment figure is inaccessible and the anxiety associated with that inaccessibility heightens the value of the available one. For a literature that has often treated relationships in isolation, this finding demonstrates that attachment processes in one romantic bond can meaningfully shape outcomes in another.

The study also carries methodological and representational significance. Relationship science has been repeatedly criticized for relying overwhelmingly on young, White, heterosexual, monogamous samples, a limitation that constrains the generalizability of its theories. By recruiting polyamorous individuals during a global crisis, the researchers extended attachment theory into a relationship structure that Bowlby-era frameworks never anticipated, testing whether the safe haven concept scales across multiple concurrent figures. The answer appears to be yes, with important qualifications: each bond operates as an attachment system, but the systems interact, and the physical arrangement imposed by lockdowns modulated how insecurity translated into distress.

The findings also speak to the mental health consequences of pandemic separation more broadly. Prior work during COVID-19 consistently linked insecure attachment to greater depression, anxiety, and coronavirus-related worry, but nearly all of that work examined single dyads. The present results suggest that the geography of attachment, meaning which attachment figures are physically available when a threat strikes, is a critical variable. Being separated from an attachment figure during a mass threat event was not psychologically neutral; anxiety about that separated partner amplified pandemic distress, while the presence of a cohabiting partner partially compensated, at least in terms of commitment.

Caveats remain. The survey was cross-sectional, so the direction of the associations cannot be established with certainty, and the sample of 186 polyamorous individuals, while valuable, may not generalize to all consensually non-monogamous populations or to monogamous couples. Data were not released in an open repository, and the study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Chapman University with informed consent from all participants. Still, as one of the first studies to measure dual attachment bonds to cohabiting and separated partners during lockdown, the work opens a genuinely new line of inquiry: how the architecture of a person’s entire attachment network, not just a single relationship, determines resilience when a crisis divides intimate life between those who are present and those who are kept apart.

Subject of Research: Attachment bonds to cohabiting and separated romantic partners among polyamorous individuals during COVID-19 lockdowns

Article Title: Together and Apart: Dual Attachment Bonds to Cohabiting and Separated Partners Predict Relationship and Psychological Outcomes During COVID-19 Lockdowns

Article References: Bern, R., Wooten, H., Moreno, E., Eastwick, P. W., & Moors, A. C. (2026). Together and Apart: Dual Attachment Bonds to Cohabiting and Separated Partners Predict Relationship and Psychological Outcomes During COVID-19 Lockdowns. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03538-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03538-7

Keywords: attachment theory, polyamory, consensual nonmonogamy, COVID-19, lockdown, relationship satisfaction, commitment, mental health, psychological distress, romantic relationships, safe haven, Archives of Sexual Behavior

The trial enrolled 24 traumatized refugee women living in communities across Southern Germany, drawn from six different countries of origin. The researchers used a controlled within-group design in which every participant served as her own comparator across time. Each woman was assessed at three points: a baseline measurement (t1), a pretest after an eight-week waiting period (t2), and a posttest following the intervention (t3). This waiting-period structure is methodologically important. Because the women received no other psychotherapy during the entire study period, any change in symptoms during the waiting phase could be attributed to natural recovery, the passage of time, or the mere attention of being assessed. When all symptom scores remained essentially unchanged across those first eight weeks, the researchers could be considerably more confident that whatever happened afterward was linked to the therapy itself.

The measurement strategy reflected the linguistic and cultural diversity of the sample. The primary outcome was the Refugee Health Screener-15 (RHS-15), a validated instrument developed specifically to detect emotional distress in refugee populations. Secondary measures included the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS21) and the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Checklist (PCL-S), the latter a 17-item instrument used to characterize posttraumatic stress severity. Crucially, all scales were administered in an interview format in each participant’s native language or a language she spoke well, with trained interviewers rather than self-completed questionnaires. This attention to language matters enormously in refugee research, where literacy barriers, unfamiliar response formats and subtle translation problems can systematically distort results. The researchers also conducted an exploratory follow-up with ten participants to examine whether gains persisted beyond the end of treatment.

The intervention itself consisted of eight weekly group sessions, each lasting 1.5 hours, delivered by trained dance movement therapists. Dance movement therapy, or DMT, is one of the creative arts therapies recognized by professional bodies such as the American Dance Therapy Association and its German counterpart. Rather than asking clients to narrate traumatic memories verbally, DMT works through the body: movement improvisation, rhythmic coordination, and expressive physical activity are used as the primary channels of therapeutic work. Two design features of this trial stand out. First, the sessions incorporated music that was emotionally meaningful to the participants themselves, drawing on their own cultural traditions rather than imposing a Western therapeutic soundtrack. Second, the women created their own dance improvisations within the group setting, making the therapy a participatory and culturally adaptive process rather than a standardized protocol imposed from outside.

The results were remarkable in their consistency. At baseline, every woman in the study showed clinically relevant levels of trauma symptoms, confirming the depth of need in this population. During the waiting period, as noted, nothing changed—symptoms of trauma, stress, depression and anxiety all held steady. After the eight weeks of dance movement therapy, however, all four symptom domains dropped significantly. Most strikingly, on the PCL-S trauma measure, scores fell so markedly that the group average dropped below the clinical cutoff value, meaning that the women moved, on average, from a symptom range that would warrant a PTSD diagnosis into the non-clinical range. The statistical analysis employed Greenhouse-Geisser corrected F-tests, a technique that adjusts for potential violations of sphericity in repeated-measures data, alongside t-tests for related samples comparing the matched time points.

The exploratory follow-up added an important nuance to the picture. When ten of the participants were reassessed eight weeks after the intervention ended, the symptom reductions appeared to hold—the benefits carried on. At a one-year follow-up, however, the effects were no longer evident. This pattern, common across many psychotherapy studies for posttraumatic stress, suggests that dance movement therapy can initiate genuine recovery but that some form of maintenance—booster sessions, ongoing group participation, or continued low-intensity support—may be needed to sustain the gains over the long term. For a population whose lives remain marked by insecure residency status, separation from family, and ongoing acculturation stress, the disappearance of treatment effects at one year is less a failure of the therapy than a reminder that trauma recovery is rarely a single event.

Why might moving the body help where words struggle? The theoretical rationale draws on a growing understanding of how trauma is encoded and expressed physiologically. Posttraumatic stress is not purely a cognitive condition; it involves autonomic dysregulation, muscular bracing, disrupted breathing, and a fragmented sense of bodily self. Survivors of violence often experience profound disconnection from their own bodies, and talk-based therapies depend precisely on the verbal reflective capacities that chronic stress and hypervigilance can suppress. Dance movement therapy targets these somatic dimensions directly: rhythmic group movement can regulate arousal, synchronized movement with others rebuilds experiences of trust and social connection, and improvised expression allows emotions to be externalized without requiring linguistic articulation. The incorporation of familiar music from participants’ own cultures may further enhance emotional engagement and safety, addressing a well-known barrier in cross-cultural mental health care where standardized Western interventions can feel foreign or intrusive.

The clinical and economic implications are significant. The authors describe DMT as a low-threshold and cost-effective approach, and the characterization is apt. Group therapy requires fewer therapist hours per patient than individual treatment. It does not depend on a shared spoken language between therapist and client in the way cognitive behavioral therapy does, although skilled, culturally competent therapists remain essential. It can be delivered in community settings rather than specialized clinics, and the participants in this study were recruited through psychosocial centers for refugees and torture victims rather than through psychiatric pathways. For health systems in Germany and across Europe that are chronically unable to meet the mental health needs of refugee populations—remember that fewer than one in ten refugees in need in Germany receives care—interventions that are accessible, acceptable across cultural backgrounds and scalable hold obvious appeal.

Honest appraisal requires acknowledging the study’s limits, and the authors are transparent about them. The within-group design, while strengthened by the waiting-period control, is less rigorous than a randomized controlled trial with an active comparison group; placebo effects, expectancy effects and non-specific therapeutic attention cannot be fully excluded. The sample of 24 women is small, although the authors note it was fully powered for the primary analyses, and the loss of more than half the sample at follow-up restricts the long-term conclusions. The trial was also retrospectively registered at the Center for Open Science in March 2023, which some methodologists would flag. The authors themselves emphasize that the lack of high-quality studies with proper control conditions and long-term follow-ups in this field points to a clear need for future research with more rigorous methodologies, ideally multi-site randomized trials that replicate the culturally adaptive elements that appear central to this intervention’s success.

Even with those caveats, the study adds meaningful weight to the evidence base for creative arts therapies in trauma care, a field that has often relied on smaller or less controlled studies. What makes these findings resonate beyond the statistics is the population at their center: women who survived violence in the countries they left, danger along the routes they traveled, and precarity in the places where they landed, and who in most cases had never before received any mental health treatment. That eight weekly sessions of moving together, accompanied by music that mattered to them, could pull their average trauma symptoms below a clinical threshold is a result worth taking seriously. It suggests that healing for survivors of displacement may not always require words—and that the body, so often the register in which trauma is written, can also be the medium through which recovery begins. The next step is to confirm these effects in larger, randomized trials and to determine how the benefits can be sustained over years, not months. For the twenty-four women who took part, however, the value of those eight weeks has already been measured.

Subject of Research: Effects of dance movement therapy on trauma, stress, depression and anxiety in traumatized refugee women

Article Title: The effect of dance movement therapy on traumatized refugee women – a clinical controlled trial

Article References: Koch, S. C., Nazemi, Z., Arnaud, C., Cook, K., Steltmann, S. J., & Tomaszewski, C. (2026). The effect of dance movement therapy on traumatized refugee women – a clinical controlled trial. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, 26(1), Article 277. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12906-026-05299-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12906-026-05299-1

Keywords: dance movement therapy, refugee women, PTSD, trauma, stress, depression, anxiety, creative arts therapies, RHS-15, clinical controlled trial, mental health, cultural adaptation

The research, led by Satu Baruri of B.R. Ambedkar College of Law at Andhra University in India, together with colleagues at Széchenyi István University in Hungary, GITAM Institute of Technology and KL Business School, set out to identify the behavioural and cognitive factors that determine whether digitally active individuals become victims of cybercrime, and what happens to their finances and mental health afterwards. Rather than treating victimisation, financial loss and psychological distress as separate problems, the team built a single integrated framework in which all three outcomes are linked, allowing them to trace how a single security lapse can cascade into both a drained bank account and a deteriorating state of mind.

To construct that framework, the researchers drew on two well-established theories from criminology and health psychology. The first is Cyber Routine Activity Theory, or CRAT, an adaptation of the classic routine activity perspective in criminology, which holds that victimisation occurs when a motivated offender encounters a suitable target in the absence of capable guardianship. In the cyber context, this means that the structure of a person’s digital life, how often they transact online, how much personal information they share, and how visible they are to strangers, shapes their exposure to motivated attackers. The second is Protection Motivation Theory, or PMT, which originated in the study of health behaviour and describes how people weigh threats against their own ability to cope with them. PMT predicts that individuals who perceive themselves as susceptible to a threat and who believe they can take effective protective action will be more likely to adopt safety behaviours.

Combining these two theoretical lenses, the study examined five potential determinants of cybercrime victimisation: digital lifestyle exposure, cybersecurity awareness, financial literacy, perceived susceptibility and risky online behaviours. Digital lifestyle exposure captures the sheer intensity of a person’s online activity, from e-commerce and digital banking to social media engagement. Cybersecurity awareness reflects knowledge of threats and protective practices, such as recognising phishing attempts or using strong authentication. Financial literacy measures a person’s understanding of financial products and risks, which might plausibly help them spot fraudulent investment schemes or unauthorised transactions. Perceived susceptibility, drawn from PMT, is the degree to which individuals believe they could personally fall prey to cyberattacks. Risky online behaviours encompass the concrete actions, clicking unverified links, reusing passwords, oversharing personal data, that create openings for attackers.

The empirical test was quantitative and rigorous. The team administered a structured questionnaire to 397 digitally active individuals and analysed the resulting data using structural equation modelling, a statistical technique that allows researchers to test networks of hypothesised relationships between observed measurements and latent constructs simultaneously. This matters because cybercrime victimisation cannot be directly observed in a survey; it must be inferred from patterns of responses. Structural equation modelling lets the researchers estimate how strongly each behavioural or cognitive factor feeds into victimisation, and how victimisation in turn propagates into financial and psychological harm, while accounting for measurement error in every variable.

The results deliver a clear and, in places, counterintuitive message. Two factors emerged as significant drivers of cybercrime victimisation: cybersecurity awareness and risky online behaviours. The first of these is reassuring in one sense, because it suggests that awareness genuinely matters, but the direction of the relationship underscores a subtlety the authors highlight: awareness and victimisation are intertwined in ways that simple awareness campaigns may not resolve. The second finding is more straightforward. People who engage in risky online behaviours are significantly more likely to be victimised, confirming that the concrete choices users make day to day, not merely the abstract level of threat in their environment, determine whether attackers succeed.

Just as telling are the factors that failed to predict victimisation. Digital lifestyle exposure, financial literacy and perceived susceptibility all showed no significant effects on whether respondents became victims. This is a striking result for anyone who assumes that heavy internet users are automatically the most vulnerable, or that people who understand finance are better at avoiding fraud. The study suggests that simply living much of one’s life online does not, by itself, determine victimisation, and that knowing how money works does not translate automatically into recognising a scam. Even perceived susceptibility, the psychological sense of being at risk, did not translate into protection. In other words, feeling vulnerable is not the same as being safe, and subjective risk perception alone does not shield users from attack.

The second half of the model examined what victimisation does to people, and here the findings are sobering. Cybercrime victimisation was found to contribute significantly to both financial loss and mental health deterioration. Moreover, the study reports a bidirectional relationship: victimisation drives financial and psychological harm, and those harms in turn feed back into the experience of victimisation. This feedback loop is perhaps the study’s most important conceptual contribution. A victim who has lost money may become more anxious and distracted, which can impair judgement and increase the likelihood of further victimisation. Psychological distress and financial strain are not merely consequences of cybercrime; within this framework they become part of the mechanism that sustains it.

The authors argue that these findings underscore the importance of behavioural practices in shaping cyber vulnerability. If risky online behaviours are the significant behavioural pathway into victimisation, then interventions that target specific behaviours, rather than general awareness messaging alone, are likely to be more effective. The study offers insights for the development of cybersecurity awareness programmes and behavioural risk mitigation strategies, suggesting that efforts to reduce cybercrime’s toll should focus on changing what people actually do online, and should recognise that the financial and psychological consequences of victimisation are deeply interconnected. Treating a victim’s financial recovery and mental health support as separate problems, the framework implies, misses the way each can aggravate the other.

The research also makes a methodological and conceptual contribution to the literature. By considering behavioural, financial and psychological outcomes within a single structural model, the study moves beyond fragmented approaches that examine cybercrime victimisation, monetary loss and mental health in isolation. The work was conducted with ethical approval from the Institutional Ethics Committee of Andhra University, with voluntary, anonymous participation and digital informed consent from all respondents, all of whom were adults. Published open access, the study arrives at a moment when digital technologies continue to spread faster than the protective habits needed to use them safely. Its central lesson is one that individuals, educators and policymakers alike can act on: the strongest predictor of cyber harm is not how much time you spend online, how much you know about finance, or even how vulnerable you feel, but what you actually do when the next suspicious link, message or offer appears on your screen.

Subject of Research: Behavioural and cognitive determinants of cybercrime victimisation and its financial and mental health consequences

Article Title: Behavioural and cognitive determinants of financial loss and mental health deterioration following cybercrime victimisation

Article References: Baruri, S., Manikyam, S., Rejeb, A., Roy, R., & Mukherjee, S. (2026). Behavioural and cognitive determinants of financial loss and mental health deterioration following cybercrime victimisation. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00468-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00468-6

Keywords: cybercrime, cybersecurity awareness, mental health, financial loss, digital lifestyle, risky online behaviour, victimisation, structural equation modelling, routine activity theory, protection motivation theory, financial literacy, online fraud

The research team, led by Hacer Kabakoğlu of Hatay Mustafa Kemal University and Rabia Arpacı of Hitit University, surveyed 415 university students aged 18 to 28 at a university in southern Türkiye. Participants were recruited through convenience sampling, and the study was designed as a descriptive and correlational investigation rather than a clinical trial. Each student completed a battery of standardized instruments: a personal information form, the Suicide Probability Scale, the Basic Psychological Needs Scale, the Meaning in Life Scale, and the Life Engagement Scale. The researchers then analyzed the data using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and multiple regression analysis to determine how strongly each psychological factor predicted suicide probability, both alone and in combination.

The average scores painted a picture of a population under measurable strain. Participants scored 137.66 plus or minus 25.09 on the total basic psychological needs measure, 46.60 plus or minus 10.34 on meaning in life, 24.03 plus or minus 4.46 on life engagement, and 75.15 plus or minus 14.96 on suicide probability. While these are group averages rather than individual diagnoses, the statistical relationships between them were unambiguous. All of the associations between basic psychological needs, meaning in life, life engagement, and suicide probability were significant at the p less than 0.001 level, meaning the probability that these links arose by chance alone is extremely small.

The regression analysis delivered the study’s headline result. Taken together, basic psychological needs, the search for meaning, the presence of meaning, and life engagement explained 46.6 percent of the total variance in suicide probability, corresponding to an adjusted R-squared of 0.466. In practical terms, this means that nearly half of the differences in suicide risk between students could be statistically accounted for by these four psychological variables. Within that model, life engagement and basic psychological needs emerged as the strongest individual predictors, suggesting that how actively a student invests in their goals and how well their fundamental psychological needs are satisfied matter more, in this sample, than the more abstract question of whether life feels meaningful.

The concept of basic psychological needs comes from self-determination theory, a widely influential framework in psychology that holds that human beings have three innate requirements for healthy functioning: autonomy, the sense that one’s actions are self-chosen; competence, the sense that one is capable and effective; and relatedness, the sense of being connected to and cared for by others. When these needs are chronically frustrated, the theory predicts, people become vulnerable to a cascade of psychological difficulties, including diminished motivation, alienation, and despair. The present findings align with that prediction in a particularly consequential domain, showing that need frustration is tightly coupled with elevated suicide probability in young adults navigating the pressures of university life.

Meaning in life, the second pillar of the study, is typically divided into two distinct components, and the researchers measured both. Presence of meaning refers to the extent to which a person feels their life already has significance and direction, while search for meaning refers to the active effort to find or build that significance. The two are not simply opposites. A student can be actively searching without yet feeling any sense of purpose, or can feel a settled sense of meaning without much ongoing reflection. The inclusion of both dimensions in the regression model allowed the team to assess whether the feeling of meaning and the hunt for it carry different weights in relation to suicide risk, and both contributed to the overall explanatory power of the model.

Life engagement, the strongest predictor alongside basic psychological needs, captures something related but distinct: the degree to which a person commits to and invests energy in the goals and activities that matter to them. A student may report that life has meaning in the abstract yet still drift through their days without genuine commitment, and the data suggest that this behavioral dimension of purposeful living is where the protective effect is most visible. Engagement, in this sense, functions as the bridge between believing life matters and actually living as though it does. Its prominence in the model implies that interventions aimed simply at talking students into feeling that life is meaningful may fall short unless they also help students build concrete, absorbing commitments.

The authors frame these results as a contribution to understanding the current state of suicide probability among university students, identifying the factors associated with it, and developing effective psychosocial interventions to prevent suicidal behavior. That framing matters, because the study is correlational by design. It cannot establish that unmet needs or low engagement cause suicidal thinking, only that they move together with a strength and consistency that makes causal hypotheses plausible and testable. Longitudinal and intervention studies would be needed to confirm the direction of the arrows, but the size of the explained variance gives such studies a clear target.

The study also carries practical implications for universities and mental health services. Screening tools that assess psychological need satisfaction, meaning, and engagement could help identify students at elevated risk before acute symptoms appear, and campus programs that foster autonomy, competence, and connection, such as mentorship schemes, collaborative projects, and structured goal-setting support, map directly onto the strongest predictors identified here. The researchers note that their findings may guide the development of such psychosocial interventions, and the specificity of the results makes that guidance unusually concrete: bolster life engagement and meet basic psychological needs, and the statistical model suggests suicide probability should fall.

Published open access in BMC Psychology, the study was approved by the Hatay Mustafa Kemal University Ethics Committee and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with written and verbal informed consent from all participants. It received no specific external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests. As suicide rates among young adults continue to rise, research of this kind shifts the question from the dramatic and the acute to the everyday and the structural, asking not only what pushes a person to the edge but what, in the fabric of ordinary psychological life, holds them back from it. The answer emerging from this work is that the weight of existence becomes unbearable most often when basic needs go unmet, meaning remains unfound, and life goes unlived with full commitment.

Subject of Research: Psychological predictors of suicide probability among university students

Article Title: The unbearable weight of existence: The effect of basic psychological needs, meaning in life and life engagement on suicide probability

Article References: Kabakoğlu, H., & Arpacı, R. (2026). The unbearable weight of existence: The effect of basic psychological needs, meaning in life and life engagement on suicide probability. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05666-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05666-0

Keywords: suicide probability, basic psychological needs, meaning in life, life engagement, self-determination theory, university students, mental health, BMC Psychology, regression analysis, psychosocial intervention, young adults, suicide prevention

The research team, led by Ana H. Alarcón Aguilar and colleagues, framed their work around a growing international consensus that well-being is not a luxury but a core component of health. Since the World Health Organization defined health in 1948 as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, researchers have accumulated evidence that people with high well-being live longer, recover faster and develop fewer chronic conditions. Meta-analyses have linked positive psychological states to lower cardiovascular risk, slower illness progression and reduced mortality, making well-being both an outcome worth studying and a potential lever for public health policy. In an era when governments are scrambling to cope with ageing populations, understanding what sustains mental health in old age has become a strategic priority enshrined in the United Nations 2030 Agenda.

Spain presents a particularly urgent case. People over 65 currently make up 20.1 percent of the Spanish population, a share projected to climb to roughly 30.4 percent by around 2050. Data from the European Quality of Life Survey, which has tracked well-being across the continent since 2003 using the same instrument employed in the new study, show that Spanish well-being declines with age, and that older Spanish adults score lower than their Nordic counterparts while resembling the pattern seen across the Mediterranean and Balkan regions. Within Spain, women consistently report lower mental well-being than men, a gap the new study reproduces in detail.

The participants, all residents of Castelló de la Plana, completed a battery of validated questionnaires administered by three experienced psychologists over two weeks. Psychological well-being was measured with the WHO-5 Well-Being Index, a five-item scale asking how often over the previous two weeks respondents felt cheerful and in good spirits, calm and relaxed, active and vigorous, fresh and rested on waking, and that daily life was filled with interesting things. Raw scores from zero to 25 are multiplied by four to yield a percentage, with scores below 50 traditionally flagged as a screening threshold for depression. Life satisfaction was assessed with Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale, loneliness with the six-item Spanish version of the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale, and physical health with the physical health dimension of the WHOQOL-BREF quality-of-life instrument, covering daily activities, energy, mobility, pain, sleep and work capacity.

The headline result was a mean WHO-5 score of 60.21, with a standard deviation of 18.80, indicating moderate overall well-being but with substantial individual variation. Women averaged 57.66 while men averaged 64.42, a statistically significant difference. All instruments showed satisfactory internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.70 for loneliness to 0.81 for life satisfaction, giving the team confidence that the scales were measuring stable, coherent constructs in this older Spanish sample.

The analytical centerpiece was a hierarchical multiple linear regression, a technique that enters blocks of predictor variables in sequence to reveal how much explanatory power each adds. The first block contained sociodemographic variables: gender, age, living alone, marital status, education and employment. It explained less than three percent of the variance in well-being. Adding life satisfaction raised the explained variance to 35 percent. Physical health pushed it to 47 percent, and loneliness completed the model at 49 percent. The final model was highly significant, with an F-statistic of 22.56 and a statistical power of 1.00, and diagnostic checks confirmed the assumptions of homoscedasticity, normally distributed residuals and independent errors, with a Durbin-Watson statistic of 1.94.

Four predictors emerged as significant in the final model. Being male was associated with higher well-being, with a coefficient of minus 4.86 for the female category. Each additional point of life satisfaction added 2.04 points of well-being, and each point of better perceived physical health added 1.67. Loneliness worked in the opposite direction, subtracting 1.87 points per unit of perceived loneliness. Notably, age, living alone, marital status, educational level and employment status all failed to reach significance, a pattern the authors link to prior international work by Geerling and Diener showing that demographic predictors exert small or very small effects on older people’s well-being compared with psychosocial factors such as perceived social support.

The gender gap deserves particular attention. The authors note that women’s lower well-being is consistent with European survey data and with literature showing that women report more depressive symptoms, a condition strongly and negatively correlated with well-being. Yet they also raise a methodological caveat: men may systematically underreport depressive symptoms because of social desirability bias, meaning the true gender difference could be either real or inflated by measurement artifacts. Either way, the study argues that older women should be a priority target for well-being interventions, especially those with lower educational attainment, who previous research identifies as being at elevated risk.

The study’s limitations temper its conclusions but do not undermine its central message. The cross-sectional design captures associations, not causal arrows, and the authors emphasize that the relationships between loneliness, health, life satisfaction and well-being are likely bidirectional: lonely people become less healthy, and less healthy people become lonelier. The convenience sample, recruited by approaching people over 55 in the streets of Castelló, was predominantly female, retired and highly educated, limiting generalizability to Spain’s older population as a whole. The authors also flag the absence of income, frailty, self-perceptions of ageing and self-compassion from the model, all of which prior studies suggest could add explanatory power, and they call for longitudinal designs and probability sampling in future work.

What the study loses in causal certainty it gains in practical direction. Because life satisfaction, physical health and loneliness are all modifiable, they are actionable targets in a way that age and gender are not. The authors point to community-based programmes that strengthen intergenerational ties, adapted physical activity initiatives that improve both mobility and mood, and digital literacy training that helps older adults maintain meaningful online connections. Interventions built on self-compassion and positive self-perceptions of ageing have also been shown to reduce depressive symptoms and may even protect against cognitive decline. With Spain’s over-65 population swelling toward nearly a third of the country, and with the study’s well-being means slightly below the European survey benchmarks of 63 in 2016 and 65.4 in 2012, the message for policymakers is clear: the cheapest and most effective investments in healthy ageing may lie not in demographics but in connection, health and the way older people evaluate their own lives.

Subject of Research: Predictors of psychological well-being among Spanish older adults, including loneliness, physical health, life satisfaction and gender

Article Title: Psychological Well-Being in Spanish Older Adults

Article References: Aguilar, A. H. A., Hornero, A. C., Riera, A. J. L., Hidalgo, M. R., & Miedes, A. C. (2026). Psychological Well-Being in Spanish Older Adults. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00521-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00521-y

Keywords: psychological well-being, older adults, loneliness, life satisfaction, physical health, WHO-5, ageing, Spain, gender differences, hierarchical regression, mental health, healthy ageing

The research team, led by Chen Zarecki of Ariel University and the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College with colleagues including Carmit Satran, Anis Kaldawy, Riki Tesler, and Shiran Bord, set out to address a gap that has persisted in the endometriosis literature. The condition has been studied extensively from a biomedical perspective, focusing on lesions, hormones, and surgical outcomes, but its cultural and ethnic dimensions have received far less attention. The authors emphasize that their goal was not to produce nationally representative prevalence estimates. Rather, they wanted to examine associations and differences in what they call Perceived Life Course Impact, or PLCI, and in social support among women diagnosed with endometriosis across ethnic groups.

The study recruited 535 Jewish women and 212 Arab women through an online panel rather than a clinical setting. Within each group, researchers compared women with a confirmed endometriosis diagnosis to matched controls: 267 Jewish women with endometriosis against 268 without, and 58 Arab women with the condition against 154 without. Participants completed validated questionnaires assessing PLCI across three life domains, namely intimate relationships, education, and employment, along with measures of social support, social negativity, perceived mental health, and pain. The design was cross-sectional, meaning it captured a snapshot in time rather than following women over years, and the researchers used analyses of covariance and hierarchical regression models to probe ethnic and diagnostic differences while controlling for demographic and health-related covariates.

The first and most striking result is how consistently endometriosis disrupted lives regardless of ethnicity. Women with the disease, whether Jewish or Arab, reported significantly higher perceived life course impact in every domain measured, poorer mental health, lower social support, and higher social negativity compared with women without the diagnosis. The statistical strength of these differences, reported at p < .001, indicates that the associations are unlikely to be artifacts of sampling variation. In other words, the burden of endometriosis on intimate relationships, educational attainment, and employment was substantial across the board, confirming that this is not merely a condition of cyclical pain but one that reshapes the trajectory of a woman’s adult life.

Yet the study also revealed meaningful cultural patterning within that shared burden. Arab women reported higher PLCI regarding education than Jewish women, suggesting that the disease may interfere more heavily with schooling and academic progression in that community. Jewish women, by contrast, reported better social interaction patterns than their Arab counterparts, hinting at differences in how openly the illness can be discussed or how readily social networks absorb its disruptions. Perhaps most unexpectedly, Jewish women with endometriosis reported worse mental health and higher pain levels than Arab women with the same diagnosis, a finding that complicates any simple assumption that minority status automatically translates into worse outcomes on every measure.

These divergences point toward what the researchers describe as cultural pathways to health inequity. The ways a chronic, stigmatized, and often invisible illness is experienced and interpreted are shaped by ethnicity, culture, and social environment, the authors conclude. In communities where menstrual pain is surrounded by silence or taboo, women may delay disclosure, normalize severe symptoms, or encounter less empathy from family and employers. In settings where discussion is more open, the emotional weight of the disease may surface more readily, which could partly explain the higher reported mental health burden among Jewish women in the sample. The study’s design cannot disentangle all of these mechanisms, but the patterns it documents are consistent with the idea that illness is lived through culture as much as through tissue.

The regression models added a second layer of insight by identifying which social factors best predicted the perceived life course impact. For the whole sample, social negativity, essentially the experience of criticism, dismissal, or hostility from one’s social surroundings, emerged as the strongest social predictor of PLCI, with social support and menstrual pain joining it for the most part. This hierarchy held even among women with endometriosis specifically: social negativity remained the strongest predictor, accompanied by social support, menstrual pain, and, notably, driving time to the health care clinic. The appearance of travel distance as a significant predictor is a reminder that access to care is not only about insurance or availability of specialists but about the literal geography between a woman in pain and the help she needs.

That social negativity outweighed even pain severity as a predictor of life disruption is arguably the study’s most provocative implication. It suggests that the reactions of partners, families, employers, and communities may do as much damage as the disease itself, amplifying the consequences of symptoms into lost education, stalled careers, and strained relationships. For clinicians, this reframes endometriosis management: treating lesions and prescribing hormonal therapy may be necessary but insufficient if patients return to environments that minimize or stigmatize their suffering. The authors argue that their findings highlight the need for culturally sensitive interventions that address both clinical symptoms and the social and cultural determinants of health.

The study carries methodological caveats worth noting. Its cross-sectional design cannot establish causality, so it remains possible, for example, that women whose lives have been more disrupted perceive more social negativity rather than the reverse. The online panel recruitment and the modest number of Arab women with endometriosis, 58 in total, limit generalizability, and the authors explicitly caution against reading their figures as prevalence estimates. Self-reported measures of perceived impact and mental health are also subjective by nature, even when drawn from validated instruments. Still, the consistency of the diagnostic differences across two ethnically distinct populations, and the persistence of social negativity as the dominant predictor in multiple models, lends weight to the central claim that social context is a genuine determinant of endometriosis outcomes.

Globally, endometriosis affects an estimated one in ten women of reproductive age, and average diagnostic delays of years remain the norm in many health systems. Studies like this one push the conversation beyond the examination room, arguing that inequity in women’s health is produced not only by biology and access to surgery but by the cultural scripts that determine whose pain is believed, whose symptoms are discussed, and whose life plans are allowed to bend around a chronic illness. For the Jewish and Arab women in this study, the diagnosis was a shared experience; the meaning of that experience, and its reach into education, work, and intimacy, was anything but uniform. Closing that gap, the researchers suggest, will require health systems that treat culture not as background noise but as a clinical variable in its own right.

Subject of Research: Cultural and ethnic differences in the perceived life course impact of endometriosis among Jewish and Arab women in Israel

Article Title: Cultural pathways to health inequity: perceived life course impact of endometriosis among Jewish and Arab women in Israel

Article References: Zarecki, C., Satran, C., Kaldawy, A., Tesler, R., & Bord, S. (2026). Cultural pathways to health inequity: perceived life course impact of endometriosis among Jewish and Arab women in Israel. International Journal for Equity in Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-03038-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-03038-z

Keywords: endometriosis, health equity, ethnicity, women's health, social support, social negativity, mental health, perceived life course impact, Israel, cross-sectional study, culturally sensitive care, chronic pain